We don’t always know what decisions people will make when times get tough for them. Some people flourish, some do not. This post is just to remind The Jaded Buyer and The Jaded Seller to avoid “Quick and Easy” and instead believe in the value created by ”putting in hard work” despite the temptation out there to do otherwise.
When people are short for cash, it is not uncommon for them to choose to do “whatever it takes” to turn that situation around. For some people that means working extra hard, yet for others that could mean “taking advantage of others”. Both paths may even succeed in acheiving financial goals in the short run. That is why financial goals should not be your only goals. Differentiate yourself by providing trust and value for the long-run.
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Writing a Book Review of sorts can be intimidating. I’m sure it’s common to feel hesitant about being able to adequately come anywhere close to doing justice to the many inter-related ideas an author has expressed in his work. At the same time, there is an eagerness to share the insights gleaned from their work as well. The latter is what I will attempt to do here.
The book I’ll be referring to in this post is George Soros’ “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008″. I am by no means any kind of a financial expert. While I’m sure that different people will focus on different aspects of this book, my aim is to simply express the main point that stood out for me. That happens to be the human element of the equation.
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I’ve been intrigued lately by a new section of books in the Barnes & Noble bookstore that I frequent. It is a grouping of books labelled “Thought-Provoking”.
Clearly ”Thought-Provoking” isn’t a subject that one can easily build a business idea or a keyword strategy around. People aren’t likely to go to a store or to Google looking for something “Thought Provoking”.
Either way, ”Thought-Provoking” seems to be a viable and growing category of books which might include a mix of psychology, sociology, philosophy and science. Such books are perhaps just as likely show up in the Self-Improvement section as in the Business section of a bookstore.
Perhaps this new category has been spurred by Malcolm Gladwell’s success with his books, Blink and Tipping Point. As a recent article from Timesonline.co.uk entitled, “The 10 secrets of Malcolm Gladwell’s success“, suggests, the popularity of “arcane” books like his might be due to a “sociological transformation of the past 25 years”. An interesting premise. Could there be a “more intellectually curious” business-mindset developing out there?
Are we at a turning point? As the economy slows down and people pull back to take the time to rebuild their net worth and adjust to potentially widespread structural changes, will a new mindset and new work ethic arise, too?
Might not the next ten years be a time when a new set of successes show up to challenge Gladwell’s assertion that there’s not a shortage of talent in the world but that there’s a shortage of people willing to put in the 10,000 hours it takes to become successful? Could these “Thought Provoking” books be a sign of something new to come….
Clearly we can not expect to approach the amount of change we currently face by relying on our old way of thinking about things. Our old mindset is no longer working.
Everywhere you turn, there is talk of change. I even started off planning on writing about this upcoming change. That’s when it occurred to me. I was surprised to find that everything I was writing down, regarding change, could just as appropriately be grouped under a heading of “personal responsibility”.
So, below is a list of eight observations about the kind of a mindset that I believe we will need to adopt in order to learn from our past and to successfully navigate the upcoming structural changes we all will be (or already are) facing.
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More and more, we see and hear about social media, social networking sites, and micro-blogging tools. You probably heard about how the current election was impacted (some even say won) by the grassroots efforts of social networking strategies.
Amid all of this social media enthusiasm, there have also been recent reports about how the older forms of Web 2.0, namely, blogging, is dead or at least dying. This has prompted some to wonder if we should be dropping the old tools for the new.
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Does having a positive outlook during tough times really change anything? Granted that a positive attitude alone doesn’t change anything (i.e., it is just one ingredient in the equation), yet I do believe that not having a positive outlook will certainly make the struggle to dig yourself out of trouble much harder than necessary, too.
Clearly, choosing to be stressed, resentful and angry isn’t going to help you. In good times or bad, being negative will almost always make things more difficult than need be, both in the short- and long-run, i.e., by likely affecting our health (e.g., diet, sleep-patterns, blood-pressure levels, etc.), the quality of the decisions we make , the options we perceive being available to us, as well as the quality of our relationships with the people around us.
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Is Conventional Wisdom good or bad? I would say: “it depends on the circumstances.” I tend not to describe things as being only “black or white” anyway. I often see things in shades of gray. There seems to always be extremes and exceptions, or a new combination of elements finally coming together in just the “right” or “wrong” way, that theories just can’t blindly be applied in the same way every time, e.g., what’s good for one person, isn’t always good for all people.
On the other hand, there are those “hard and fast” rules and laws that can seem to be more absolute. For example, if we all follow the “rules of the road” when driving, order is maintained. The system works quite well. But there, too, is were we begin to see those gray areas of “lawful” versus “ethical”, e.g., is it really okay to speed just a little, especially if everyone else does it, too?
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How’s a consumer to know what to believe? Anything and everything can be debated either way. Check out this post about the new High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) Lobby commercial as posted on Triplepundit.com and Twittered about by @thecitizen. Look at the comments to this post, too. A strong argument can be made for either side.
Then also find, in the sidebar on that same site, an ad for a movie trailer about the business and the future of Water, check it out at flowthefilm.com. The trailer seems to depict a film full of convincing arguments, told in a documentary style similar to An Inconvient Truth and the 9/11 Loose Change films. These films can be convincing. Some people are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt. Some are not. Some fall somewhere in-between.
Looks like we need more places that let us hear both sides of an argument so that we can then choose for ourselves about which side we think should win, such as in the relationship-related site called: Sidetaker.com (as heard on Twitter). But then again, I guess our upcoming elections will be the largest scale version of this. It’s amazing how each side of an argument will have its share of people that are adamant about its side being the only way to think about something.
Will politics ever be anything but a game to be won or lost?
Court cases are often won or lost based on the skill-set of the attorneys hired or appointed. It is not necessarily the facts or circumstantial evidence alone that determine innocence or guilt, but it is how those elements are argued. Facts aren’t allowed to speak for themselves any more. Facts just don’t have the personality for it.
Rhetoric
The online post, “The Rhetoric and the Reality“, has found appropriate words to describe how politicians historically “tell the truth creatively” with “dubious claims, exaggerations, and selective statistics”. Or, as the WashintonPost.com’s “The Fact Checker” points out, we are seeing the ”usual share of outlandish spin, misleading rhetoric, and outright fibs.”
Yet in this sound-bite world with busy, low-attention span audiences, oversimplication seems necessary. Wasn’t John Kerry criticized for talking too much? Aren’t other speakers criticized for being boring? Omitting facts does occur when we simplify. But then who is keeping track of the details? How do we know when important facts are being omitted or not? Who has the time to keep informed on all the details? Who are we trusting to keep us informed? And, what are the consequences of placing our trust blindly?
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While I might not be prone to having blind faith in “an experienced pilot”, I am also not prone to “throwing the baby out with the bath-water.” In other words, I’m finding that just because you don’t agree with everything when you first learn something, that doesn’t mean you have to disregard everything about it either.
I bring this up in the context of what I’ve been learning about the role the subconscious mind plays for us in combination with the functioning of our conscious (thinking) mind. As is taught through SRI Coaching, it is important to develop rapport between the conscious and the subconscious mind since each serves a purpose.
Clearly, the concept of a conscious mind is easier to grasp than that of a subconscious or unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is said to be where memories, emotions, and perceptions exist, as well as where energy is stored and from where our bodily functions are run.
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