Regurgitated learning

There are countless examples of phrases that are engrained into our rule-making world.

We sheepingly follow them like commandments even though they weren't on the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.

When it comes to rules. There is one constant. There are no rules. Or as Lexus pointed out in a recent commercial, "rules weren't made for the exceptional, they were written by them".

I sit in a lot of business meetings where highly intelligent people regurgitate the same rules they read in a book or learned in a classroom.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
If you conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.
Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing.
It's not about the product you sell. It's about the experience you offer.

On their own, all of those sentences make sense. But so what. What is the real learning behind each of them.

Can I learn from them?
Can I expand on them?
Can I break them?

Rules are accepted until someone breaks them and makes our lives better. We then all realize the rule wasn't true.

Cars couldn't be built in 73 minutes, until Ford figured it out.
Men couldn't fly until the Wright Brothers showed us otherwise.
Cars can't fly until someone figures out that George Jetson wasn't just a cartoon.

Automated learning can be done by robots and computers. We've been taught to read something, learn about it and then regurgitate it as knowledge. We don't need knowledge. That's why we have Google.

We have to be greater than Google.

We have to ask the hard questions. We have to get deeper in our understanding. We have to come up with new innovations. Google doesn't come up with innovations. The people behind Google do.

Here's my point.

The next time you are faced with an automatic response, ask yourself one question, "Do I know this statement to be true OR am I regurgitating something I was told.

A hate letter

I wake up every morning and look at you. Not knowing what role you play in my life, I wonder why you're still here?

I think you're lying to me.

Or do you tell me things I don't want to hear?
Words roll around my head, "Isn't that the definition of a friend?"

Without emotion, you just say it the way you see it. Actually it's so matter of fact that it pisses me off.

I've asked you to sugar coat your message.
You never do.

I've ignored you. And you were waiting for me when I was ready to come back.
I've yelled and swore at you. You always listened calmly and non judgemental.

I hate you.  You've been in my life for 20 years. I think I hated you the first day I saw you.

Why did I stick around so long?
Was it hate masked as love?
Or was it necessity?
Who knows?

All I know is I've had enough. You stopped talking to me. You stopped listening.

It's been two chilly weeks. I cannot stand this coldness anymore. Today is the day I'm kicking you to the curb. You are garbage to me.

I'm getting a younger, sexier model.

Can't wait to bring her home and show the kids.

I hope the new set of bathroom scales won't be a bitch like you were.

No fault insurance

We are living in the age of no-fault society.

The insurance companies taught us that there are times when no one is actually at fault for an accident. But we know that's not true. It's always someone else's fault. It couldn't be us. Could it?

Everything happens to us.. It has to be someone else's fault. As we look at where to point our blame, we are forgetting to take responsibility for our own actions.

Our society is walking backwards. Evolution and technology haven't given us eyes in the back of heads yet. We have to fall down eventually. And when we do, it's gonna hurt the entire race.

Lack of responsibility is a lack of competence. We are not born with this competence. We are taught it by our parents and teachers.

Depending on our experiences, each of us have a different level of emotional competence to accept responsibility.

Hot coffee burns.
Do we have to be told to be careful?
We do if we don't have the emotional competence to accept the results of our actions.

It's easier to blame another person, an event, or a thing for the resulting damage to ourselves.

In every great story, there is are three prominent characters: The villain, the hero and the victim.

We never play the role of villain in our own stories. We accept the role of hero or victim.

The victim says "Oh my, look what the villain has done to me."
The hero says, "I will right this wrong and save the day."
The villain says with conviction, "I didn't do anything wrong."

No one is right. No one is wrong.

The villain in your story believes you are the villain. The villain actually believes you are the one who wronged him.

So who's right?

It doesn't matter. You can be right or you can be happy. That's the only choice.

We have to accept the shit that happens to us and try to understand what we could've done differently.

We're the only ones to blame.

It's time we all take responsibility like a Boss. Otherwise, our species is going to wake up one day in a dimly lit cave wondering why the gods hate us so much.

That's the path we're on.
Don't blame me.
It's not my fault.

I am a fan but I hate you

I watched you enter a league of professionals. You were truly one of a kind. It was fun watching you dominate a league of men, when you were only a teenager.

Then something changed. You wanted more. And by wanting more, you got less from me. I stopped cheering for you. You are the best. But you're also a whiner.

Nobody likes a whiner.

I love talent. And when I see it, I drool over it. It's awesome to watch.

And you have it in spades.

But man, I hate you now. I can't explain it. I cheer against you.

History doesn't deserve your greatness. Despite it all, you're not only the best of a generation, you may be the best of all time. But I still hate you.

Whiner, go back to South Beach. Cleveland doesn't need you. They deserve better. I hope they get a title one day but not when you're there.

Your return to your hometown was a public relations move and I hated it the day you decided to come home. As you try to rebrand yourself, I know you for who you really are.

Whiner.

Splash, splash.  Let's go Warriors.

Self proclaimed experts

Listening in a noisy world is difficult. The internet has made everything loud.

Finding an expert today is like having a conversation in a nightclub with a pretty girl, while the base booms through your arteries.

Expertise is hard to find. Everyone is advertising themselves as experts these days. And so few are. 

To make the wrong decision and spend good money after bad experts seems to be more common than ever before.

There was a time when there were only one expert in a category. We knew them, or we knew someone who knew them. They were the busiest. They didn't have to advertise. Customers took care of that for them through word of mouth marketing. 

And then one day, something changed. The internet came along. Choices grew. Business became a battleground.

The busiest couldn't do any more business, so all the others would brawl for the remainder of the pie. They would quarrel on price, service, and time. They would argue who was better. And all claimed to be the best. But customers knew who was the best because their friends would tell them. The BEST was already extremely busy. He didn't need the extra work and therefore didn't need to brag.

Actually he never bragged. 

I was thinking about this scenario recently as it applied to softball. When a newcomer moves to town and wants to play softball, he puts his name on a "spare" list to get picked up by a team. There are about 50 new names every year added to the list. In every case, when that player brags about his ability, he's a dud. 

I watched a guy who was supposed to be really good, strike out four times this week. In a game where strikeouts are rare, he demonstrated his expertise at failing.

In other cases, I've heard guys, with complete humility say that they had played a bit and would like to come out and have some fun with new found friends.  

In a noisy world, when a company brags about themselves, I believe they are overcompensating for something they are not. Just like in softball, the braggarts are not the best. The company that doesn't brag is the better choice.

A lesson about marketing from a hitchhiker

I was driving into work this morning, when I had the urge to pull over and let a complete stranger enter my car.

My mom wouldn't approve, so I didn't do it.

He had his thumb extended wishing to fetch a drive to somewhere unknown. Not knowing if my destination intersected with his, I decided not to stop. I wouldn't have stopped anyways. I've only picked up one hitchhiker in my life, and it was someone I knew.

I worried about the smell. He looked allergic to bath water. The Seinfeld episode on body odour was lingering among my other thoughts.

Then I thought about my friend Paul. He used to hitchhike every weekend two hours each way to see his lovely lady friend back in 1995.

Paul knew he needed to sell himself to the countless cars zooming by. He explained hitchhiking was a numbers game. And that someone always picked him up within ten minutes of starting his adventure.

Approaching this role like any sales job, Paul would put on a tie and suit jacket and carry a briefcase. That usually got him his lift. Who wouldn't pick up a business man in distress? If that didn't work, he would pull out a sign from his briefcase, which doubled as his luggage.

The sign would simply say, "Going home to see my mom". Now that's marketing. He tapped into people's emotions.

How often do we see the hitchhiker who looks like he is on his way to Woodstock? Hair tied back in a ponytail, facial hair that has been growing for a few months, army jacket, with matching hiking boots and wool socks and shorts. Probably has a hunting knife somewhere stashed in his duffle bag waiting to be used on his next victim. The duffle bag matches the army surplus gear.  It's tossed to the side of the road, trying to hide from view waiting for someone to pick them up.

I often wonder who picks up these nomads. It must surely be other nomads who can associate with them. I wouldn't pick them up unless I knew them. There's probably nothing wrong with them, until they decide to pull out that hunting knife and steal my car.

But who wouldn't pick up my friend Paul? Paul sold himself and marketed himself within two seconds that someone zoomed by. He only needed two seconds.  He always found a buyer. It was too good of a deal.

How do we present ourselves in our own marketing?
How does our business present itself?
Are we vagrants looking for a free ride?
Or we built on a purpose that is easily identifiable for all potential buyers?

I believe...

What do you believe in? Think about it. What do you believe in so much that when you sway from your beliefs, your conscience lectures you into sleeplessness.

Have you ever written out a values statement to remind yourself and others what you believe in?

Some of us write them out. But most don't, because they are engrained into our upbringing. They emerge when we have kids as we try to pass them to the next generation.

Most values statement aren't worth much, unless they are read every single day. The problem with a values statement is that it only makes sense to you. And if you don't read it everyday, the statement becomes academic and trivial, lost in the papers of life, while you float in the vast ocean of somethingness, headed toward nothingness, while your conscience beacons you to return to safe shores.

For a values statement to have meaning, it must be written in plain, every day language. It must be void of interpretation. It must be the foundation in which all decisions are made. It must help us make decisions when we are in conflict between two equal but opposite choices.

In a team, a values statement is even more important. The leader wants everyone to choose the right path, when two tempting choices float their way.

If a values statement is vague, the interpretation will be open and the results cannot be predictable.
If a values statement is clear, everyone navigates their choices in the same direction and the destination is not just predictable.

It is intended.

Boring, corporate value statements are written on boards, laminated and posted at the front entrance of most offices. They are neighbours to mission statements, visions statements and they all live in the same useless academic community.

I remember having a values statement stare at me everyday in one of my office jobs. Our leader read in Harvard Business Review that it would get lost at the front desk, so he got all the middle and senior managers together. We spent two days in a hotel conference room developing our new mission, vision and values. The process was interesting. And I felt good about it because I was included in the process. After the two days were complete, we felt like we had direction. He laminated them and put one in every office as a constant memory of what happened on those two days.  It didn't change the culture of the organization. It didn't change the work ethics of the employees. It didn't do a damn thing except make him our leader look like he was a smart strategist.

The problem was with the leader. The first item on the values list was respect. He lacked respect for his staff and would fire them if someone looked at him the wrong way. His vision was never going to work because he didn't align with the values statements.

You can learn a lot about someone when you know what they stand for and what they stand against.

There's a better way. And simpler too.

At a recent class, I was asked to write out my belief statements. I had to articulate what my business stood for, in every day language.

I wrote them out. And so did everyone else in the class. We shared them, and we realized that the simpler the statement the more powerful the message.

The simpler the statement, the easier it is to remember.
The simpler the statement, the easier it is to follow.

When values are written clearly, they can be guiding principles.

There is one rule in developing "I believe" statements. They can't sound corporate-y. They have to be written in every day language.

What are your "I believe" statements?

Here are the ones I recently developed for my new business.

This wasn't developed by a committee.
It's not up for discussion.
It will be a guide for everyone in how we act.
There are no exceptions for any person, including the owner.
And no one is perfect, so we'll deal with each mistake in a human, respectful way.


We believe work is sometimes hard, but it doesn’t have to go unappreciated. 
We believe work should be fun. 
We believe that people come before profits. 
We believe that no one is perfect, and there’s always a more human way to deal with issues. 
We believe that we could laugh a lot more. 
We believe that customers deserve our best. 
We believe that karma is a bitch, so we work hard to not upset her.