Seth Godin on Standing Out

Seth Godin feels that days of status quo marketing through the television industrial complex are coming to an end. People are too busy to pay attention to the nonstop advertising of average products for average people. What grabs people's attention is something remarkable, or rather something worth making a remark about. And their remarks spread the ideas or products to the world and make it a success. Learn about the cutting edge of spreading ideas with this talk by Seth Godin.

Personal Success Strategy

To achieve personal success, you should first know what you want. You should first know your destination. Then, after knowing your destination, you should figure out how to get there.
I recently read a great strategy about “how to get there” in the book The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz. While the strategy is aimed at companies, I believe that it’s just as applicable to individuals. The strategy is called “tacking” which comes from the sailing world:

He (the sailor) knows that he will not follow a straight line; the changing winds alone will not allow for that. Instead, he will travel in a zigzag-like pattern.
By tacking, the sailor travels a short distance, maximizing the winds and avoiding hazards. He then analyzes where he is in relationship to his destination, adjusts the sails, redirects the boat and continues the zag part of his travels. After another short distance he again evaluate his relationship to the destination and adjusts.

These routine adjustments will eventually bring the sailor to his destination.
Isn’t that similar to achieving personal success? You know where you want to go, but the wind always changes along the way. No matter how good your plan is, unexpected things always happen. You need to respond to them and adjust your actions accordingly or you may never reach your destination.
For me, this is a great idea that I have started applying. From my past experiences, I know that things always change and a tactic might not work for long. Holding to it in the name of habit or discipline will only take me further away from my destination.
So now I decide to use the tacking strategy on a monthly basis. Here is what I do:

1. I look at my life purpose and its one-liner.
2. I set a goal of the year related to my life purpose.
3. Based on the goal of the year, I set some specific objectives for the month. I set the objectives based on what I think are the best tactics to achieve my goal.
4. I work hard the entire month to achieve my objectives for the month.
5. Near the end of the month, I evaluate how things are going. Did I choose the right objectives? Do the objectives take me closer to my goal? Do I find better tactics to apply?
6. Based on the evaluation, I set new objectives for the following month. These objectives could be the same or different from the previous ones.

That’s how I apply the tacking strategy. I do my best to travel a short distance (one month in this case) before evaluating my position and adjusting my actions. In my opinion, tacking is a very good strategy for personal success. It allows you to adapt to changing situation.
One question you might have is: why monthly? One month is the best duration for me. It’s long enough to apply a tactic but still gives me twelve opportunities a year to adjust my actions. Of course, your situation may be different, so find the duration that works for you.

Focus, but why ?

Confucius says: “Man who chases two rabbits catches neither!”

“I’d rather be strong somewhere than weak everywhere”.

When managers know they have only one battle to fight it concentrates their minds wonderfully.

Companies that broaden their line, for whatever reason, are vulnerable to narrowly focused competition that takes advantage of division.

Nobody loses business just because they have a broad focus. To lose business you have to run up against a competitor with a narrow focus.

What’s needed for success is focus, which sometimes can be achieved with a full line of products, but with sacrifices' made in other areas. Distribution could be one such area. Dell Computer deselected retail distribution and direct sales force with success.

Some managers equate size with power. Is a large company more powerful than a small one? Not necessarily. A highly focused company is more powerful than a less focused company.

What provide an organization with its power is its degree of focus and its share of market. Size is only important if it contributes to an increase in market share.

Power gives a company the ability to “control” an industry, taking it in a direction that will only increase the company’s power and domination.

Wouldn’t it be easier to increase the share of a business you know than to get a share of a business you don’t know?

A focus is not forever.

At any point in time, a company has 3 kinds of products. (1) yesterdays products, which are candidates for disposal; (2) today’s products, which are producing the bulk of the company’s profits; and (3) tomorrow’s products, which are the company’s future.

Nothing stays still long enough for a company to be perfectly focused.

Sooner or later even the most powerful focus becomes obsolete. That’s when a company must refocus itself.

Focus, the future of your company depends on it.

Abstracts from: “Focus, The future of your company depends on it”, by Al Ries

Trial, Error and the God Complex by Tim Harford

Tim Harford is a senior columnist for the Financial Times. His column, “The Undercover Economist”, reveals the economic ideas behind everyday experiences. He is also the only economist in the world to run a problem page, “Dear Economist”, in which readers’ personal problems are answered tongue-in-cheek with the latest economic theory.
Tim’s first book, “The Undercover Economist” has sold one million copies worldwide in almost 30 languages.

Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.

Paul Bloom on the Situation of Pleasure

Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists — that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is.

Just do it

This is an excerpt from an interesting article i read on The Times titled Spoilt for Choice by Liz Hollis

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For the naturally indecisive, Hell is choosing what to put in your supermarket trolley. Successfully negotiate the 38 choices of milk that I counted for sale in my local Tesco (organic, skimmed, soya, omega3 enriched or filtered for purity) and you’re then confronted with jam overload: 154 flavours.
Selecting from the banks of rosehip jam handcrafted in the Pyrenees, fig conserve, Scandinavian blackcurrant with “bits” or without, could take you all day. Then there’s the aisle with 107 varieties of pasta and 98 types of fruit cordial . . .
Choice aplenty – indeed, so much that psychologists now believe that it is making us miserable. Most big supermarkets provide us with about 30,000 products, and each year they add more. Indeed, for a taste of what the future might look like in every store, visit the latest temple of runaway choice – the giant new American Whole Foods Market in Kensington High Street, West London. Here, choice rules supreme. You can choose from 1,000 wine labels, 100 types of nuts, oats and grains and more than 40 varieties of sausage.
“I feel as though I’ve been punched in the face after I’ve been round somewhere like Morrisons,” says Joy Miller, 39, who runs a communications business in Norwich. “It’s so overwhelming that it just makes you feel awful. If you carefully considered every aspect – ethics, food miles, price, flavour and ingredients – you’d never get round to buying anything, ever.”
Of course, it doesn’t stop at groceries. Everywhere you turn there is a mind-boggling parade of clothes, gadgets, financial products, holidays and entertainment. Tantalised by all these buying options, we stockpile our shopping baskets, homes and lives with ever more consumer goods that we probably don’t need or even appreciate. And this isn’t good for our happiness.
“The huge number of choices that assault us every day makes many of us feel inadequate and in some cases even clinically depressed,” says Professor Barry Schwartz, a psychologist from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of The Paradox of Choice.“ There is vastly too much choice in the modern world and we are paying an enormous price for it. It makes us feel helpless, mentally paralysed and profoundly dissatisfied.”
Professor Schwartz believes that the dogma of all Western societies – that maximising freedom and choice increases welfare – is deeply flawed. “It wouldn’t surprise me if eventually you’ll be able to buy a mobile phone with integral nasal-hair trimmer and crème brûle torch,” he speculates sardonically.
So why does having so much choice make us feel miserable? Shouldn’t we be delighted that we can travel to any corner of the planet for our holidays, or select from tens of thousands of financial plans? Sadly not. Because making a decision is now a nightmare. We can easily end up with what psychologists call “consumer vertigo”, that is, swamped with so many options that we can’t make any decision, or decide wrongly.
“So much choice makes decision-making increasingly complex,” says David Shanks, a psychology professor and the co-author of Straight Choices, a new book that examines how to make the best decisions when faced with a perplexing array of options. We feel bad that every time we do make a choice, it seems we are missing out on other opportunities. This makes us feel inadequate and dissatisfied with what we have chosen. Often, we feel bamboozled and just shove a familiar or prominently displayed brand into our basket. Then we feel useless because we can’t cook gourmet dinners like Jamie Oliver and don’t know what to do with any of these exotic new ingredients. So we end up buying and eating the same meals time and again.
This excess also numbs us to the heady pleasure felt by previous generations when they bought something new in an era when budgets were leaner and consumer goods in shorter supply. All we can think about now is what we still want to buy, rather than appreciating what we have.
Children are not immune, either. How can choosing yet another throwaway plastic trinket from the zoo gift shop ever equal the intensity felt by the 1940s child unwrapping just a couple of presents a year – on their birthday and at Christmas?
Experiments confirm that the less choice we have, the better we feel. Professor Mark Lepper and his team at Stanford University in America found that consumers who tested six jams went on to buy more and feel happier than those offered 24 jams to taste. Another experiment showed that giving students a choice of fewer essay topics made them produce better work.
“This suggests that we thrive when we have less choice,” says Professor Lepper. “Excess choice is paralysis rather than liberation.”
Yet the number of consumer choices available continues to multiply. “It doesn’t help that there is an ever-decreasing amount of expert advice available from shop assistants – if you can find one at all,” says Paco Underhill, chief executive of Envirosell, a research and consulting company. Consequently, many people’s homes are filled with high-tech products that offer still more unwanted choices: washing machines with a host of setting options (though we only ever use two); phones that could send e-mails if only we knew how to use them.
But if all this choice is actually harming us, what can we do about it?
Professor Lepper suggests that, for a start, we should lighten up when selecting, say, a type of bread or a disposable camera. “Don’t take making mundane choices too seriously or it gets to feel like an onerous task,” he says.
Opt for small shops that offer less choice – it’s harder to feel angst-ridden in a smaller supermarket where the choice is simply between big potatoes and small potatoes. In addition, decide on priorities before you look at what’s available – for instance, you could look only at cameras that offer a large playback screen, if that’s crucial for you. And don’t expect to become an expert; ask others who know what to look for.
To preserve mental wellbeing, save your decision-making effort for serious things that merit a large expenditure of time and effort. Then you can make better use of techniques such as those outlined by Professor Shanks and his colleagues.
“Choose when to choose,” says Professor Schwartz. “Don’t worry about what type of mobile-phone package to opt for. Pick a sofa from IKEA in 30 seconds and you’ll feel better than if you spend hours researching sofas – because you won’t know what else you’re missing out on.”
He adds that when it comes to achieving happiness it is better to be a “satisficer” who accepts a good-enough choice than a “maximiser” who always wants to make the best possible decision.
Perhaps we should all learn to love the constraints on our lives. After all, being restricted to a local job because you can’t move your children out of school, or having to buy a house near elderly relatives, makes you (and them) feel better.
“It challenges a lot of our beliefs, but it could just be that choice within constraints will make us feel a lot better,” says Professor Schwartz. “We need to live in the moment, appreciate what we have and not think about all the other things that we could choose instead.”




For excellent twenty-minute video of lecture by Barry schwartz, click on the video below.

A Choice Worth Having

In my last post i mentioned about Professor Barry Shwartz. Here are some excerpts from one of his terrific posts titled "A New Council of Psychological Advisors for President Obama?"


After President Barack Obama figures out how to bring the economy out of recession, stabilize financial institutions, end two wars, and get every citizen health insurance, there is something else that he should consider: The United States needs a Council of Psychological Advisors.
This new body would parallel and complement the Council of Economic Advisors. When economists have the president’s ear, all their whispers concern incentives and self-interest. We need psychologists whispering in his other ear, about the economy, education, healthcare, and more.
On the Economy—Understand the “Irrational” Where did our financial institutions go wrong? Many accounts focus on greed, fear, and lack of trust. And why did things get so out of hand? Why was there a housing “bubble”? Somehow, “irrational exuberance” (Robert Schiller) or “animal spirits” (John Maynard Keynes) overwhelmed rational calculations of risk and reward. And it isn’t just that irrational optimism, or even blindness to market fundamentals, gets the better of our rational faculties. Rather, as George Soros has pointed out, these psychological phenomena can become part of a feedback loop that actually changes market fundamentals. “Reflexivity,” he calls it. The housing bubble was not the first such phenomenon, nor will it be the last.
Economists offer little that helps us understand why such bubbles occur or how they might be prevented. They also have little to tell us about how to prevent a “downward spiral of negative expectations” that makes fear of an economic downturn self-fulfilling. Economists largely make assumptions about the rationality of human decision-making and proceed from there. Witness Alan Greenspan’s recent admission that he was mistaken in assuming that markets operate rationally and efficiently. The current crisis makes it clear that ignoring the real psychology of greed, fear, trust, and irrational enthusiasm (0r pessimism) can be perilous. Economists offer little that helps us understand why such bubbles occur or how they might be prevented. A Council of Psychological Advisors could help.
On Education—More than Just Carrots and Sticks: One of President Obama’s top priorities is to improve the quality of American education. This will require recruiting and retaining excellent teachers and finding ways to motivate students. How can this worthy goal be achieved? At the moment, we’re pointing in the direction of school choice and competition to produce better schools, higher pay to produce better teachers, big tests to monitor their performance, and financial incentives to motivate students. A bunch of carrots and sticks. Will these kinds of measures be enough? Research in psychology suggests not. More important than pay (as long as it is adequate) are working conditions that allow teachers to be flexible, autonomous, and creative in their work with students, and that provide teachers with a sense that they are working in a community that has a common purpose. From this perspective, the regimentation of instruction ushered in by big-test accountability is actually counter-productive. And so is the move, now being tried in pilot projects around the country, to pay students for showing up to class and for getting good grades. A Council of Psychological Advisors could help design environments that encourage students to pursue mastery rather than money and teachers to view their work as a calling.



Moving Beyond GDP: Finally, let us ask the most fundamental question: what is public policy for? We aim to increase collective welfare, but just what does welfare consist in? For the most part, under the sway of economic thinking, our aim has been to make the country more prosperous-to increase per capita GDP. The appeal of this goal is two-fold. First, we assume that if people are richer, they will be freer to choose as individuals the objects and activities that serve their welfare. We (the state and its technocrats) don’t have to choose for them. So wealth serves as a proxy for everything else. And second, GDP can be measured. But like a drunk looking under a lamp post for his car keys, even though he dropped them someplace else (because “that’s where the light is”), it doesn’t help much to pursue what you can measure if what you’re measuring is the wrong thing. It doesn’t help to get better at achieving goals if you’re achieving the wrong goals. Much research in the psychology of well being suggests that some wealth-enhancing policies improve welfare, but others do not. Indeed, some of what it takes to get more prosperous may be counterproductive when it comes to well being. A Council of Psychological Advisors can help here too, in the design of a system of national “psychological accounts” that does a better job of measuring well being than per capita GDP ever could.
Many of us hold out the hope that the coming Obama administration will mark a return to respect for knowledge and expertise. Agencies will be run and staffed not by political cronies, or by people who “just know in their gut” what needs to be done, or by ideologues, but by people who actually have respect for evidence. It would be a shame to bring experts on board in existing agencies, only to have them have to rely on personal intuition rather than knowledge in formulating policies and making decisions that could benefit from psychological expertise. A Council of Psychological Advisors is long overdue. This would be an excellent time to create one.