Friday, May 27, 2005
The Dieter’s Companion
The Dieter’s Companion
© 2000 by Diane Hanson
The key to your moving forward today is to change your focus from what is holding you back to what you want. Then you have a force that attracts you by pulling you forward. It’s hard to focus on what you want when you can’t see beyond the obstacles. If you focus on your obstacles they become huge but if you put them away and do not dwell on them or allow them to take over your life then it’s easier to move ahead.
When you change your focus you can change your future.
How do you feel when you wake up in the morning? Are you getting enough exercise? What is your eating like? How would you describe your energy level? How do you sleep? Focus on your vision not on your weight. If you do not know where you are going you will probably end up somewhere else. Add your own goals in the spaces provided.
To get into better shape, to fit into the suit you brought two years ago to have more energy to do the things you enjoy. He knew that his confidence would soar if he felt fit and vigorous. I am standing in front of a group of people my pants fit well. The belt is on the middle hole where I like it. My suit fits snuggly across my chest and loosely at the waist. People are admiring my physique I feel lean and energetic. I am in great shape I feel confident. Fixing on how much weight you want to lose won’t lose you anywhere. Vision focused internal positive force draws you towards your vision naturally and unfolds the list of good feelings.
Those who use positive imagery lost twice the weight as those who did not. Create a personal vision success card by typing your vision on a piece of paper no larger than 3½ X 2½ inches. Use small type and edit to 50 words. What need does your behavior serve? Jump-starting your motivation to be willing to act you need to feel that the change you are considering is essential to your well-being. The fewer smaller and weaker your barriers are the easier it would be to move ahead.
When you focus on your vision of success you energy level expands. Place tangible items like photos, expressions, affirmations and other symbols in constant view. Talk it up by telling others of your intended goals you set yourself up to achieve. Play up the value of reminding yourself of the benefits you will enjoy when you get there. Give it center stage to keep your vision of success from the forefront of your daily life and drive your dreams to your destination.
The best explanation for the acronym FEAR is false evidence that appears real. Balancing your priority is the process your actions are targeted you feel a sense of inner balance less internal conflict and feeling of peace a reduction in stress levels, harmony among your various emotions, you feel in-charge and energized, your life falls into place it flows you feel more confident and motivated to reach your diet and exercise goals.
SMART is an acronym that translates as specific measurable action oriented realistic time lined goals or objectives. The anticipation of what you imagine doing is always worse than the reality of doing it. A simple plan focusing on day-to-day successes will turbo charge your efforts. I dream of men who take the next step instead of worrying about the next thousand steps. I am committed to make a promise to yourself that you want honor. Replace guilt with motivation, replace hesitation with resolution, and replace fear with action. Never change a winning game, always change a losing one.
One of my preferred strategies is to shrink the plate. Use the plate with a six-inch diameter for anything you eat. Go for variety not volume - imagine kid size portions. Remember to zoom in on your vision of success until it grows as large as a giant billboard. Man alone is the architect of his destiny. As much as 95% of what you do each day is done from habit both in your thoughts and actions your favorite habits for eating and exercise. Habits are hardwired to the complex motor pathways in our brain.
It is crucial for your long-term success to recognize how easy it is to be drawn into the field of behavioral gravity. Behavioral gravity has a jaw of riptide unless you know how to escape it keeps pulling you away from your goals and commitments. The easiest way to get out of a riptide is to swim parallel to the shoreline until you are out of the current’s range. Make room for new habits. What do you want to hold on to? What are you ready to let go of? What do you want to take on?
Scramble your daily routine. Scrambling simply means mixing up the routines in your day and doing things differently. It is a wonderful technique for tricking those well-worn pathways in your brain and setting up new connections.
Have back up plans. Redesign your day to include a healthy snack at work so that wouldn’t arrive home ravenous. Small purposeful acts can have a large impact. What habits you want to eliminate or modify first. What are you willing to do about it? What’s your plan? How attached are you to it and how hard will it be to break? Anchor your new habits when embedded with other positive activities or actions that already exit in your daily routine. Look for opportunities to create positive habit pairs in your daily routine.
Substitute means that you replace an old detrimental habit with a new beneficial habit. Practice, practice, practice any change in habit may feel different, uncomfortable and even inconvenient at first. New habits flourish with steady attention. The more you do it the more comfortable it will feel and the easier it gets. Good health habits can increase your life expectancy by 13 years. Unattended signs and symptoms usually do not go away they intensify or shift to new location.
Nutritionists suggest you consume most of your calories by 3 o’ clock. This prevents stockpiling calories later in the day which are harder to burn off.
Only 20% to 30% of population exercises regularly. Less than 10% of all the Americans exercise at a frequency intensity or duration considered desirable for good health. If you exercise on a regular basis it increases your odds that your weight will stay off. There are also a host of benefits. The benefits include improved sex life, positive impact on daily life being healthier, increased energy, increased reaction time, improved memory, fewer doctor’s visits, improved sleep, decreased craving for fatty foods, prolonged life, and increased alertness, enhanced immune system.
You can lose weight three times faster if you exercise five times a week instead of three. What you can conceive and believe you can achieve focus on what you need to do for yourself and what will your plans do to achieve your goals and why is it important to you. Be clear and specific about what you need from them. Designing your environment is a key factor for maintaining your health goals. What three supportive changes would you ask for at work, home, or elsewhere for a wish list? You can readjust your current way of doing things so that you fit your health needs into your daily routine. One more example then we will move on to something else.
One out of every four American skips breakfast. Breakfast skippers usually weigh more than breakfast eaters. We should eat a light breakfast, mid morning snacks, small lunch afternoon snack and a light snack after dinner. What am I doing today to help reach my goals consistent choices require the least effort energy and exertion. 10% of those who begin traditional weight loss programs without exercise are able to lose the desired weight and less than 1% of that group is able to keep the weight off. Exercise is a strong behavioral driver. Know your degree of mastery to make each choice count focus on your actions, go for consistency, set gradually targets, create an early morning system called safe habits that will support your goals. What was missing was a new focus on mental and emotional toughness and physical stamina that would keep him going the distance in challenging situations. You need stamina guild and support.
If you think you can you can and if you think you can’t you are right. The acronym WIN stands for What’s Important Now.
I can make healthful choices. I can decide what’s best for me. I will succeed. I have what it takes. I will have more than willpower. I have a system that works. I can eat with moderation. I am doing the best that I can. My actions are on target. I am feeling more confident every day. I am looking and feeling more fit. My success today will add to the next. Motivation lives best and longest within the structure of confidence.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0867308834
© 2000 by Diane Hanson
The key to your moving forward today is to change your focus from what is holding you back to what you want. Then you have a force that attracts you by pulling you forward. It’s hard to focus on what you want when you can’t see beyond the obstacles. If you focus on your obstacles they become huge but if you put them away and do not dwell on them or allow them to take over your life then it’s easier to move ahead.
When you change your focus you can change your future.
How do you feel when you wake up in the morning? Are you getting enough exercise? What is your eating like? How would you describe your energy level? How do you sleep? Focus on your vision not on your weight. If you do not know where you are going you will probably end up somewhere else. Add your own goals in the spaces provided.
To get into better shape, to fit into the suit you brought two years ago to have more energy to do the things you enjoy. He knew that his confidence would soar if he felt fit and vigorous. I am standing in front of a group of people my pants fit well. The belt is on the middle hole where I like it. My suit fits snuggly across my chest and loosely at the waist. People are admiring my physique I feel lean and energetic. I am in great shape I feel confident. Fixing on how much weight you want to lose won’t lose you anywhere. Vision focused internal positive force draws you towards your vision naturally and unfolds the list of good feelings.
Those who use positive imagery lost twice the weight as those who did not. Create a personal vision success card by typing your vision on a piece of paper no larger than 3½ X 2½ inches. Use small type and edit to 50 words. What need does your behavior serve? Jump-starting your motivation to be willing to act you need to feel that the change you are considering is essential to your well-being. The fewer smaller and weaker your barriers are the easier it would be to move ahead.
When you focus on your vision of success you energy level expands. Place tangible items like photos, expressions, affirmations and other symbols in constant view. Talk it up by telling others of your intended goals you set yourself up to achieve. Play up the value of reminding yourself of the benefits you will enjoy when you get there. Give it center stage to keep your vision of success from the forefront of your daily life and drive your dreams to your destination.
The best explanation for the acronym FEAR is false evidence that appears real. Balancing your priority is the process your actions are targeted you feel a sense of inner balance less internal conflict and feeling of peace a reduction in stress levels, harmony among your various emotions, you feel in-charge and energized, your life falls into place it flows you feel more confident and motivated to reach your diet and exercise goals.
SMART is an acronym that translates as specific measurable action oriented realistic time lined goals or objectives. The anticipation of what you imagine doing is always worse than the reality of doing it. A simple plan focusing on day-to-day successes will turbo charge your efforts. I dream of men who take the next step instead of worrying about the next thousand steps. I am committed to make a promise to yourself that you want honor. Replace guilt with motivation, replace hesitation with resolution, and replace fear with action. Never change a winning game, always change a losing one.
One of my preferred strategies is to shrink the plate. Use the plate with a six-inch diameter for anything you eat. Go for variety not volume - imagine kid size portions. Remember to zoom in on your vision of success until it grows as large as a giant billboard. Man alone is the architect of his destiny. As much as 95% of what you do each day is done from habit both in your thoughts and actions your favorite habits for eating and exercise. Habits are hardwired to the complex motor pathways in our brain.
It is crucial for your long-term success to recognize how easy it is to be drawn into the field of behavioral gravity. Behavioral gravity has a jaw of riptide unless you know how to escape it keeps pulling you away from your goals and commitments. The easiest way to get out of a riptide is to swim parallel to the shoreline until you are out of the current’s range. Make room for new habits. What do you want to hold on to? What are you ready to let go of? What do you want to take on?
Scramble your daily routine. Scrambling simply means mixing up the routines in your day and doing things differently. It is a wonderful technique for tricking those well-worn pathways in your brain and setting up new connections.
Have back up plans. Redesign your day to include a healthy snack at work so that wouldn’t arrive home ravenous. Small purposeful acts can have a large impact. What habits you want to eliminate or modify first. What are you willing to do about it? What’s your plan? How attached are you to it and how hard will it be to break? Anchor your new habits when embedded with other positive activities or actions that already exit in your daily routine. Look for opportunities to create positive habit pairs in your daily routine.
Substitute means that you replace an old detrimental habit with a new beneficial habit. Practice, practice, practice any change in habit may feel different, uncomfortable and even inconvenient at first. New habits flourish with steady attention. The more you do it the more comfortable it will feel and the easier it gets. Good health habits can increase your life expectancy by 13 years. Unattended signs and symptoms usually do not go away they intensify or shift to new location.
Nutritionists suggest you consume most of your calories by 3 o’ clock. This prevents stockpiling calories later in the day which are harder to burn off.
Only 20% to 30% of population exercises regularly. Less than 10% of all the Americans exercise at a frequency intensity or duration considered desirable for good health. If you exercise on a regular basis it increases your odds that your weight will stay off. There are also a host of benefits. The benefits include improved sex life, positive impact on daily life being healthier, increased energy, increased reaction time, improved memory, fewer doctor’s visits, improved sleep, decreased craving for fatty foods, prolonged life, and increased alertness, enhanced immune system.
You can lose weight three times faster if you exercise five times a week instead of three. What you can conceive and believe you can achieve focus on what you need to do for yourself and what will your plans do to achieve your goals and why is it important to you. Be clear and specific about what you need from them. Designing your environment is a key factor for maintaining your health goals. What three supportive changes would you ask for at work, home, or elsewhere for a wish list? You can readjust your current way of doing things so that you fit your health needs into your daily routine. One more example then we will move on to something else.
One out of every four American skips breakfast. Breakfast skippers usually weigh more than breakfast eaters. We should eat a light breakfast, mid morning snacks, small lunch afternoon snack and a light snack after dinner. What am I doing today to help reach my goals consistent choices require the least effort energy and exertion. 10% of those who begin traditional weight loss programs without exercise are able to lose the desired weight and less than 1% of that group is able to keep the weight off. Exercise is a strong behavioral driver. Know your degree of mastery to make each choice count focus on your actions, go for consistency, set gradually targets, create an early morning system called safe habits that will support your goals. What was missing was a new focus on mental and emotional toughness and physical stamina that would keep him going the distance in challenging situations. You need stamina guild and support.
If you think you can you can and if you think you can’t you are right. The acronym WIN stands for What’s Important Now.
I can make healthful choices. I can decide what’s best for me. I will succeed. I have what it takes. I will have more than willpower. I have a system that works. I can eat with moderation. I am doing the best that I can. My actions are on target. I am feeling more confident every day. I am looking and feeling more fit. My success today will add to the next. Motivation lives best and longest within the structure of confidence.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0867308834
Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames
Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames
© 2001 by Thich Nhat Hanh
Many people look for happiness outside themselves, but true happiness must come from inside of us. The most basic condition for happiness is freedom - freedom from the mental formations of anger, despair, jealousy and delusion.
When a person’s speech is full of anger it is because here she suffers deeply. Because he has so much suffering he becomes full of bitterness. He is always ready to complain and blame others for his problems. This is why you find it very unpleasant to listen to him and try to avoid him.
Listening with compassion can help the other person to suffer less, if you can sit down quietly and listen compassionately to that person for one hour you can relieve a lot of his suffering. You have to be very concentrated while you listen. Finally she came close and sat quietly left next to him something that she had never done in the last 5 years. She always shouted and her speech had been full of anger, bitterness, blaming and judging. They had only argued with each other. She had not spoken to him like this in years with so much love and tenderness. If we cannot restore communication happiness will never be possible. The practice of compassionate listening, the practice of loving speech and the practice of taking care of our anger are presented very clearly. To do this we must pay more attention to the bio-chemical aspects of anger because anger has its roots in our body as well as our mind. Anger is not strictly a psychological reality.
In Buddhism we call the body mind formation Mama Rupa. Mama Rupa is the Psycho Soma, the mind, body as one entity. The same reality sometimes appears as mind and sometimes appears as body. Our duality tells us that mind cannot be body and body cannot be mind. But look deeply we see that body is mind and mind is body. Modern medicine is aware that the sickness of the body may be a result of sickness in the mind and the sickness in our mind may be connected to sickness in our body.
Not only do we nourish our anger with edible food but also through what we consume with our eyes, ears and consciousness. The consumption of cultural items is also linked to anger. What we read in magazines, what we view on television can also be toxic. And they also contain anger and frustration. A film is like a piece of beefsteak, it can contain anger if you consume it you are eating anger you are eating frustration. Newspaper articles, meeting, conversations can contain a lot of anger. You may feel lonely sometimes and want to talk to some one. In one hour of conversation the other person’s words may poison you with a lot of toxins. There are those who take refuge in eating to forget their sorrow and their depression. When we eat well we can eat less. We need only half the amount of food that we eat every day. To eat well we should chew our food about 50 times before we swallow.
Eating is a deep practice. When I eat I enjoy every morsel of my food. When we eat mindfully we are not eating or chewing our anger our anxiety or our projects. We are chewing the food prepared lovingly by others. It is very pleasant. When you serve yourself be aware of your eyes. Don’t trust them; it is your eyes that push you to take too much food.
When someone says or does something that makes us angry we suffer, we tend to fail to do something back to make the other suffer with the hope that we would suffer less. We think I want to punish you; I want to make you suffer because you have made me suffer, and when I see you suffer a lot I will feel better. It is an escalation of suffering on both sides. Both of you need compassionate help, neither of you needs punishment. If you have some fire the most urgent things to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believed to be the arsonist. So when you are angry if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person if you try to punish her you are acting exactly like some of the run past of the arsonist or everything goes up in flame. It needs only one conscious step to be back in contact with yourself and everything around you.
Whenever you are not standing, sitting or lying down you are going. But where are you going? You have already arrived with every step you can arrive in the present moment; you can step into the pure land or into the kingdom of God.
When you are angry you are not very beautiful, you are not presentable, your face looks like a bomb ready to explode, look at someone who is angry when you see the tension in her you become frightened, show a mirror with you and look at it to see what state you are in. After you have breathed in and out a few times smiling at yourself, the tension will be gone and you will think from relief. Your anger is like that it needs to be cooked, in the beginning it is raw, you cannot eat raw potatoes. Your anger is very difficult to enjoy but if you know how to take care of it to put this then the negative energy of your anger will become the positive energy of understanding and compassion.
You accept your anger because you know you can take care of it and transform it into positive energy. At the moment you become angry you tend to believe that your misery has been created by another person, you blame him or her for all your suffering but by looking deeply you may realize that the seed of anger in you is the main cause of your suffering. Many other people confounded with the same situation will not get angry like you. They hear the same words, they see the same situation and yet they are able to stay calm and not be carried away, while you get angry so easily you may get angry very easily because your seed of anger is too strong. All of us have a seed of anger in the depth of our consciousness, but it some of us that seed of anger is bigger than other seeds like love or compassion. The seed of anger may be bigger because we have not practiced in the past, then we will stop blaming the other person for causing our suffering. We realize she or he is only a secondary cause, once you have taken care of your angry you become aware that she is still suffering now you can focus your attention on the other person, when someone does not know how to handle his own suffering he allows it spill all over the people around him. When you suffer you make people around you suffer.
We realize that what she needs is help and not punishment. While you are filled with the desire to return and help there is a completely different kind of thinking. You saw that his reaction, his anger was a kind of energy that had been transmitted to him by his father. He would become exactly like his father or continuation of his father. He did not want to treat his sister like that but the energy transmitted to him by his father was so strong that he almost did exactly what his father had done to him.
Darling I need your help, first allow this for foundation for your capacity to love the other person, if you don’t take good care of yourself if you are not happy if you are not peaceful you cannot make the other person happy. Your capacity for loving another person depends entirely on your capacity for loving yourself or taking care of yourself.
Many of us still have a wounded child within us. Our wounds may have been caused by a father or mother, taking care of ourselves; we must go back and take care of the wounded child inside of us. When you climb a beautiful mountain and invite your little child within to climb with you, when you can concentrate the beautiful sunset invite him or her to enjoy with you, if you do that for a few weeks or for a few months the wounded child in you will be healed. When you sit in a cafe, with a lot of music in the background a lot of projects in your hands you are not really drinking coffee or tea.
Darling it is wonderful that you are here alive it makes me very happy, the other person maybe caught in worries, anger and forgetfulness but with mindfulness, you can save her and yourself. Mindfulness is the energy of the Buddha. Start a peace talk with your loved one.
Darling in the past we have made each other suffer so much both of us were victims of our anger, we made a hell of each other, now I want to change, I wanted to become allies so that we can protect each other practice together and transform our anger together, but it is still the better life from now on based on the practice of mindfulness. Darling I need your help I need your support I need your co-operation I cannot succeed without you. You have to say these words to your partner your son, your daughter time to do it, this is the awakening this is love, so it is very important to go to your partner, to your beloved one and negotiate a strategy of peace, strategy of consuming, a strategy of protection, it is up to you to convince the other person.
Before we can make deep changes in our lives we have to look into our diet, our way of consuming, we have to live in such a way that we stop consuming the things that poison us and intoxicate us. Peace, reconciliation and happiness begin with you, the way you walk the way you breath, the way you smile the way you re-act all this is very important. We must begin with this, show that you no longer feel any anger or condemnation, show that you understand and respect the other person. We are primarily responsible for anger but we believe very nicely that if we can say something or do something to punish the other person we will suffer a lot, because whatever you do or say in a state of anger will only cause more damage in the relationship. Instead, you should try not to say anything when we are angry. When you say something really unkind, what you do when you do something in retaliation, their anger increases, you make the other person suffer and you will try hard to say or do something back to get relieved from this suffering. Trying to punish the other person is only going to make situations worse, so promise each other that every time you get angry you will not say or do anything out of anger. Take advantage of the moments when you are happy together to sign the contract, your peace treaty a treaty of true love. Your peace treaty should be written and signed entirely on the basis of love.
The Buddha never advised us to suppress our anger he told us to go back to ourselves and take good care of it. This does not mean that you have to hide your anger you have to let the other person know that you are angry and that you suffer, if the other person is dear to you then you have to confess that you are angry and that you suffer, tell him, or her in a calm way.
Darling, I am angry at you I suffer try your best to say it peacefully. You must do this as soon as possible. You should not keep your anger or your sufferings to yourself for more than 24 hours. Write a peace message deliver the letter to her and make sure she gets it before 24 hours past. You can add I am doing my best.
While embracing your anger you practice looking deeply to see the nature of your anger because you know that you may be the victim of a wrong perception, you may have misunderstood what you heard and what you saw. You may have a wrong idea of what have been said what have been done. Your anger is born from such ignorance and wrong perception. You remember that you should not be so sure that you are the victim of the other person’s wrong doing, the victim of the other person’s words give your self and you have created the hell inside you.
Please help me, Darling I need your help, if you are capable of writing or saying these three sentences you are capable of true love, Darling I suffer and I want you to know it, Darling I am doing my best. I am trying not to blame anyone else including you since we are so close to each other since we have made a commitment to each other, I feel that I need your support and your help to get out of the state of suffering of anger. Because you are doing your best I am too doing my best. I have to ask myself, what shall I say? What shall I do? That has made her suffer like that. Why do I do that? So when the other person receives a message a message communicated by loving speech he will be inspired by your love by your language and by your practice. Perhaps, you’ve become aware that you became angry because of the wrong perception when you have such an insight you have to tell the other person right away.
In the Vietnamese tradition husband and wife are expected to treat each other like a guest. You really respect each other, you behave with reverence, without such mutual respect love cannot last for long time anger and other negative energies will begin to predominant. You may like to write these three sentences down on a piece of paper the size of credit card and slip it into your wallet. Believe that sheet of paper as something that can save you because that will remind you of your commitment to each other. Some of us keep a pebble in our pocket every time we put our hands on pocket we touch the small pebble and hold it gently. We practice mindful breathing and we feel very peaceful.
The Pebble becomes the dormer; just holding the pebble breathing in and out counting them small and can help you tremendously. Place a little pebble in your pocket to act as your teacher. Anger is a sign of energy and the best way to do this is to generate another sign of energy that can embrace and take care of our anger. That second form is the energy of Mindfulness. Mindfulness is the energy of the Buddha. Energy is on one whose anger Energy is on two is mindfulness.
If you don’t have garbage you have nothing to use in order to make compost and if you have no compost there is nothing to nourish the flower in you. You need the suffering and afflictions in you since they are organic, we know that you can transform them and make good use of them. Doing violence to the others is doing violence to you. If you do not have the inside of mind duality you will still be violent. You would still want to punish to suppress and to destroy but once you have penetrated the reality as non-duality, we will smile at those of the flower and garbage in you, you would embrace both, this inside is the ground for your non-violent action.
Do not keep your suffering or anger to yourself for more than one day, you have to say these three things in a calm and loving way and you must train yourself to do so. The moment you tell him or deliver the notes to him, you would always feel some relief, better sit –down Friday evening and look deeply together, perhaps you say this on Monday or Tuesday so you have another three or four days to practice.
In our consciousness, there are many negative seeds and also many positive seeds. So practice is to devoid watering the negative and for identifying water into positive seeds everyday, so please don’t water the seeds of anger intolerance irritation and despair in me and I promise not to water these needs in you. I know that you also have negative seeds and I will be very careful not to water these seeds in you because I know if I do you will be very unhappy and then I will suffer also. I vow only to water the positive seeds in you, the seeds of love compassion and understanding, the other person is not the main of our anger. The practice of selective watering is very effective when I was watering the flower in the other person can make him or her begin to learn, it is grossly difficult to do. This is why having the community of practices is so important. We need the same way in your brother, sister, friend to remind you of what you already know.
Recognize first at the main cause of your suffering is the seed of anger in you and that the other person is only a secondary cause. If you don’t help who will. Most of the time anger is born from a wrong perception; the image of the sun that you see is the image of the sun some 8 minutes ago. Sunlight takes 8 minutes to reach the earth from such a long distance, also when you see a star you think that the star is there but the star may have disappeared already, one or two 10,000 years before. It is very helpful to write on a piece of paper “Are you sure” and hang it up in your room. When you are angry and you suffer, please go back and inspect very deeply the concept and the nature of your perception. You listen only to help the other person who express himself and find some relief from his suffering with only one condition you must use calm and loving speech. The moment the irritation manifests, the moment you think you are going to lose your calm, externally please stop.
Darling I cannot continue now, wait when we meet another time I need to practice my mind for walking and breathing. I am not at my best right now, so I do not think I can put these in the practice of loving speech. You can make a mistake only when you forget that the other person suffers, we tend to believe that you are the only one who suffers and the other person is enjoying your suffering. Understand that the other person suffers and that I must help. If you want to help correct her wrong perception, you have to wait until the moment is right, you don’t say anything you just listen and perhaps, a few days later when she feels, much better you try to give her the information as she needs to correct her perception.
Darling, the other day you said something but that is not really what happened. What happened is anger needs time to die down, when you turn off the fan it continues to spin and few thousand before stopping, anger is like that don’t except the other person to stop being angry right away. Patience is the mark of true love. When it is raining we think that there is no sunshine but if we fly high in an airplane and go through the cloud we re-discover the sunshine again. We see that the sunshine is always there.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573221872
© 2001 by Thich Nhat Hanh
Many people look for happiness outside themselves, but true happiness must come from inside of us. The most basic condition for happiness is freedom - freedom from the mental formations of anger, despair, jealousy and delusion.
When a person’s speech is full of anger it is because here she suffers deeply. Because he has so much suffering he becomes full of bitterness. He is always ready to complain and blame others for his problems. This is why you find it very unpleasant to listen to him and try to avoid him.
Listening with compassion can help the other person to suffer less, if you can sit down quietly and listen compassionately to that person for one hour you can relieve a lot of his suffering. You have to be very concentrated while you listen. Finally she came close and sat quietly left next to him something that she had never done in the last 5 years. She always shouted and her speech had been full of anger, bitterness, blaming and judging. They had only argued with each other. She had not spoken to him like this in years with so much love and tenderness. If we cannot restore communication happiness will never be possible. The practice of compassionate listening, the practice of loving speech and the practice of taking care of our anger are presented very clearly. To do this we must pay more attention to the bio-chemical aspects of anger because anger has its roots in our body as well as our mind. Anger is not strictly a psychological reality.
In Buddhism we call the body mind formation Mama Rupa. Mama Rupa is the Psycho Soma, the mind, body as one entity. The same reality sometimes appears as mind and sometimes appears as body. Our duality tells us that mind cannot be body and body cannot be mind. But look deeply we see that body is mind and mind is body. Modern medicine is aware that the sickness of the body may be a result of sickness in the mind and the sickness in our mind may be connected to sickness in our body.
Not only do we nourish our anger with edible food but also through what we consume with our eyes, ears and consciousness. The consumption of cultural items is also linked to anger. What we read in magazines, what we view on television can also be toxic. And they also contain anger and frustration. A film is like a piece of beefsteak, it can contain anger if you consume it you are eating anger you are eating frustration. Newspaper articles, meeting, conversations can contain a lot of anger. You may feel lonely sometimes and want to talk to some one. In one hour of conversation the other person’s words may poison you with a lot of toxins. There are those who take refuge in eating to forget their sorrow and their depression. When we eat well we can eat less. We need only half the amount of food that we eat every day. To eat well we should chew our food about 50 times before we swallow.
Eating is a deep practice. When I eat I enjoy every morsel of my food. When we eat mindfully we are not eating or chewing our anger our anxiety or our projects. We are chewing the food prepared lovingly by others. It is very pleasant. When you serve yourself be aware of your eyes. Don’t trust them; it is your eyes that push you to take too much food.
When someone says or does something that makes us angry we suffer, we tend to fail to do something back to make the other suffer with the hope that we would suffer less. We think I want to punish you; I want to make you suffer because you have made me suffer, and when I see you suffer a lot I will feel better. It is an escalation of suffering on both sides. Both of you need compassionate help, neither of you needs punishment. If you have some fire the most urgent things to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believed to be the arsonist. So when you are angry if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person if you try to punish her you are acting exactly like some of the run past of the arsonist or everything goes up in flame. It needs only one conscious step to be back in contact with yourself and everything around you.
Whenever you are not standing, sitting or lying down you are going. But where are you going? You have already arrived with every step you can arrive in the present moment; you can step into the pure land or into the kingdom of God.
When you are angry you are not very beautiful, you are not presentable, your face looks like a bomb ready to explode, look at someone who is angry when you see the tension in her you become frightened, show a mirror with you and look at it to see what state you are in. After you have breathed in and out a few times smiling at yourself, the tension will be gone and you will think from relief. Your anger is like that it needs to be cooked, in the beginning it is raw, you cannot eat raw potatoes. Your anger is very difficult to enjoy but if you know how to take care of it to put this then the negative energy of your anger will become the positive energy of understanding and compassion.
You accept your anger because you know you can take care of it and transform it into positive energy. At the moment you become angry you tend to believe that your misery has been created by another person, you blame him or her for all your suffering but by looking deeply you may realize that the seed of anger in you is the main cause of your suffering. Many other people confounded with the same situation will not get angry like you. They hear the same words, they see the same situation and yet they are able to stay calm and not be carried away, while you get angry so easily you may get angry very easily because your seed of anger is too strong. All of us have a seed of anger in the depth of our consciousness, but it some of us that seed of anger is bigger than other seeds like love or compassion. The seed of anger may be bigger because we have not practiced in the past, then we will stop blaming the other person for causing our suffering. We realize she or he is only a secondary cause, once you have taken care of your angry you become aware that she is still suffering now you can focus your attention on the other person, when someone does not know how to handle his own suffering he allows it spill all over the people around him. When you suffer you make people around you suffer.
We realize that what she needs is help and not punishment. While you are filled with the desire to return and help there is a completely different kind of thinking. You saw that his reaction, his anger was a kind of energy that had been transmitted to him by his father. He would become exactly like his father or continuation of his father. He did not want to treat his sister like that but the energy transmitted to him by his father was so strong that he almost did exactly what his father had done to him.
Darling I need your help, first allow this for foundation for your capacity to love the other person, if you don’t take good care of yourself if you are not happy if you are not peaceful you cannot make the other person happy. Your capacity for loving another person depends entirely on your capacity for loving yourself or taking care of yourself.
Many of us still have a wounded child within us. Our wounds may have been caused by a father or mother, taking care of ourselves; we must go back and take care of the wounded child inside of us. When you climb a beautiful mountain and invite your little child within to climb with you, when you can concentrate the beautiful sunset invite him or her to enjoy with you, if you do that for a few weeks or for a few months the wounded child in you will be healed. When you sit in a cafe, with a lot of music in the background a lot of projects in your hands you are not really drinking coffee or tea.
Darling it is wonderful that you are here alive it makes me very happy, the other person maybe caught in worries, anger and forgetfulness but with mindfulness, you can save her and yourself. Mindfulness is the energy of the Buddha. Start a peace talk with your loved one.
Darling in the past we have made each other suffer so much both of us were victims of our anger, we made a hell of each other, now I want to change, I wanted to become allies so that we can protect each other practice together and transform our anger together, but it is still the better life from now on based on the practice of mindfulness. Darling I need your help I need your support I need your co-operation I cannot succeed without you. You have to say these words to your partner your son, your daughter time to do it, this is the awakening this is love, so it is very important to go to your partner, to your beloved one and negotiate a strategy of peace, strategy of consuming, a strategy of protection, it is up to you to convince the other person.
Before we can make deep changes in our lives we have to look into our diet, our way of consuming, we have to live in such a way that we stop consuming the things that poison us and intoxicate us. Peace, reconciliation and happiness begin with you, the way you walk the way you breath, the way you smile the way you re-act all this is very important. We must begin with this, show that you no longer feel any anger or condemnation, show that you understand and respect the other person. We are primarily responsible for anger but we believe very nicely that if we can say something or do something to punish the other person we will suffer a lot, because whatever you do or say in a state of anger will only cause more damage in the relationship. Instead, you should try not to say anything when we are angry. When you say something really unkind, what you do when you do something in retaliation, their anger increases, you make the other person suffer and you will try hard to say or do something back to get relieved from this suffering. Trying to punish the other person is only going to make situations worse, so promise each other that every time you get angry you will not say or do anything out of anger. Take advantage of the moments when you are happy together to sign the contract, your peace treaty a treaty of true love. Your peace treaty should be written and signed entirely on the basis of love.
The Buddha never advised us to suppress our anger he told us to go back to ourselves and take good care of it. This does not mean that you have to hide your anger you have to let the other person know that you are angry and that you suffer, if the other person is dear to you then you have to confess that you are angry and that you suffer, tell him, or her in a calm way.
Darling, I am angry at you I suffer try your best to say it peacefully. You must do this as soon as possible. You should not keep your anger or your sufferings to yourself for more than 24 hours. Write a peace message deliver the letter to her and make sure she gets it before 24 hours past. You can add I am doing my best.
While embracing your anger you practice looking deeply to see the nature of your anger because you know that you may be the victim of a wrong perception, you may have misunderstood what you heard and what you saw. You may have a wrong idea of what have been said what have been done. Your anger is born from such ignorance and wrong perception. You remember that you should not be so sure that you are the victim of the other person’s wrong doing, the victim of the other person’s words give your self and you have created the hell inside you.
Please help me, Darling I need your help, if you are capable of writing or saying these three sentences you are capable of true love, Darling I suffer and I want you to know it, Darling I am doing my best. I am trying not to blame anyone else including you since we are so close to each other since we have made a commitment to each other, I feel that I need your support and your help to get out of the state of suffering of anger. Because you are doing your best I am too doing my best. I have to ask myself, what shall I say? What shall I do? That has made her suffer like that. Why do I do that? So when the other person receives a message a message communicated by loving speech he will be inspired by your love by your language and by your practice. Perhaps, you’ve become aware that you became angry because of the wrong perception when you have such an insight you have to tell the other person right away.
In the Vietnamese tradition husband and wife are expected to treat each other like a guest. You really respect each other, you behave with reverence, without such mutual respect love cannot last for long time anger and other negative energies will begin to predominant. You may like to write these three sentences down on a piece of paper the size of credit card and slip it into your wallet. Believe that sheet of paper as something that can save you because that will remind you of your commitment to each other. Some of us keep a pebble in our pocket every time we put our hands on pocket we touch the small pebble and hold it gently. We practice mindful breathing and we feel very peaceful.
The Pebble becomes the dormer; just holding the pebble breathing in and out counting them small and can help you tremendously. Place a little pebble in your pocket to act as your teacher. Anger is a sign of energy and the best way to do this is to generate another sign of energy that can embrace and take care of our anger. That second form is the energy of Mindfulness. Mindfulness is the energy of the Buddha. Energy is on one whose anger Energy is on two is mindfulness.
If you don’t have garbage you have nothing to use in order to make compost and if you have no compost there is nothing to nourish the flower in you. You need the suffering and afflictions in you since they are organic, we know that you can transform them and make good use of them. Doing violence to the others is doing violence to you. If you do not have the inside of mind duality you will still be violent. You would still want to punish to suppress and to destroy but once you have penetrated the reality as non-duality, we will smile at those of the flower and garbage in you, you would embrace both, this inside is the ground for your non-violent action.
Do not keep your suffering or anger to yourself for more than one day, you have to say these three things in a calm and loving way and you must train yourself to do so. The moment you tell him or deliver the notes to him, you would always feel some relief, better sit –down Friday evening and look deeply together, perhaps you say this on Monday or Tuesday so you have another three or four days to practice.
In our consciousness, there are many negative seeds and also many positive seeds. So practice is to devoid watering the negative and for identifying water into positive seeds everyday, so please don’t water the seeds of anger intolerance irritation and despair in me and I promise not to water these needs in you. I know that you also have negative seeds and I will be very careful not to water these seeds in you because I know if I do you will be very unhappy and then I will suffer also. I vow only to water the positive seeds in you, the seeds of love compassion and understanding, the other person is not the main of our anger. The practice of selective watering is very effective when I was watering the flower in the other person can make him or her begin to learn, it is grossly difficult to do. This is why having the community of practices is so important. We need the same way in your brother, sister, friend to remind you of what you already know.
Recognize first at the main cause of your suffering is the seed of anger in you and that the other person is only a secondary cause. If you don’t help who will. Most of the time anger is born from a wrong perception; the image of the sun that you see is the image of the sun some 8 minutes ago. Sunlight takes 8 minutes to reach the earth from such a long distance, also when you see a star you think that the star is there but the star may have disappeared already, one or two 10,000 years before. It is very helpful to write on a piece of paper “Are you sure” and hang it up in your room. When you are angry and you suffer, please go back and inspect very deeply the concept and the nature of your perception. You listen only to help the other person who express himself and find some relief from his suffering with only one condition you must use calm and loving speech. The moment the irritation manifests, the moment you think you are going to lose your calm, externally please stop.
Darling I cannot continue now, wait when we meet another time I need to practice my mind for walking and breathing. I am not at my best right now, so I do not think I can put these in the practice of loving speech. You can make a mistake only when you forget that the other person suffers, we tend to believe that you are the only one who suffers and the other person is enjoying your suffering. Understand that the other person suffers and that I must help. If you want to help correct her wrong perception, you have to wait until the moment is right, you don’t say anything you just listen and perhaps, a few days later when she feels, much better you try to give her the information as she needs to correct her perception.
Darling, the other day you said something but that is not really what happened. What happened is anger needs time to die down, when you turn off the fan it continues to spin and few thousand before stopping, anger is like that don’t except the other person to stop being angry right away. Patience is the mark of true love. When it is raining we think that there is no sunshine but if we fly high in an airplane and go through the cloud we re-discover the sunshine again. We see that the sunshine is always there.
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Thursday, May 26, 2005
The Power of Focus
The Power of Focus
© 2000 by Jack Canfield and Mark Hansen
The main reason most people struggle professionally and personally is simply a lack of focus. They procrastinate and allow themselves to be easily distracted and interrupted.
Successful people have successful habits. The keyword here is consistency. That means every month. This is called a no exceptions policy. If maintaining excellent health is high on your list of priorities exercising 3 times a week may be the minimum standard to keep you in shape. A no exceptions policy means you will maintain this exercise habit no matter what happens because you value the long term benefits.
More people than ever are living for immediate gratification. People in the habit of doing this have a sense of playing catch up all that time. There is always another payment next month. The fact is if you keep on doing things a certain way you will always get a predictable result. Negative habits breed negative consequences. Successful habits create a positive reward, that’s just the way life is. What’s happening is that after 21 to 30 experiences with a new habit it’s harder not to do it than to do it. To insure consistency astronauts use a check list for every single procedure to insure the same result every time.
Imagine if you only changed four habits every year, five years from now you would have 20 positive new habits. Quality is not an act it is a habit. By systematically improving one behavior at a time you can dramatically improve your overall lifestyle. We all need an education in the obvious. A lack of clarity about expected outcomes, not following up consistently on overdue receivables, talking instead of listening, working long days with no exercise or regular breaks, taking work home with you, making reservations at the last minute. Now check yourself out by making a list of all the habits that keep you unproductive.
If you hang around people who are always complaining about how bad everything is, you may start believing what they say. On the other hand, if you surround yourself with people who are strong and positive you are more likely to see a world full of opportunity and adventure.
Successful people have developed successful habits. Learn to observe what those habits are. Study successful people. They leave clues, what do they read, how do they schedule their time. Read their autobiographies and biography. Another habit that three of us have developed is listening to motivational and educational audio tapes when we are driving, walking or exercising. If you listen to an audiotape for 30 minutes each day 5 days a week in 10 years you would been exposed over 1300 hours of new and useful information. This is a habit that almost all the successful people we know have developed. They listen to audio tapes.
If you read one book every month about your industry in 10 years you’ll have read 120 books that will put you in the top 1% of your field. There are three fundamental steps. Clearly identify your bad or unproductive habits. The more vividly you describe the benefits the more likely you are to take action. Create a three part action plan. Successful people I want to interview. Three step action plans to jump start my new habit. Your habits will determine your future.
It is not hocus pocus it is all about focus.
Do you see the big picture? Creating optimum balance, building excellent relationships, the confidence factor, ask for what you want, consistent, persistent, taking decisive action, living on purpose. As the foundation is built people and systems are put in place to create stability. Paper work increases and what started out as an exciting venture becomes daily routine.
Most entrepreneurs are controllers. This is the ultimate Catch-22. There are more opportunities on the horizon and bigger deals to close but you can’t get to them because you are stuck with the day to day routine. You must invest most of your time every week doing what you do best and let others do what they do best. Focus on those activities you do brilliantly and from which you produce extraordinary results. If you don’t you will probably create higher stress levels and ultimately burn out. They are masters at applying the habit of priority focus. That means they only do the things they are brilliant at, recording and performing on stage. The Rolling Stones simply concentrate on what they do best - singing and performing.
When you focus most of your time and energy doing the things you are truly brilliant at, you eventually reap big rewards. Notice how these top performers spend very little time on their weaknesses. It is important to clearly differentiate your areas of brilliance from your weaknesses.
All your biggest rewards in life will come from spending the vast majority of your time in the areas that score ten on your talent scale what you do effortlessly without a lot of study or preparations.
Jim Carey improves his focus using visualization. He wrote himself a check for $10,000,000.00 for services rendered, dated it and kept it in his pocket. When times were tough he would sit on a quiet hillside overlooking Los Angeles and imagine himself as a movie star then he’d reread the check as a reminder of his upcoming good fortune. Interestingly enough two years later he signed a deal for more than $10,000,000.00.
Basically you make a list of all the activities you do at work in a typical week. Most people when they add up their totals score between 10 and 20. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out you can’t do 40 things each week to be truly focused. Even 20 activities are far too many.
Many people are shocked when they see how much of their week is fragmented. Simply record everything you do in 15 minute records. List three things you are brilliant at doing in your business, effortlessly, give you energy and produce the greatest results and in in-completed business. In a typical week what percent of your time do you spend on your brilliant activities? Be totally honest, often the answer is 15% to 25%. Imagine if you could refine this to 80% to 100%. The level of brilliance will determine as far as your opportunities in your life.
List three things you don’t like doing, resist doing or just no good at. Have you noticed how these activities tend to drain your energy instead of expanding it? When you keep on doing work that you just have you need to remind yourself that this is futile. Most entrepreneurs are great starters but then they don’t finish. Find a brilliant finisher to handle the details. He or she is brilliant at doing that task you don’t like to do or shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
Use the 4D formula to help you prioritize.
1. Dump it, no I choose not to do this.
2. Delegate it. Who else could do this?
3. Defer it.
4. Do it.
Staying within these boundaries requires new level of self discipline. Is what I am doing right now helping me to achieve my goal? It also means saying “no” a lot more. Preschedule your appointments just like a doctor and choose the most productive time to make your phone calls. Be aware of those habits that may be pulling you away from your focus.
People watch TV 6.5 hours a day on average. C. Clement Stone in 1969 said, “Do you watch television?” Then he asked me, “How many hours a day do you think you watch?” After a short calculation I answered about three hours a day. I want you to cut out one hour a day. If you do that you will be saving 365 hours per year. If you divide that by a 40 hour work week you will see that you added about 9½ additional weeks of productivity to your life. That’s like getting two additional months every year. I agreed that this was a great leveraging concept and then I asked Mr. Stone what he thought that I should do with this extra hour every day. He suggested I read books in my field of motivation, psychology, education, training, self esteem.
List all the business activities at work that use up your time. Name the three most important activities that generate income and the three most important activities that you don’t like doing and who could do these for you.
Set aside a scheduled time for thinking. In fact, I reserve one day a week on my calendar just to think. All of my greatest opportunities ideas or money making ventures started with the days I took off to think. I used to lock myself away in my den with strict instructions to my family that under no circumstances would I to be disturbed. The Think strategy worked for Einstein who actually did his pondering in a special thinking chair.
Master philosopher Jim Rowan astutely observes that there are two major pains in life. One is the pain of discipline the other is the pain of regret. Don’t want to look back years later saying if only I had taken up that business opportunity. If only I had saved and invested regularly, if only I had spent more time with my family, if only I had taken care of my health. John Garter the famous explorer at the tender age of 15 sat down and made a list of 127 challenging lifetime goals he wanted to accomplish. By the time he turned 50, he had successfully completed more than 100 of the goals on his list. One of Schuler’s comment said it all I think when you have big dreams you attract other big dreamers. Third, and this may be the wisest strategy, selectively share your dreams with the few people you trust. What contribution do I want to make? What do I want to become? What do I want to learn? What do I want to spend my time with? How much do I want to earn save and invest? How much time do I want off for fun? What will I do to create optimum health? Write a number beside each goal 1, 3, 5 or 10 years.
The seven goal categories are financial, business, fun time, health, relationships, personal, and contribution. When you dedicate a portion of your time to accomplishing one significant goal in each of these areas every 60-days you will have balance and peace of mind.
Start with small increments and gradually increase the size of your goals. To keep those in the forefront of your mind review them daily. Most people don’t even have an action plan for their goals. When you have written out your seven major goals shift your focus to the week ahead. We call it the seven-day focus.
At the beginning of each week select the three most important things you want to accomplish. Phone your partner at the beginning of the week and share your three most important activities. Seven days later discuss your results, victories and challenges and start the process for the following week. At work John has a first class personal assistant who allows him to focus on what he does best. Consequently he does not get caught up in unnecessary paper work or become distracted by people who could waste valuable chunks of his time. Because of this ability to be well organized he enjoys most weekends off. Although he starts the day early John is rarely home later than 6:00 p.m. allowing him special time with his family. Remember if you want a different result do something different.
B is for blue print. This is how you prepare for the day. You do prepare don’t you? A blue print is simply a map for the day. Recent research indicates that if you create your blue print the night before rather than in the morning, your unconscious mind will actually work during the night figuring out how to fulfill your next days plan. Have you ever observed people who are not in the habit of designing a blue print for the day? You will meet a few in most sales organizations. They tend to hang around the coffee pot first thing in the morning. Socializing and reviewing the newspapers are high on their agenda. Perhaps the first sales call happens around 11:00 a.m. so you can imagine how productive the rest of the day is likely to be. The one thing that separates winners from losers is winners take action.
Learn from others, you can learn a lot by observing and studying other people.
What do wealthy people do?
How do they become rich?
Why do some people struggle throughout their lives?
Why are only a small percentage of people financially independent?
I then ask them to raise their hands if they had ever approached any of these two or three people to ask them what their secrets of success were.
We honor the people who are successful but we are afraid to approach them and ask them for information, direction and guidance.
There are essentially two things that will make you wiser. The books you read and the people you meet. If you really want to rise to the top invest one hour of your day to learn more about yourself in your industry. Developing this simple habit can make you a world expert within five years. Remember the use of knowledge is power.
Exercising improves your sleeping habits.
Increases your energy levels.
Relieves stress and anxiety.
Helps you promote a healthy posture.
Relieves digestive disorders.
Enhances your self image expands career longevity.
The more time off these people take the more money they make. If you realized how powerful your thoughts are you would never think a negative thought. It’s a wonderful feeling to have special people in your life that can enrich and nourish you in many different ways. In fact when your time is almost up on this planet and you doing a little reflection on how it all worked out you’ll probably remember the relationships you call today and the unique memories and experiences associated with those people especially your family and friends. This is important stuff in life versus burning yourself out at the office.
One blast of negative energy from their lips can erase that smile on your face permanently. These people are poisonous to your health. You need a long range antenna to keep them outside your boundaries at all times. This constant negativity will drain the life out of you. They also inform you with a noxious cynicism that you can’t do this and you can’t do that especially when you have a really great idea. They delight in bursting your positive bubble. It is the highlight of their day. Don’t put-up with it any more. You could choose the type of people you want in your life. If something is dragging you down all the time make a decision, let go and move on.
One of the first things my success mentor W. Clement Stone suggested I do was to make a list my friends. And he directed me to put the letter “N” next to each person who nourished and encouraged me to be great. People who are positive optimistic solution oriented and have a can-do attitude. Next he asked me to put the letter “T”, behind every person who you talk with. Surround yourself with positive people if you want to be successful you must hang out with the successful people.
Do I like them?
Do I trust them?
Do I respect them?
Look for clues that demonstrate their integrity, honesty and experience. Watch how they treat other people. Little details will offer big insights are they in the habit of saying “please” and “thank you?”
Your clients are your passport to future growth. New business is important. Getting in touch with your best client is more important. Also be aware of the time you spend on people who are peripheral clients. They commonly take a lot of your time and energy and give you little business in return. All research indicates that very little time is allocated for clients. Consequently these relationships never mature to their full potential.
Now let’s take a look to your most important personal relationship. Take a close look at this list and review the amount of time you spend with these people. Is it sufficient to enjoy quality time?
When you ask someone to be a mentor it’s the ultimate compliment. The mastermind group requires the meeting of the mind. What’s your greatest challenge at this time?
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears our presence automatically liberates others.
Unfinished business is a term describing all the messes in your life that you haven’t dealt with. There are three ways to handle this - we can play the denial game, you can go into limbo, you can confront the issue head-on. Usually we don’t like confrontation, it’s uncomfortable and there is a certain amount of risk involved. Step into your fear. Another important factor is the energy you consume when you live in fear. You can’t afford to have all that vitality bottled up. They restrict your capacity. Be aware that unfinished business is an on-going reality.
Every week something will happen that needs to be resolved. Don’t allow these things to fester. Everything you want is on the other side of fear. What do I really fear? What can I do to overcome this?
Confidence grows by doing not by thinking. We must learn to forgive, second forgive your-self. You must give to be free. Too many people never let the real person within them come alive. Consequently they live a dormant and unfulfilled existence. Instead of gloriously stretching and challenging to be all they can be, they flounder in everyday life.
Everyday remind yourself that you did some things well. Read inspiring biographies and autobiographies. Be thankful build excellent support around you. Push yourself to accomplish or trim goals do something for your self every week.
The road to confidence is paved with weekly victories. Learn to applaud them. When I get stuck I restart myself by focusing on one goal I can finish in the next seven days, something simple. I don’t think about anything else that usually starts my momentum again. When you think you can’t revisit a former triumph.
After you sell your business do you want to buy one ask for written endorsements. Another good option is pick the most powerful sentences from 10 different testimonials and paste these on one page with the names of your clients.
One reason we can offer you such a great price is that we also asked for three estimate referrals I am sure you know the value of referrals in return we promise to give you the best in service so you’ll be happy with your decision to do business with us. Would you please introduce me to a few people of equal quality to you. Should I pay people for giving me referrals, ask for more business. Many people lose thousands of dollars and bills every year because they have nothing more to offer after the initial bill. Adding one more question at the end of a sale can significantly increase your income. Remember if you don’t ask someone else, will ask.
Consistent persistence – you will never achieve big results in your life without consistent and persistent action. This lack of consistency you will wreck your team unity. In today world the answer is simple.
Make a list of 6 things you absolutely have to get done in the next 3 months. These are activities that must be completed for whatever reason. After each activity that you have to do write one word that describes your feelings about it. Take a look at each item and one at a time put a line through each task. That’s right, cross it off your list. You don’t have to do any of these things. In life you don’t have to do anything. The big point we are making is that you don’t have to. If the feeling is negative you automatically create a negative energy that drains your capacity.
Make a list of at least 6 things you want to do or choose to do in the next 3 months. This is a different list. What are you really looking forward to doing? Again choose a word to describe how you feel about completing each item on your list. Well it’s easy to feel good about things I want to do but life isn’t always like that. There are lots of things I don’t like to do but I have to do.
Everything in life is a choice absolutely everything. All the results you are currently experiencing in your life are absolutely perfect for you. The reason you are where you are in life is simply the result of all the choices you have made to this point.
When you say things like “she made me angry,” the truth is that you chose to be angry. You didn’t have to be angry you responded with anger instead of making a different choice. When you live each day from the position of choose-to you are in a position of power. You feel in-charge and in control of your life. Make every activity a conscious choice, no more “have to,” list.
Starting today eliminate those words from your vocabulary. Regain your power. Expand your energy and enjoy the freedom that imparts consistent choosing adds to your life. When you consistently make better choices you create better habits. These better habits produce better character when you have better character you add more value to the world you become more valuable, you attract bigger and better opportunities. This allows you to make more of a contribution in your life. Remember your dominant thoughts usually win out when it comes to everyday decision.
Make sure your conscious choices are moving you closer to the completion of your most important goals it is also important to understand that choosing not to do something is a valid position. I choose not to watch TV for 3 hours every night. I choose not to waste my time reading some fictional newspapers. I choose not to become a workaholic.
The double way formula is agreement and accountability. All broken relationships can be traced to fact of the broken agreement. True integrity is based on keeping your agreements when you consistently do what you say you will do the names attached to our “reliable” and “trustworthy.” Always start the correspondence with “as promised.” For example “as promised here is a quote.”
There are six good reasons you may be procrastinating.
You are bored.
You are overwhelmed with work.
Your confidence has slipped.
You have a low self worth.
You are doing what you don’t really enjoy.
You are easily distracted.
Make sure you are not one of these frustrated individuals who go through life with the label “does not complete,” as Jim Rhone so eloquently says.
“The pain of discipline weighs ounces whereas the pain of regret weighs tons”.
W. Clement Stone had a unique way of pushing himself to take action. He would stand in front of the mirror and with great vigor smash his hands together explaining loudly as he did say “Do it now.” He would repeat this action three times this anchored him for the jobs ahead it must have worked. When he was 21 the Great Depression had set in. Undaunted young Stone started his own company called Combine Insurance, hired one thousand skilled people and built it into one of the largest enterprises in North America. I am going to do the work I enjoy carry a 3 x 5 cards that say “I am so happy I am.” Read this card at breakfast lunch dinner just prior to sleep so you become one with idea and eventually it will become a reality. Why hesitate? Upon the flames of hesitation are the bleached bones of countless million who on the threshold of victory sat down to wait and in waiting they died.
Somewhere between 35 and 55 the famous midlife crisis appears. Is this all there is? They begin feel bored something is missing.
What am I going to do with my life?
What is my life’s work all about?
What legacy will I leave behind when my time is over?
The challenge:
Let others lead small lives but not you.
Let others argue over small things but not you.
Let others cry over small hurts but not you.
Let others leave their future in someone else’s hand but not you.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558748849
© 2000 by Jack Canfield and Mark Hansen
The main reason most people struggle professionally and personally is simply a lack of focus. They procrastinate and allow themselves to be easily distracted and interrupted.
Successful people have successful habits. The keyword here is consistency. That means every month. This is called a no exceptions policy. If maintaining excellent health is high on your list of priorities exercising 3 times a week may be the minimum standard to keep you in shape. A no exceptions policy means you will maintain this exercise habit no matter what happens because you value the long term benefits.
More people than ever are living for immediate gratification. People in the habit of doing this have a sense of playing catch up all that time. There is always another payment next month. The fact is if you keep on doing things a certain way you will always get a predictable result. Negative habits breed negative consequences. Successful habits create a positive reward, that’s just the way life is. What’s happening is that after 21 to 30 experiences with a new habit it’s harder not to do it than to do it. To insure consistency astronauts use a check list for every single procedure to insure the same result every time.
Imagine if you only changed four habits every year, five years from now you would have 20 positive new habits. Quality is not an act it is a habit. By systematically improving one behavior at a time you can dramatically improve your overall lifestyle. We all need an education in the obvious. A lack of clarity about expected outcomes, not following up consistently on overdue receivables, talking instead of listening, working long days with no exercise or regular breaks, taking work home with you, making reservations at the last minute. Now check yourself out by making a list of all the habits that keep you unproductive.
If you hang around people who are always complaining about how bad everything is, you may start believing what they say. On the other hand, if you surround yourself with people who are strong and positive you are more likely to see a world full of opportunity and adventure.
Successful people have developed successful habits. Learn to observe what those habits are. Study successful people. They leave clues, what do they read, how do they schedule their time. Read their autobiographies and biography. Another habit that three of us have developed is listening to motivational and educational audio tapes when we are driving, walking or exercising. If you listen to an audiotape for 30 minutes each day 5 days a week in 10 years you would been exposed over 1300 hours of new and useful information. This is a habit that almost all the successful people we know have developed. They listen to audio tapes.
If you read one book every month about your industry in 10 years you’ll have read 120 books that will put you in the top 1% of your field. There are three fundamental steps. Clearly identify your bad or unproductive habits. The more vividly you describe the benefits the more likely you are to take action. Create a three part action plan. Successful people I want to interview. Three step action plans to jump start my new habit. Your habits will determine your future.
It is not hocus pocus it is all about focus.
Do you see the big picture? Creating optimum balance, building excellent relationships, the confidence factor, ask for what you want, consistent, persistent, taking decisive action, living on purpose. As the foundation is built people and systems are put in place to create stability. Paper work increases and what started out as an exciting venture becomes daily routine.
Most entrepreneurs are controllers. This is the ultimate Catch-22. There are more opportunities on the horizon and bigger deals to close but you can’t get to them because you are stuck with the day to day routine. You must invest most of your time every week doing what you do best and let others do what they do best. Focus on those activities you do brilliantly and from which you produce extraordinary results. If you don’t you will probably create higher stress levels and ultimately burn out. They are masters at applying the habit of priority focus. That means they only do the things they are brilliant at, recording and performing on stage. The Rolling Stones simply concentrate on what they do best - singing and performing.
When you focus most of your time and energy doing the things you are truly brilliant at, you eventually reap big rewards. Notice how these top performers spend very little time on their weaknesses. It is important to clearly differentiate your areas of brilliance from your weaknesses.
All your biggest rewards in life will come from spending the vast majority of your time in the areas that score ten on your talent scale what you do effortlessly without a lot of study or preparations.
Jim Carey improves his focus using visualization. He wrote himself a check for $10,000,000.00 for services rendered, dated it and kept it in his pocket. When times were tough he would sit on a quiet hillside overlooking Los Angeles and imagine himself as a movie star then he’d reread the check as a reminder of his upcoming good fortune. Interestingly enough two years later he signed a deal for more than $10,000,000.00.
Basically you make a list of all the activities you do at work in a typical week. Most people when they add up their totals score between 10 and 20. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out you can’t do 40 things each week to be truly focused. Even 20 activities are far too many.
Many people are shocked when they see how much of their week is fragmented. Simply record everything you do in 15 minute records. List three things you are brilliant at doing in your business, effortlessly, give you energy and produce the greatest results and in in-completed business. In a typical week what percent of your time do you spend on your brilliant activities? Be totally honest, often the answer is 15% to 25%. Imagine if you could refine this to 80% to 100%. The level of brilliance will determine as far as your opportunities in your life.
List three things you don’t like doing, resist doing or just no good at. Have you noticed how these activities tend to drain your energy instead of expanding it? When you keep on doing work that you just have you need to remind yourself that this is futile. Most entrepreneurs are great starters but then they don’t finish. Find a brilliant finisher to handle the details. He or she is brilliant at doing that task you don’t like to do or shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
Use the 4D formula to help you prioritize.
1. Dump it, no I choose not to do this.
2. Delegate it. Who else could do this?
3. Defer it.
4. Do it.
Staying within these boundaries requires new level of self discipline. Is what I am doing right now helping me to achieve my goal? It also means saying “no” a lot more. Preschedule your appointments just like a doctor and choose the most productive time to make your phone calls. Be aware of those habits that may be pulling you away from your focus.
People watch TV 6.5 hours a day on average. C. Clement Stone in 1969 said, “Do you watch television?” Then he asked me, “How many hours a day do you think you watch?” After a short calculation I answered about three hours a day. I want you to cut out one hour a day. If you do that you will be saving 365 hours per year. If you divide that by a 40 hour work week you will see that you added about 9½ additional weeks of productivity to your life. That’s like getting two additional months every year. I agreed that this was a great leveraging concept and then I asked Mr. Stone what he thought that I should do with this extra hour every day. He suggested I read books in my field of motivation, psychology, education, training, self esteem.
List all the business activities at work that use up your time. Name the three most important activities that generate income and the three most important activities that you don’t like doing and who could do these for you.
Set aside a scheduled time for thinking. In fact, I reserve one day a week on my calendar just to think. All of my greatest opportunities ideas or money making ventures started with the days I took off to think. I used to lock myself away in my den with strict instructions to my family that under no circumstances would I to be disturbed. The Think strategy worked for Einstein who actually did his pondering in a special thinking chair.
Master philosopher Jim Rowan astutely observes that there are two major pains in life. One is the pain of discipline the other is the pain of regret. Don’t want to look back years later saying if only I had taken up that business opportunity. If only I had saved and invested regularly, if only I had spent more time with my family, if only I had taken care of my health. John Garter the famous explorer at the tender age of 15 sat down and made a list of 127 challenging lifetime goals he wanted to accomplish. By the time he turned 50, he had successfully completed more than 100 of the goals on his list. One of Schuler’s comment said it all I think when you have big dreams you attract other big dreamers. Third, and this may be the wisest strategy, selectively share your dreams with the few people you trust. What contribution do I want to make? What do I want to become? What do I want to learn? What do I want to spend my time with? How much do I want to earn save and invest? How much time do I want off for fun? What will I do to create optimum health? Write a number beside each goal 1, 3, 5 or 10 years.
The seven goal categories are financial, business, fun time, health, relationships, personal, and contribution. When you dedicate a portion of your time to accomplishing one significant goal in each of these areas every 60-days you will have balance and peace of mind.
Start with small increments and gradually increase the size of your goals. To keep those in the forefront of your mind review them daily. Most people don’t even have an action plan for their goals. When you have written out your seven major goals shift your focus to the week ahead. We call it the seven-day focus.
At the beginning of each week select the three most important things you want to accomplish. Phone your partner at the beginning of the week and share your three most important activities. Seven days later discuss your results, victories and challenges and start the process for the following week. At work John has a first class personal assistant who allows him to focus on what he does best. Consequently he does not get caught up in unnecessary paper work or become distracted by people who could waste valuable chunks of his time. Because of this ability to be well organized he enjoys most weekends off. Although he starts the day early John is rarely home later than 6:00 p.m. allowing him special time with his family. Remember if you want a different result do something different.
B is for blue print. This is how you prepare for the day. You do prepare don’t you? A blue print is simply a map for the day. Recent research indicates that if you create your blue print the night before rather than in the morning, your unconscious mind will actually work during the night figuring out how to fulfill your next days plan. Have you ever observed people who are not in the habit of designing a blue print for the day? You will meet a few in most sales organizations. They tend to hang around the coffee pot first thing in the morning. Socializing and reviewing the newspapers are high on their agenda. Perhaps the first sales call happens around 11:00 a.m. so you can imagine how productive the rest of the day is likely to be. The one thing that separates winners from losers is winners take action.
Learn from others, you can learn a lot by observing and studying other people.
What do wealthy people do?
How do they become rich?
Why do some people struggle throughout their lives?
Why are only a small percentage of people financially independent?
I then ask them to raise their hands if they had ever approached any of these two or three people to ask them what their secrets of success were.
We honor the people who are successful but we are afraid to approach them and ask them for information, direction and guidance.
There are essentially two things that will make you wiser. The books you read and the people you meet. If you really want to rise to the top invest one hour of your day to learn more about yourself in your industry. Developing this simple habit can make you a world expert within five years. Remember the use of knowledge is power.
Exercising improves your sleeping habits.
Increases your energy levels.
Relieves stress and anxiety.
Helps you promote a healthy posture.
Relieves digestive disorders.
Enhances your self image expands career longevity.
The more time off these people take the more money they make. If you realized how powerful your thoughts are you would never think a negative thought. It’s a wonderful feeling to have special people in your life that can enrich and nourish you in many different ways. In fact when your time is almost up on this planet and you doing a little reflection on how it all worked out you’ll probably remember the relationships you call today and the unique memories and experiences associated with those people especially your family and friends. This is important stuff in life versus burning yourself out at the office.
One blast of negative energy from their lips can erase that smile on your face permanently. These people are poisonous to your health. You need a long range antenna to keep them outside your boundaries at all times. This constant negativity will drain the life out of you. They also inform you with a noxious cynicism that you can’t do this and you can’t do that especially when you have a really great idea. They delight in bursting your positive bubble. It is the highlight of their day. Don’t put-up with it any more. You could choose the type of people you want in your life. If something is dragging you down all the time make a decision, let go and move on.
One of the first things my success mentor W. Clement Stone suggested I do was to make a list my friends. And he directed me to put the letter “N” next to each person who nourished and encouraged me to be great. People who are positive optimistic solution oriented and have a can-do attitude. Next he asked me to put the letter “T”, behind every person who you talk with. Surround yourself with positive people if you want to be successful you must hang out with the successful people.
Do I like them?
Do I trust them?
Do I respect them?
Look for clues that demonstrate their integrity, honesty and experience. Watch how they treat other people. Little details will offer big insights are they in the habit of saying “please” and “thank you?”
Your clients are your passport to future growth. New business is important. Getting in touch with your best client is more important. Also be aware of the time you spend on people who are peripheral clients. They commonly take a lot of your time and energy and give you little business in return. All research indicates that very little time is allocated for clients. Consequently these relationships never mature to their full potential.
Now let’s take a look to your most important personal relationship. Take a close look at this list and review the amount of time you spend with these people. Is it sufficient to enjoy quality time?
When you ask someone to be a mentor it’s the ultimate compliment. The mastermind group requires the meeting of the mind. What’s your greatest challenge at this time?
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears our presence automatically liberates others.
Unfinished business is a term describing all the messes in your life that you haven’t dealt with. There are three ways to handle this - we can play the denial game, you can go into limbo, you can confront the issue head-on. Usually we don’t like confrontation, it’s uncomfortable and there is a certain amount of risk involved. Step into your fear. Another important factor is the energy you consume when you live in fear. You can’t afford to have all that vitality bottled up. They restrict your capacity. Be aware that unfinished business is an on-going reality.
Every week something will happen that needs to be resolved. Don’t allow these things to fester. Everything you want is on the other side of fear. What do I really fear? What can I do to overcome this?
Confidence grows by doing not by thinking. We must learn to forgive, second forgive your-self. You must give to be free. Too many people never let the real person within them come alive. Consequently they live a dormant and unfulfilled existence. Instead of gloriously stretching and challenging to be all they can be, they flounder in everyday life.
Everyday remind yourself that you did some things well. Read inspiring biographies and autobiographies. Be thankful build excellent support around you. Push yourself to accomplish or trim goals do something for your self every week.
The road to confidence is paved with weekly victories. Learn to applaud them. When I get stuck I restart myself by focusing on one goal I can finish in the next seven days, something simple. I don’t think about anything else that usually starts my momentum again. When you think you can’t revisit a former triumph.
After you sell your business do you want to buy one ask for written endorsements. Another good option is pick the most powerful sentences from 10 different testimonials and paste these on one page with the names of your clients.
One reason we can offer you such a great price is that we also asked for three estimate referrals I am sure you know the value of referrals in return we promise to give you the best in service so you’ll be happy with your decision to do business with us. Would you please introduce me to a few people of equal quality to you. Should I pay people for giving me referrals, ask for more business. Many people lose thousands of dollars and bills every year because they have nothing more to offer after the initial bill. Adding one more question at the end of a sale can significantly increase your income. Remember if you don’t ask someone else, will ask.
Consistent persistence – you will never achieve big results in your life without consistent and persistent action. This lack of consistency you will wreck your team unity. In today world the answer is simple.
Make a list of 6 things you absolutely have to get done in the next 3 months. These are activities that must be completed for whatever reason. After each activity that you have to do write one word that describes your feelings about it. Take a look at each item and one at a time put a line through each task. That’s right, cross it off your list. You don’t have to do any of these things. In life you don’t have to do anything. The big point we are making is that you don’t have to. If the feeling is negative you automatically create a negative energy that drains your capacity.
Make a list of at least 6 things you want to do or choose to do in the next 3 months. This is a different list. What are you really looking forward to doing? Again choose a word to describe how you feel about completing each item on your list. Well it’s easy to feel good about things I want to do but life isn’t always like that. There are lots of things I don’t like to do but I have to do.
Everything in life is a choice absolutely everything. All the results you are currently experiencing in your life are absolutely perfect for you. The reason you are where you are in life is simply the result of all the choices you have made to this point.
When you say things like “she made me angry,” the truth is that you chose to be angry. You didn’t have to be angry you responded with anger instead of making a different choice. When you live each day from the position of choose-to you are in a position of power. You feel in-charge and in control of your life. Make every activity a conscious choice, no more “have to,” list.
Starting today eliminate those words from your vocabulary. Regain your power. Expand your energy and enjoy the freedom that imparts consistent choosing adds to your life. When you consistently make better choices you create better habits. These better habits produce better character when you have better character you add more value to the world you become more valuable, you attract bigger and better opportunities. This allows you to make more of a contribution in your life. Remember your dominant thoughts usually win out when it comes to everyday decision.
Make sure your conscious choices are moving you closer to the completion of your most important goals it is also important to understand that choosing not to do something is a valid position. I choose not to watch TV for 3 hours every night. I choose not to waste my time reading some fictional newspapers. I choose not to become a workaholic.
The double way formula is agreement and accountability. All broken relationships can be traced to fact of the broken agreement. True integrity is based on keeping your agreements when you consistently do what you say you will do the names attached to our “reliable” and “trustworthy.” Always start the correspondence with “as promised.” For example “as promised here is a quote.”
There are six good reasons you may be procrastinating.
You are bored.
You are overwhelmed with work.
Your confidence has slipped.
You have a low self worth.
You are doing what you don’t really enjoy.
You are easily distracted.
Make sure you are not one of these frustrated individuals who go through life with the label “does not complete,” as Jim Rhone so eloquently says.
“The pain of discipline weighs ounces whereas the pain of regret weighs tons”.
W. Clement Stone had a unique way of pushing himself to take action. He would stand in front of the mirror and with great vigor smash his hands together explaining loudly as he did say “Do it now.” He would repeat this action three times this anchored him for the jobs ahead it must have worked. When he was 21 the Great Depression had set in. Undaunted young Stone started his own company called Combine Insurance, hired one thousand skilled people and built it into one of the largest enterprises in North America. I am going to do the work I enjoy carry a 3 x 5 cards that say “I am so happy I am.” Read this card at breakfast lunch dinner just prior to sleep so you become one with idea and eventually it will become a reality. Why hesitate? Upon the flames of hesitation are the bleached bones of countless million who on the threshold of victory sat down to wait and in waiting they died.
Somewhere between 35 and 55 the famous midlife crisis appears. Is this all there is? They begin feel bored something is missing.
What am I going to do with my life?
What is my life’s work all about?
What legacy will I leave behind when my time is over?
The challenge:
Let others lead small lives but not you.
Let others argue over small things but not you.
Let others cry over small hurts but not you.
Let others leave their future in someone else’s hand but not you.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558748849
As the Future Catches You - Genomics
As the Future Catches You - Genomics
© 2001 by Juan Enriquez
Wealth is ever more mobile and concentrated. As of 1995 we began to read the full gene sequence of bacteria, insects, plants, animals, humans which is written in a four-letter code ATCG. We are beginning to acquire direct and deliberate control over the evolution of all life forms on the planet including ourselves.
Each seed has a long string of gene data that looks like the following, so why not engineer mosquito genes so that they have the opposite effect. If mosquito saliva contained antibodies, you could immunize people and animals by making sure they were bitten. The digital revolution was a large waterfall.
A few countries and companies understood this change that is how poor countries like Finland, Singapore and Taiwan got so wealthy so quickly. In 1938, the richest country per person in Asia was the Philippines. In 1954, according to the World Bank, the most promising Asian economy was Burma. The two nucleotide based pairs that code all lives ATCG have already led some of the world’s largest companies such as Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis, IBM, Hertz, Compaq, Lexus, and SmithKline to declare that their future lies in life science. Some life science companies will crash spectacularly others will get larger than Microsoft or Cisco. The world’s mega mergers are going to be driven by digital and genetic code.
You currently spend about 9 times as much for doctors and medical interventions as you do on medicines and prevention. Treatment will shift from emergency interventions to a deliberate and personalized prevention just as dentistry did. You need ever fewer people, time or capital to build a nation.
The great cartographers of today aren’t mapping continents, rivers, mountains or cities they are mapping the genetic code of all living things. These maps are changing the way we look at all life. As a country or region if you understand and apply technology, you can postpone becoming a wondrous but abandoned archeological site.
The cradle of civilization is today’s Iraq. In 1200, Cambodia was one of the richest countries in the world. In 1500 Peru and Mexico all Europeans and the Switzerland of Africa was Uganda. But why is it so hard to keep a country together today. Individuals can leverage technology. They no longer need a big state to get very rich because the way you generate wealth is very different today and those who generate knowledge are the ones getting richer. The knowledge component becomes more important and manual labor less visible.
When you are trying to spread and sell knowledge keeping something exclusive and rare often leads to a loss of value, what matters most is that the purchaser becomes part of a network and that the network keeps growing. Each additional phone or fax sold makes the network more valuable so each purchaser becomes a salesman. Don’t you have a fax? You should get one.
Look , for example, at one of the world’s largest computer networks so they ask PC owners like you whether you will donate part of your unused capacity. Those who founded search for extraterrestrial intelligence hoped 100,000 global citizens would sign up, more than two million did and the network grows every week. AIDS researchers are seen copying this model creating the world’s largest academic computing site designed to understand and attack the virus that mutates very rapidly. The broader the network the easier it is to communicate, the more each product is worth and the cheaper it becomes to purchase or use it. What makes money today is the knowledge necessary to process and distribute information.
In 1990 one of the world’s ten wealthiest individuals was American. In 2000 six out of ten were American. Many countries are failing, falling apart and disappearing. In 1950, Singapore was an isolated, tiny poor island - it wasn’t even a country before 1965. Its leaders went to Malaysia and asked whether it would be willing to absorb Singapore and make it part of its state. By 1985 Singaporeans were producing $8,000 per person. The British were already $11,000. By 1999 Singaporeans were 2% wealthier than the British.
The future belongs to small populations who build empires of mind. Ideas are different, the more you spread them the more valuable they become. So now those who produce knowledge get consistently richer. As we get more information we get better at processing and re-transmitting information. Today’s dominant alphabet no longer codes in 26 letters but in two, one and zero. In 1997 telephone wires carried more digital data than voice. That it is likely few of us have ever heard the name of what will be the world’s largest company in 2020.
The letters used, the order of the letters and where these letters are placed within a sentence. Lets go together can mean let’s go together or lets go to get her. This science of nature substitutes one string of ATCGs for another particularly within a section of DNA’s that codes actively. The organism can be drastically altered. We have only 1/3rd more genes than a worm. Around 99% of your genes have partial counterparts in mice. By the time we get to those pigmy chimps, the gene overlap with humans is about 98.5%. The variation between your genome and that of your brother, neighbor, worst enemy or that of any other person on the planet is miniscule. Of every thousand letters of genetic code, we differ from our neighbor by less than one letter that is by less than one ATC or G base pair. The real differences between one person and another are less than 0.0003%.
Even three letters out of three billion can make a huge difference. If you are missing CTT at a specific spot in your genome you carry cystic fibrosis. A child born in 1900 in the US had a life expectancy of 46 years. By the end of the century it was 78, close to a 70% increase and genetics is likely to increase this life span significantly. In 1900 the three leading causes of death in the United States were pneumonia, tuberculosis and diarrhea. Today they are heart disease, cancer and stroke. Hazelton believes that understanding the genes will allow us to live 120 years. After that we may be young and healthy forever. Hazelton is one of the United States leading AIDS researchers, CEO of a major pharmaceutical company. Hazelton’s company has applied for 9,200 patents.
Our children will likely be running on the beach well into their 90s powered by replacement body parts that come from a variety of people and are grown in various countries. Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe they train three executives for each job because two may die of AIDS, but most societies do not understand genetic discovery and that makes them for all practical purposes functionally illiterate in the language that codes all life on this planet. We have started to accumulate the instruments and knowledge required to control directly and deliberately the evolution of our species and that of every other species on the planet.
In 1991 all the world’s labs have identified only 2000 genes. By 1995 Ventura and his team were able to publish a partial map of 35,000 genes. In 1974, Monsanto estimated that sequencing a single gene would cost equivalent of $150,000,000.00. By 1998 the cost of sequencing a gene was $150.00, by 2001 it could be less than $50.00. The average gene is about 27,000 base pairs about eight pages of tightly packed footnotes.
In 1971, a General Electric scientist attempted to patent a bacterium that allowed patterns on living organisms and genes. Pharmaceuticals are likely to become niche products targeted to individual genotypes and new products will likely appear weekly. It helps to have super computers for maps of parallel processing. Of the world’s 500 largest computers, 217 are in the United States, 63 in Germany and 56 in Japan for the centers leading the life science revolution. Many great minds are flocking to defenders leading the life science revolution. Maryland, Boston, Cambridge, San Francisco, San Diego. Singapore has just launched a map of this multibillion-dollar life science initiative.
ATCGs and 1 and 0s are interchangeable and may lead to even more powerful data processors, some of which could be based on DNA. By 2010 a computer should have the same processing capacity as the human brain. Just as the industrial revolution allowed some people to multiply their physical capacity a 100 or a 1000 fold, biology is now driven by applied maps, statistics, computer science robotics. The world’s best programmers are increasingly gravitating toward Biology, Bio-informatics and Bio-computing. The few smart people are going to be able to do a lot of biology very quickly. This human genome was privately mapped in a single lab but employed only 50 people running sequencing machines.
It becomes clear that the world’s most powerful and compact coding and information-processing system is a genome. Gene tests will lead to personalized medicine. You will be able to test whether one medicine or another works better for you before you take. Many drug launchers have died in phase three trials after millions of dollars are spent. Today for every dollar we spend on medicines, we also spend nine on treatments and interventions. Hazleton thinks we will soon spend at least an equal amount on prevention just as we do with dentist. Grandpa’s lifestyle seems very primitive to us just as today’s medicine will to our grandchildren. Imagine them saying: “Grammy, are you pulling my leg when you tell me they used to poison people and cut body parts off to try to secure cancer
Most middle aged workers were earning 9% less than their parents had 25 years earlier, and if normal women had not gone to work, most family incomes would not have increased at all during the 1980’s and 1990’s. In the United States almost one-third of all Ph.D.’s science and engineering students are Asian. Two out of a hundred are African-American or African. It took the telephone 35 years to get to one-quarter of US homes. Coin the term creative destruction new products and discoveries relentless mostly destroyed the old.
The genomic revolution could essentially lead to anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000 new medicines. Small companies can generate a great deal of wealth and get very large very quickly with ever fewer employees.
Only 300 average genes out of 26,000 have no counterpart in mice and about 85% of two species genes sequences are identical. You are all worms just a bunch of worms and little did she know how right she was because basic thousand genes are conserved across the species. History changes faster than one might expect and history changes slower than one might expect. You can stand on the sideline and soon the state will guide things. Where you can help yourself your family your company and your country navigate this wondrous and scary adventure. We are about to go over waterfall and in a few centuries February 12, 2001 will represent the divide between an air before human threaten up genes and the post genomic era. The end actually is just the beginning.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609609033
© 2001 by Juan Enriquez
Wealth is ever more mobile and concentrated. As of 1995 we began to read the full gene sequence of bacteria, insects, plants, animals, humans which is written in a four-letter code ATCG. We are beginning to acquire direct and deliberate control over the evolution of all life forms on the planet including ourselves.
Each seed has a long string of gene data that looks like the following, so why not engineer mosquito genes so that they have the opposite effect. If mosquito saliva contained antibodies, you could immunize people and animals by making sure they were bitten. The digital revolution was a large waterfall.
A few countries and companies understood this change that is how poor countries like Finland, Singapore and Taiwan got so wealthy so quickly. In 1938, the richest country per person in Asia was the Philippines. In 1954, according to the World Bank, the most promising Asian economy was Burma. The two nucleotide based pairs that code all lives ATCG have already led some of the world’s largest companies such as Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis, IBM, Hertz, Compaq, Lexus, and SmithKline to declare that their future lies in life science. Some life science companies will crash spectacularly others will get larger than Microsoft or Cisco. The world’s mega mergers are going to be driven by digital and genetic code.
You currently spend about 9 times as much for doctors and medical interventions as you do on medicines and prevention. Treatment will shift from emergency interventions to a deliberate and personalized prevention just as dentistry did. You need ever fewer people, time or capital to build a nation.
The great cartographers of today aren’t mapping continents, rivers, mountains or cities they are mapping the genetic code of all living things. These maps are changing the way we look at all life. As a country or region if you understand and apply technology, you can postpone becoming a wondrous but abandoned archeological site.
The cradle of civilization is today’s Iraq. In 1200, Cambodia was one of the richest countries in the world. In 1500 Peru and Mexico all Europeans and the Switzerland of Africa was Uganda. But why is it so hard to keep a country together today. Individuals can leverage technology. They no longer need a big state to get very rich because the way you generate wealth is very different today and those who generate knowledge are the ones getting richer. The knowledge component becomes more important and manual labor less visible.
When you are trying to spread and sell knowledge keeping something exclusive and rare often leads to a loss of value, what matters most is that the purchaser becomes part of a network and that the network keeps growing. Each additional phone or fax sold makes the network more valuable so each purchaser becomes a salesman. Don’t you have a fax? You should get one.
Look , for example, at one of the world’s largest computer networks so they ask PC owners like you whether you will donate part of your unused capacity. Those who founded search for extraterrestrial intelligence hoped 100,000 global citizens would sign up, more than two million did and the network grows every week. AIDS researchers are seen copying this model creating the world’s largest academic computing site designed to understand and attack the virus that mutates very rapidly. The broader the network the easier it is to communicate, the more each product is worth and the cheaper it becomes to purchase or use it. What makes money today is the knowledge necessary to process and distribute information.
In 1990 one of the world’s ten wealthiest individuals was American. In 2000 six out of ten were American. Many countries are failing, falling apart and disappearing. In 1950, Singapore was an isolated, tiny poor island - it wasn’t even a country before 1965. Its leaders went to Malaysia and asked whether it would be willing to absorb Singapore and make it part of its state. By 1985 Singaporeans were producing $8,000 per person. The British were already $11,000. By 1999 Singaporeans were 2% wealthier than the British.
The future belongs to small populations who build empires of mind. Ideas are different, the more you spread them the more valuable they become. So now those who produce knowledge get consistently richer. As we get more information we get better at processing and re-transmitting information. Today’s dominant alphabet no longer codes in 26 letters but in two, one and zero. In 1997 telephone wires carried more digital data than voice. That it is likely few of us have ever heard the name of what will be the world’s largest company in 2020.
The letters used, the order of the letters and where these letters are placed within a sentence. Lets go together can mean let’s go together or lets go to get her. This science of nature substitutes one string of ATCGs for another particularly within a section of DNA’s that codes actively. The organism can be drastically altered. We have only 1/3rd more genes than a worm. Around 99% of your genes have partial counterparts in mice. By the time we get to those pigmy chimps, the gene overlap with humans is about 98.5%. The variation between your genome and that of your brother, neighbor, worst enemy or that of any other person on the planet is miniscule. Of every thousand letters of genetic code, we differ from our neighbor by less than one letter that is by less than one ATC or G base pair. The real differences between one person and another are less than 0.0003%.
Even three letters out of three billion can make a huge difference. If you are missing CTT at a specific spot in your genome you carry cystic fibrosis. A child born in 1900 in the US had a life expectancy of 46 years. By the end of the century it was 78, close to a 70% increase and genetics is likely to increase this life span significantly. In 1900 the three leading causes of death in the United States were pneumonia, tuberculosis and diarrhea. Today they are heart disease, cancer and stroke. Hazelton believes that understanding the genes will allow us to live 120 years. After that we may be young and healthy forever. Hazelton is one of the United States leading AIDS researchers, CEO of a major pharmaceutical company. Hazelton’s company has applied for 9,200 patents.
Our children will likely be running on the beach well into their 90s powered by replacement body parts that come from a variety of people and are grown in various countries. Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe they train three executives for each job because two may die of AIDS, but most societies do not understand genetic discovery and that makes them for all practical purposes functionally illiterate in the language that codes all life on this planet. We have started to accumulate the instruments and knowledge required to control directly and deliberately the evolution of our species and that of every other species on the planet.
In 1991 all the world’s labs have identified only 2000 genes. By 1995 Ventura and his team were able to publish a partial map of 35,000 genes. In 1974, Monsanto estimated that sequencing a single gene would cost equivalent of $150,000,000.00. By 1998 the cost of sequencing a gene was $150.00, by 2001 it could be less than $50.00. The average gene is about 27,000 base pairs about eight pages of tightly packed footnotes.
In 1971, a General Electric scientist attempted to patent a bacterium that allowed patterns on living organisms and genes. Pharmaceuticals are likely to become niche products targeted to individual genotypes and new products will likely appear weekly. It helps to have super computers for maps of parallel processing. Of the world’s 500 largest computers, 217 are in the United States, 63 in Germany and 56 in Japan for the centers leading the life science revolution. Many great minds are flocking to defenders leading the life science revolution. Maryland, Boston, Cambridge, San Francisco, San Diego. Singapore has just launched a map of this multibillion-dollar life science initiative.
ATCGs and 1 and 0s are interchangeable and may lead to even more powerful data processors, some of which could be based on DNA. By 2010 a computer should have the same processing capacity as the human brain. Just as the industrial revolution allowed some people to multiply their physical capacity a 100 or a 1000 fold, biology is now driven by applied maps, statistics, computer science robotics. The world’s best programmers are increasingly gravitating toward Biology, Bio-informatics and Bio-computing. The few smart people are going to be able to do a lot of biology very quickly. This human genome was privately mapped in a single lab but employed only 50 people running sequencing machines.
It becomes clear that the world’s most powerful and compact coding and information-processing system is a genome. Gene tests will lead to personalized medicine. You will be able to test whether one medicine or another works better for you before you take. Many drug launchers have died in phase three trials after millions of dollars are spent. Today for every dollar we spend on medicines, we also spend nine on treatments and interventions. Hazleton thinks we will soon spend at least an equal amount on prevention just as we do with dentist. Grandpa’s lifestyle seems very primitive to us just as today’s medicine will to our grandchildren. Imagine them saying: “Grammy, are you pulling my leg when you tell me they used to poison people and cut body parts off to try to secure cancer
Most middle aged workers were earning 9% less than their parents had 25 years earlier, and if normal women had not gone to work, most family incomes would not have increased at all during the 1980’s and 1990’s. In the United States almost one-third of all Ph.D.’s science and engineering students are Asian. Two out of a hundred are African-American or African. It took the telephone 35 years to get to one-quarter of US homes. Coin the term creative destruction new products and discoveries relentless mostly destroyed the old.
The genomic revolution could essentially lead to anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000 new medicines. Small companies can generate a great deal of wealth and get very large very quickly with ever fewer employees.
Only 300 average genes out of 26,000 have no counterpart in mice and about 85% of two species genes sequences are identical. You are all worms just a bunch of worms and little did she know how right she was because basic thousand genes are conserved across the species. History changes faster than one might expect and history changes slower than one might expect. You can stand on the sideline and soon the state will guide things. Where you can help yourself your family your company and your country navigate this wondrous and scary adventure. We are about to go over waterfall and in a few centuries February 12, 2001 will represent the divide between an air before human threaten up genes and the post genomic era. The end actually is just the beginning.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609609033
Telemarketing Tips – Unknown Book
Telemarketing Tips – Unknown Book
Define the offer: a complete offer includes the product or service, price, and delivery system. Delivery includes process of getting the product to the customer and the receipt of payment.
Refine the message: Guided script contains two or three open and closed-ended probing questions. Script length averages 500-750 words and it can take from five to six minutes to deliver.
Business-business is 5 to 8 completed calls per hour and $6-$10 per call per decision-maker contact.
Effective steps: identify yourself and your firm; establish rapport; give the purpose of the call and create interest; ask fact-finding questions; deliver your sales message; answer objections; close the sale; wrap up the call.
Time Line: the time line guides your progress. Assign a date to every function that must be completed before the campaign begins.
Track results on an hour-by-hour basis to determine the best times to call. Reps must be trained to account for every incoming or outbound call.
Campaign Checklist:
Dates: Number of calls:
Script
Contact per hour Completes per hour
Sales per hour
A good script will help the rep control the call. Without control, the average talk time increases and so do costs. Test two scripts. Never allow reps to improvise a response to customer’s questions. The end result will be inconsistencies, omissions, and poor call quality. Experience shows that 4 to 5 hours of outbound telemarketing sustains call productivity and prevents employee burnout.
You need a kickoff to create excitement and to make the reps feel that they’re part of the team. To determine average cost per call, use loaded costs which include office overhead, systems, labor, phone, etc. Maintain a team vision and use posters to display these achievements, and hang the posters on walls where everyone can bask in the glory of the successful campaign. You must have a reason, legitimate reason to call customers.
Train your reps to “brand” each call at the end. “We will keep in touch.” This leaves the customer with a good feeling and keeps your company name on his mind.
The difference between good companies and excellent companies is training.
Reps should react to the ideas they hear and not to the customer’s personality. Reps should use expression, speed of voice, and rhythm to give their voices flavor and gusto. Using buzz words can also arouse and motivate the listener.
Quick start training: highlights of company history; business philosophy; organization chart; mission statement; methods and activities to be used; list of acronyms used by the company; glossary.
One common training mistake is lack of adequate practice. Another is lack of model behavior. Work on one skill at a time.
Monitoring offers quality assurance, coaching and development of reps, customer satisfaction.
Scripts: have them write the script. Hold focus groups to discuss various sections of the script.
Opening the call:
Who are you? Why are you calling? What’s in it for them?
Ask good questions: use the five Ws: Who? What? Where? When? How?
Ask questions that have to be answered with more than one word.
Ask questions which require others to draw on their experience.
Ask questions that make prospects explain their viewpoints
Ask questions that will guarantee a positive response regarding your product’s features and lead the prospect to the close.
Ask questions that will help close the sale early.
Ask questions that determine a customer’s needs, so that you offer him the best product or service.
Positive approach: “You’ll find that...” “You’ll be interested to know...”
Listen for these closing signals: customer changes from cool to more relaxed voice; prospect compares details of your offer with those of a competitor; prospect asks for your opinion.
Typical closing techniques:
Trial close: “Would you like to reserve a seat at our upcoming Executive Briefing next week on XXX date at our downtown office?”
Assumptive close: “I can reserve a spot at the Executive Briefing right now.”
Alternate choice: “Mr. Smith, would you like to schedule a Needs Analysis Conference at 9am or 2pm your time?”
Direct close: “Mr. Jones, can I come to your office on XXX day to show you the benefits of our product?”
Elimination of choices close: offer three alternatives
Limited-time close: “If you schedule a Needs Analysis for tomorrow, we can offer you a free coffee mug!”
Fact-finding phrases: “What’s your opinion?” “What do you consider...” “How do you feel about?” “Would you explain?”
Script-writing DOs: think visually; answer the questions ”what’s in it for me?”; use short sentences; provide for pauses in the script; be clear, concise, conversational, convincing.
Script-writing DON’Ts: give the customer a chance to say no; use negative words; let customer hear a chaotic atmosphere with loud background noise.
Thomas Edison: “I did not fail a thousand times, I learned a thousand ways that would not work.” Learn to innovate fast.
Don’t make these mistakes: reps not planning their calls; reps talking too much; not developing rapport; not setting daily, weekly, monthly goals.
Motivational toolbox: goals (writing, very specific, measurable, contain deadlines, and include action plans; training; feedback; recognition; meetings.
Igniter phrases: I agree. I looked at this last night and I really like it. That’s good. Good job. Let’s go. I have faith in you. That’s interesting. You’re on the right track. That’s a winner. Great. I know it will work. Go ahead, try it. I like that. Keep going. Very good. You’re in high gear. Fantastic.
Call reluctance symptoms: reps may delay first call of the day; may not follow up on sales leads; make few calls per hour; discuss fear of calling.
The following is a list of problems for sales people:
Attempting Too Much
Communication, Poor
Confused Responsibility or Authority
Delegation, Ineffective
Drop-In Visitors
Inability to Say No
Information, Incomplete
Leaving Tasks Unfinished
Management by Crisis
Meetings
Paperwork
Personal Disorganization
Planning Inadequate
Procrastination
Progress Reports, Inadequate Controls
Self-Disipline, Lack of
Socializing
Staff, Inadequate
Telephone Interruptions
Travel
Define the offer: a complete offer includes the product or service, price, and delivery system. Delivery includes process of getting the product to the customer and the receipt of payment.
Refine the message: Guided script contains two or three open and closed-ended probing questions. Script length averages 500-750 words and it can take from five to six minutes to deliver.
Business-business is 5 to 8 completed calls per hour and $6-$10 per call per decision-maker contact.
Effective steps: identify yourself and your firm; establish rapport; give the purpose of the call and create interest; ask fact-finding questions; deliver your sales message; answer objections; close the sale; wrap up the call.
Time Line: the time line guides your progress. Assign a date to every function that must be completed before the campaign begins.
Track results on an hour-by-hour basis to determine the best times to call. Reps must be trained to account for every incoming or outbound call.
Campaign Checklist:
Dates: Number of calls:
Script
Contact per hour Completes per hour
Sales per hour
A good script will help the rep control the call. Without control, the average talk time increases and so do costs. Test two scripts. Never allow reps to improvise a response to customer’s questions. The end result will be inconsistencies, omissions, and poor call quality. Experience shows that 4 to 5 hours of outbound telemarketing sustains call productivity and prevents employee burnout.
You need a kickoff to create excitement and to make the reps feel that they’re part of the team. To determine average cost per call, use loaded costs which include office overhead, systems, labor, phone, etc. Maintain a team vision and use posters to display these achievements, and hang the posters on walls where everyone can bask in the glory of the successful campaign. You must have a reason, legitimate reason to call customers.
Train your reps to “brand” each call at the end. “We will keep in touch.” This leaves the customer with a good feeling and keeps your company name on his mind.
The difference between good companies and excellent companies is training.
Reps should react to the ideas they hear and not to the customer’s personality. Reps should use expression, speed of voice, and rhythm to give their voices flavor and gusto. Using buzz words can also arouse and motivate the listener.
Quick start training: highlights of company history; business philosophy; organization chart; mission statement; methods and activities to be used; list of acronyms used by the company; glossary.
One common training mistake is lack of adequate practice. Another is lack of model behavior. Work on one skill at a time.
Monitoring offers quality assurance, coaching and development of reps, customer satisfaction.
Scripts: have them write the script. Hold focus groups to discuss various sections of the script.
Opening the call:
Who are you? Why are you calling? What’s in it for them?
Ask good questions: use the five Ws: Who? What? Where? When? How?
Ask questions that have to be answered with more than one word.
Ask questions which require others to draw on their experience.
Ask questions that make prospects explain their viewpoints
Ask questions that will guarantee a positive response regarding your product’s features and lead the prospect to the close.
Ask questions that will help close the sale early.
Ask questions that determine a customer’s needs, so that you offer him the best product or service.
Positive approach: “You’ll find that...” “You’ll be interested to know...”
Listen for these closing signals: customer changes from cool to more relaxed voice; prospect compares details of your offer with those of a competitor; prospect asks for your opinion.
Typical closing techniques:
Trial close: “Would you like to reserve a seat at our upcoming Executive Briefing next week on XXX date at our downtown office?”
Assumptive close: “I can reserve a spot at the Executive Briefing right now.”
Alternate choice: “Mr. Smith, would you like to schedule a Needs Analysis Conference at 9am or 2pm your time?”
Direct close: “Mr. Jones, can I come to your office on XXX day to show you the benefits of our product?”
Elimination of choices close: offer three alternatives
Limited-time close: “If you schedule a Needs Analysis for tomorrow, we can offer you a free coffee mug!”
Fact-finding phrases: “What’s your opinion?” “What do you consider...” “How do you feel about?” “Would you explain?”
Script-writing DOs: think visually; answer the questions ”what’s in it for me?”; use short sentences; provide for pauses in the script; be clear, concise, conversational, convincing.
Script-writing DON’Ts: give the customer a chance to say no; use negative words; let customer hear a chaotic atmosphere with loud background noise.
Thomas Edison: “I did not fail a thousand times, I learned a thousand ways that would not work.” Learn to innovate fast.
Don’t make these mistakes: reps not planning their calls; reps talking too much; not developing rapport; not setting daily, weekly, monthly goals.
Motivational toolbox: goals (writing, very specific, measurable, contain deadlines, and include action plans; training; feedback; recognition; meetings.
Igniter phrases: I agree. I looked at this last night and I really like it. That’s good. Good job. Let’s go. I have faith in you. That’s interesting. You’re on the right track. That’s a winner. Great. I know it will work. Go ahead, try it. I like that. Keep going. Very good. You’re in high gear. Fantastic.
Call reluctance symptoms: reps may delay first call of the day; may not follow up on sales leads; make few calls per hour; discuss fear of calling.
The following is a list of problems for sales people:
Attempting Too Much
Communication, Poor
Confused Responsibility or Authority
Delegation, Ineffective
Drop-In Visitors
Inability to Say No
Information, Incomplete
Leaving Tasks Unfinished
Management by Crisis
Meetings
Paperwork
Personal Disorganization
Planning Inadequate
Procrastination
Progress Reports, Inadequate Controls
Self-Disipline, Lack of
Socializing
Staff, Inadequate
Telephone Interruptions
Travel
Co-opetition
Co-opetition
© 1996 by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff
This book was excellent concept of cooperation and competition at the same time in business.
A complement is anything which makes the first product or service more attractive.
The goal is to make the pie bigger rather than fighting with competitors over a fixed pie.
Opposite of competitor is a complementor. The game is composed of customers, suppliers, competitors, and complementors.
A player is a complementor if customers value your product more when they have the others product as well. What else might my customers buy that would make my product more valuable?
The more people that want a knowledge-base product, the easier it is to provide. This is because there is a large upfront cost. The bigger the market, the more development costs can be spread out.
Put yourself in shoes of other players to assess how valuable you are to them. Put yourself in the shoes of other players to anticipate reactions to your actions. Put yourself in shoes of other players to understand how they see the game.
PARTS: Players, Added Values, Rules, Tactics, Scope.
Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it. Karl Marx.
The greatest gain comes from changing the rules of the game itself.
Anytime you enter a game, you change it. It’s a new game because you have entered and joined the cast of players.
Sometimes the most valuable service you can offer is creating competition, so don’t just give it away. You need to get paid to play.
How important is it to the customer that you bid? There are many ways to get paid to play. You can ask for contributions toward bid-preparation expenses. You can ask for better access to information about the business. Ask to deal with a different person. Make the bidding an opportunity to meet senior management. Ask to meet someone who will appreciate what you bring to the table. You might ask customer to quote you a price at which he would give you his business. The customer gives you a signed contract, complete with price.
Hidden costs of bidding: your unlikely to succeed; the price is so low that you will lose; incumbent can retaliate; you help establish a lower price; you set a bad precedent; competitors will use low price as benchmark; think coopetition.
Bringing more customers into the game is a good idea. Paying customers to play, especially early adopters, is good. AOL understood that it had to lose money early. Getting a party going isn’t very different from starting a network. No one wants to go to an empty nightclub.
Yet another way to bring in more customers is to identify and stimulate complementary products. Developing complementary products brings more customers into the game.
Becoming your own customer is a way to develop the market, assure demand, and achieve scale.
Pay suppliers to play, form a buying coalition which is a larger buyer, do it yourself. You can help customers buy from existing complementors. Your greater size will attract more suppliers into the game.
Bring in competitors by licensing your technology to make money and to avoid complacency. Create second sources to encourage buyers to adopt your tech, do it yourself, and promote internal competition with teams.
Nintendo: One strong company and the rest weak.
To further stimulate demand, N made magazine with tips, etc. with a price so low the goal was to break even to stimulate demand. The magazine was an ideal complement to N games.
The trick is to spend $1 in such a way it is perceived as quality improvement of $2 to clients.
High quality is low cost. This establishes a virtuous circle.
Raise the amount customers are willing to pay by more than the incremental cost. Reduce cost without reducing willingness to pay by as much. If you have lower costs this helps to deliver a better product. Deliver a better product in way that helps you to lower costs.
The $64,000 question is how to develop a relationship. American Airlines spotted some underutilized resources, empty seats, and put them to good use. People got to take vacations in Hawaii that they otherwise wouldn’t have. American made a pie bigger and raised its value.
Say thank you and create loyalty by rewarding it. Many companies offer the best deals to new customers. That’s backwards. You want to treat your best customers the best.
Say thank you in kind, not cash; save best thank you for best customer; say thank you in way it will build your business don’t say it too quickly or slowly; say you’re going to say thank you; recognize you may have to compete for loyalty; think coopetition to wallow your competitors to have loyal customers also; don’t forget to say thank you even if you have a monopoly; say thank you to your suppliers as well as to your customers.
To prevent price wars, you may want to charge your own customers low prices and offer higher prices to your rival’s customers.
Perception is reality - Bishop Berkeley
Change people’s perceptions and you change the game. Shaping perceptions is the domain of tactics. By tactics, we specifically mean actions that players take to shape the perceptions of other players.
PowerPoint list price was kept high at $339 but bundled at a very low price into Office. So they felt they were getting the $399 product at a great deal.
Scope: The first step is to recognize the links between games. You can create new links between games or sever existing ones.
The existence of common players determines the possibility that the games are linked. They can be linked if people perceive them to be linked. You do something that the incumbent can’t match without hurting his existing business. You create a dilemma for the incumbent. He wants to come after you, but he doesn’t. Judo: Turn strength into a weakness.
Cannibalize yourself rather than let someone else eat you alive.
Package discounts are magic. Take two unrelated products. Increase sales without giving up much margin by offering package discounts.
There’s always a larger game.
Checklist for change: What is the Value Net; what are opportunities for cooperation and competition in relationships; would you like to change cast of players; who stands to gain or lose if you become a player; what is your added value; which rules are helping or hurting you; what new rules would you like to have; do you have the power to make those rules;
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385479492
© 1996 by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff
This book was excellent concept of cooperation and competition at the same time in business.
A complement is anything which makes the first product or service more attractive.
The goal is to make the pie bigger rather than fighting with competitors over a fixed pie.
Opposite of competitor is a complementor. The game is composed of customers, suppliers, competitors, and complementors.
A player is a complementor if customers value your product more when they have the others product as well. What else might my customers buy that would make my product more valuable?
The more people that want a knowledge-base product, the easier it is to provide. This is because there is a large upfront cost. The bigger the market, the more development costs can be spread out.
Put yourself in shoes of other players to assess how valuable you are to them. Put yourself in the shoes of other players to anticipate reactions to your actions. Put yourself in shoes of other players to understand how they see the game.
PARTS: Players, Added Values, Rules, Tactics, Scope.
Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it. Karl Marx.
The greatest gain comes from changing the rules of the game itself.
Anytime you enter a game, you change it. It’s a new game because you have entered and joined the cast of players.
Sometimes the most valuable service you can offer is creating competition, so don’t just give it away. You need to get paid to play.
How important is it to the customer that you bid? There are many ways to get paid to play. You can ask for contributions toward bid-preparation expenses. You can ask for better access to information about the business. Ask to deal with a different person. Make the bidding an opportunity to meet senior management. Ask to meet someone who will appreciate what you bring to the table. You might ask customer to quote you a price at which he would give you his business. The customer gives you a signed contract, complete with price.
Hidden costs of bidding: your unlikely to succeed; the price is so low that you will lose; incumbent can retaliate; you help establish a lower price; you set a bad precedent; competitors will use low price as benchmark; think coopetition.
Bringing more customers into the game is a good idea. Paying customers to play, especially early adopters, is good. AOL understood that it had to lose money early. Getting a party going isn’t very different from starting a network. No one wants to go to an empty nightclub.
Yet another way to bring in more customers is to identify and stimulate complementary products. Developing complementary products brings more customers into the game.
Becoming your own customer is a way to develop the market, assure demand, and achieve scale.
Pay suppliers to play, form a buying coalition which is a larger buyer, do it yourself. You can help customers buy from existing complementors. Your greater size will attract more suppliers into the game.
Bring in competitors by licensing your technology to make money and to avoid complacency. Create second sources to encourage buyers to adopt your tech, do it yourself, and promote internal competition with teams.
Nintendo: One strong company and the rest weak.
To further stimulate demand, N made magazine with tips, etc. with a price so low the goal was to break even to stimulate demand. The magazine was an ideal complement to N games.
The trick is to spend $1 in such a way it is perceived as quality improvement of $2 to clients.
High quality is low cost. This establishes a virtuous circle.
Raise the amount customers are willing to pay by more than the incremental cost. Reduce cost without reducing willingness to pay by as much. If you have lower costs this helps to deliver a better product. Deliver a better product in way that helps you to lower costs.
The $64,000 question is how to develop a relationship. American Airlines spotted some underutilized resources, empty seats, and put them to good use. People got to take vacations in Hawaii that they otherwise wouldn’t have. American made a pie bigger and raised its value.
Say thank you and create loyalty by rewarding it. Many companies offer the best deals to new customers. That’s backwards. You want to treat your best customers the best.
Say thank you in kind, not cash; save best thank you for best customer; say thank you in way it will build your business don’t say it too quickly or slowly; say you’re going to say thank you; recognize you may have to compete for loyalty; think coopetition to wallow your competitors to have loyal customers also; don’t forget to say thank you even if you have a monopoly; say thank you to your suppliers as well as to your customers.
To prevent price wars, you may want to charge your own customers low prices and offer higher prices to your rival’s customers.
Perception is reality - Bishop Berkeley
Change people’s perceptions and you change the game. Shaping perceptions is the domain of tactics. By tactics, we specifically mean actions that players take to shape the perceptions of other players.
PowerPoint list price was kept high at $339 but bundled at a very low price into Office. So they felt they were getting the $399 product at a great deal.
Scope: The first step is to recognize the links between games. You can create new links between games or sever existing ones.
The existence of common players determines the possibility that the games are linked. They can be linked if people perceive them to be linked. You do something that the incumbent can’t match without hurting his existing business. You create a dilemma for the incumbent. He wants to come after you, but he doesn’t. Judo: Turn strength into a weakness.
Cannibalize yourself rather than let someone else eat you alive.
Package discounts are magic. Take two unrelated products. Increase sales without giving up much margin by offering package discounts.
There’s always a larger game.
Checklist for change: What is the Value Net; what are opportunities for cooperation and competition in relationships; would you like to change cast of players; who stands to gain or lose if you become a player; what is your added value; which rules are helping or hurting you; what new rules would you like to have; do you have the power to make those rules;
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385479492
The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next
The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next
© 1997 by Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker
If you are going to succeed in chaos, you must connect with chaos. You must act in concert with chaos.
What really mattered in an organization was how binding a decision was on the life span on the organization. What is the duration of the impact of a decision?
Early adopters are absolutely critical because they are opinion leaders. It is their efforts that attract the second group of adopters, “confirmers.” Then, as early adopters and confirmers group together, they begin to form a market. Early adopters belong to engineering, Confirmers to Marketing, and then once it is total adoption, conversation about it stops. No one talks about Coke, Coke just IS.
Privacy will matter to Millennialists because in a world of connectivity, privacy becomes scarce, and scarcity gains value.
Sales focus can either be product, marketing process, or on the consumer.
Create a tribe by initiation, closing ceremony, continuous reinforcement of ritual. Send out a letter telling your customers how smart they were to choose you. The proof of constant caring is an act of genius.
The message needs to show respect and be authentic.
Returns increase, too, as information is shared in real time, in the present tense, and they increase in direct proportion to the degree to which the information is shared. Real-time information sharing creates authenticity.
We have not even begun to ask the question that bioengineering soon will be requiring us to answer. We are inventing new life forms at the same rate we are losing old ones. What is life? Is human sperm in a sperm bank stuff or life?
There are a number of myths you need to get past: reason, family, business organization (only owners or employees), relations of economic worth, governments, nations, action, singularity, and the myth that reality is real.
“Of course its insane” Yossarian said, “That’s why it is the only sane thing to do!”
Fusion: Have a commitment, making the commitment the entire core of your business, binding your employees to that core commitment.
Great businesses are businesses that have at their heart an entrepreneur whose long-term objective is everyone’s objective. Great businesses also make that objective the entire core of their existence. They fuse their business to the core.
Eliminate the number of things that you do. Take whatever values are inherent in the business and let those truths direct and manage the daily activities of the enterprise.
The only thing that can create customer loyalty is loyalty itself. It is only by giving loyalty to your customers that you can get loyalty back in return, and it is only by recognizing that customers are under no obligation to give their loyalty that you can hold on to it day by day.
Your first concern is someone who purchased your product, not someone who might do so. You thank your customers for what they have done in the past.
You make your value structure isomorphic with the value structure of your customer base.
Make the ownership of a customer relationship a fundamental part of the creation of the business itself. All you can transfer from product to product, and brand to brand, is your customers’ loyalty. His or her loyalty is the most valuable commodity you can own. Scarcity creates value.
People should be paid for information on themselves. Understand tribalism, membership, and fraternity of strangers.
Any organization builds up endotruths and exotruths. Endotruths are ones known inside but not outside. Exotruths are presumed truths about the tribe, the ones that determine its external value and reputation and cannot be shaken even by denying them.
It’s okay to waste time. Avoid the activity trap. Manage choices out of your life, not into it. Take a nap, catch an afternoon matinee. Conserve energy and you’ll have more of it for the things that really matter.
Managing choices out of your life is single most important survival skill in business. What’s needed today is less attention than distention. You should maintain a refusal to involve yourself in issues which have no relevance for you.
Find your own sacred site.
Start planning around the certainty of uncertainty. Focus on outcomes.
Simplify your focus.
Here are some words of potential interest: Anthrolieange, bionomics, cryptocentrism, distention, diversity IQ, downward nobility, fault tolerance, filocity, Gosh, instant history, nanostalgia, nulture, on the bubble, tribal marketing.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887308384
© 1997 by Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker
If you are going to succeed in chaos, you must connect with chaos. You must act in concert with chaos.
What really mattered in an organization was how binding a decision was on the life span on the organization. What is the duration of the impact of a decision?
Early adopters are absolutely critical because they are opinion leaders. It is their efforts that attract the second group of adopters, “confirmers.” Then, as early adopters and confirmers group together, they begin to form a market. Early adopters belong to engineering, Confirmers to Marketing, and then once it is total adoption, conversation about it stops. No one talks about Coke, Coke just IS.
Privacy will matter to Millennialists because in a world of connectivity, privacy becomes scarce, and scarcity gains value.
Sales focus can either be product, marketing process, or on the consumer.
Create a tribe by initiation, closing ceremony, continuous reinforcement of ritual. Send out a letter telling your customers how smart they were to choose you. The proof of constant caring is an act of genius.
The message needs to show respect and be authentic.
Returns increase, too, as information is shared in real time, in the present tense, and they increase in direct proportion to the degree to which the information is shared. Real-time information sharing creates authenticity.
We have not even begun to ask the question that bioengineering soon will be requiring us to answer. We are inventing new life forms at the same rate we are losing old ones. What is life? Is human sperm in a sperm bank stuff or life?
There are a number of myths you need to get past: reason, family, business organization (only owners or employees), relations of economic worth, governments, nations, action, singularity, and the myth that reality is real.
“Of course its insane” Yossarian said, “That’s why it is the only sane thing to do!”
Fusion: Have a commitment, making the commitment the entire core of your business, binding your employees to that core commitment.
Great businesses are businesses that have at their heart an entrepreneur whose long-term objective is everyone’s objective. Great businesses also make that objective the entire core of their existence. They fuse their business to the core.
Eliminate the number of things that you do. Take whatever values are inherent in the business and let those truths direct and manage the daily activities of the enterprise.
The only thing that can create customer loyalty is loyalty itself. It is only by giving loyalty to your customers that you can get loyalty back in return, and it is only by recognizing that customers are under no obligation to give their loyalty that you can hold on to it day by day.
Your first concern is someone who purchased your product, not someone who might do so. You thank your customers for what they have done in the past.
You make your value structure isomorphic with the value structure of your customer base.
Make the ownership of a customer relationship a fundamental part of the creation of the business itself. All you can transfer from product to product, and brand to brand, is your customers’ loyalty. His or her loyalty is the most valuable commodity you can own. Scarcity creates value.
People should be paid for information on themselves. Understand tribalism, membership, and fraternity of strangers.
Any organization builds up endotruths and exotruths. Endotruths are ones known inside but not outside. Exotruths are presumed truths about the tribe, the ones that determine its external value and reputation and cannot be shaken even by denying them.
It’s okay to waste time. Avoid the activity trap. Manage choices out of your life, not into it. Take a nap, catch an afternoon matinee. Conserve energy and you’ll have more of it for the things that really matter.
Managing choices out of your life is single most important survival skill in business. What’s needed today is less attention than distention. You should maintain a refusal to involve yourself in issues which have no relevance for you.
Find your own sacred site.
Start planning around the certainty of uncertainty. Focus on outcomes.
Simplify your focus.
Here are some words of potential interest: Anthrolieange, bionomics, cryptocentrism, distention, diversity IQ, downward nobility, fault tolerance, filocity, Gosh, instant history, nanostalgia, nulture, on the bubble, tribal marketing.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887308384
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Enterprise One to One Marketing: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age
Enterprise One to One Marketing: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age
© 1997 by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers
Sell one customer as many products and services as possible. Share of customer.
Product marketing will be supplanted by relationship marketing.
Improve customer retention, protect and increase margins, create entirely new markets,
I know you. You tell me what you want. I make it. I remember next time.
A Learning Relationship between a customer and an enterprise gets smarter and smarter with every individual interaction, defining in ever more detail the customer’s own individual needs and tastes.
Remember the specifications.
To get the equivalent level of service from any other firm, the customer must reteach the competitor what he has already taught the original firm.
Segments are static while individual customers are dynamic and interactive.
The direction of success for an aggregate market firm is to acquire more customers. While for a customer-driven firm it is to keep customers longer and grow them bigger.
The 1:1 treats customer base as primary asset of the firm, carefully managing the investments. Which customers will yield the highest return to the firm?
To receive a truly customized product or service the customer first has to say what he wants and how it should be delivered. This converts the customers from passive target to active participant in the selling process. The dialogue must pick up where it left off yesterday with particular customers. Creating dialogue opportunities with customers is a prerequisite for soliciting feedback.
Managers should be in charge of customers rather than product and programs.
Customers have different needs from a firm and they represent different valuations to a firm.
Manage the customers actual valuation versus strategic valuation.
Customers also provide references, knowledge of other tastes, design of new products and services.
What is the maximum amount of money the firm is willing to spend to prevent that customer from leaving the franchise.
Every single interaction is a priceless opportunity to learn more.
A competitor will focus on taking away your most valuable customers.
You must remember individual customers and interact with individual customers in a cost-efficient manner.
Customer valuations are uniform or highly differentiated. Customer needs are uniform or highly differentiated, this creates four quadrants.
Increasingly tailor products and services to particular customer needs.
Strategic value is the total profit a firm could realize from a customer if it were to develop a strategy or take some marketing initiative with a particular customer. Analyze which customers to keep, grow, shed.
Large number or customers who are satisfied, but not very satisfied will still leave a franchise.
If you can convince a customers to spend some time or energy teaching your firm how to cater better to his or her individual tastes then you can keep this customer loyal for a longer period of time. When a customers spends time teaching your firm, the customers himself develops a stake in the benefits of this learning.
Customers wants you to know what they want and when and how they want it.
Design interactive, the enterprise needs a convenient way for a customer to specify exactly what he or she needs. You should never require your customer to tell you the same thing twice.
One of the secrets of mass customization is simply that it allows a customer to participate in the actual design and development of his own product.
Begin the Learning Relationship with each customer.
Put some products on automatic replenishment basis.
The goal is not to be consolidator of consumer products but to acquire and own each individual customer relationship.
Give your customer the opportunity to teach you what he wants. Remember it, give it back to him, and keep his business forever.
The customer will have to expend effort in order to teach the firm the specifications. The firm is learning, the customer is teaching. The customer is, through his own effort, increasing the value of the enterprise, to him. (The customer adds service information which tells the firm what the customer needs, what the customer is doing, and what the customer plans for the future.)
Strive for QQP - Quality of product, Quality of service, fair Price.
The biggest cost of discounting to attract new customers is price dilution. It is easier for him to buy from you. It is more convenient for him. He already knows the quality.
Once an individual customer’s needs have been taught to the firm, the value of the firm to that particular customer increases dramatically.
The more needs differentiation there is within the customer base, the more benefit can be realized from a Learning Relationship.
Look for all the opportunities to remember differences among customers.
The trick is to visualize the product in the broadest sense possible. See it as an object that provides a service. What is the service my product is providing?
The focus is to find more products for its customers.
Know which customers have which needs without overexposing any single customer to a whole range of irrelevant services.
Community knowledge comes from the accumulation of information about a whole community of customer tastes and preferences.
Anticipate what a particular customer wants, even before she herself realizes she wants it.
You must teach customers as well as be taught by them. The enterprise services as a conduit for spreading knowledge within the industry.
Teaching: bringing out products benefits, improving the customer’s usage process, and breaking new ground with the customer.
Do an inventory of interaction events between the enterprise and the customer. Manage the complete dialogue, across all media, and integrated by individual customer.
Don’t ask for everything at once. Let the customer choose. What is preferred media?
If we had all the customer specific information we could possibly want, what would we do differently in conducting business with our customers?
Assign a customer manager and reward each customer manager for increasing the value of the customers within his or her own portfolio. The responsibility is to manage each customer relationship, supervising the firm’s dialogue, finding products and services for each.
Measure the Share of Customer (SOC). Why is the share of customer so low? Are you not reaching the right decision makers? Does your company not make the products they need? Do they have special needs that you might be able to meet better with a less standardized product?
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/038548755X
© 1997 by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers
Sell one customer as many products and services as possible. Share of customer.
Product marketing will be supplanted by relationship marketing.
Improve customer retention, protect and increase margins, create entirely new markets,
I know you. You tell me what you want. I make it. I remember next time.
A Learning Relationship between a customer and an enterprise gets smarter and smarter with every individual interaction, defining in ever more detail the customer’s own individual needs and tastes.
Remember the specifications.
To get the equivalent level of service from any other firm, the customer must reteach the competitor what he has already taught the original firm.
Segments are static while individual customers are dynamic and interactive.
The direction of success for an aggregate market firm is to acquire more customers. While for a customer-driven firm it is to keep customers longer and grow them bigger.
The 1:1 treats customer base as primary asset of the firm, carefully managing the investments. Which customers will yield the highest return to the firm?
To receive a truly customized product or service the customer first has to say what he wants and how it should be delivered. This converts the customers from passive target to active participant in the selling process. The dialogue must pick up where it left off yesterday with particular customers. Creating dialogue opportunities with customers is a prerequisite for soliciting feedback.
Managers should be in charge of customers rather than product and programs.
Customers have different needs from a firm and they represent different valuations to a firm.
Manage the customers actual valuation versus strategic valuation.
Customers also provide references, knowledge of other tastes, design of new products and services.
What is the maximum amount of money the firm is willing to spend to prevent that customer from leaving the franchise.
Every single interaction is a priceless opportunity to learn more.
A competitor will focus on taking away your most valuable customers.
You must remember individual customers and interact with individual customers in a cost-efficient manner.
Customer valuations are uniform or highly differentiated. Customer needs are uniform or highly differentiated, this creates four quadrants.
Increasingly tailor products and services to particular customer needs.
Strategic value is the total profit a firm could realize from a customer if it were to develop a strategy or take some marketing initiative with a particular customer. Analyze which customers to keep, grow, shed.
Large number or customers who are satisfied, but not very satisfied will still leave a franchise.
If you can convince a customers to spend some time or energy teaching your firm how to cater better to his or her individual tastes then you can keep this customer loyal for a longer period of time. When a customers spends time teaching your firm, the customers himself develops a stake in the benefits of this learning.
Customers wants you to know what they want and when and how they want it.
Design interactive, the enterprise needs a convenient way for a customer to specify exactly what he or she needs. You should never require your customer to tell you the same thing twice.
One of the secrets of mass customization is simply that it allows a customer to participate in the actual design and development of his own product.
Begin the Learning Relationship with each customer.
Put some products on automatic replenishment basis.
The goal is not to be consolidator of consumer products but to acquire and own each individual customer relationship.
Give your customer the opportunity to teach you what he wants. Remember it, give it back to him, and keep his business forever.
The customer will have to expend effort in order to teach the firm the specifications. The firm is learning, the customer is teaching. The customer is, through his own effort, increasing the value of the enterprise, to him. (The customer adds service information which tells the firm what the customer needs, what the customer is doing, and what the customer plans for the future.)
Strive for QQP - Quality of product, Quality of service, fair Price.
The biggest cost of discounting to attract new customers is price dilution. It is easier for him to buy from you. It is more convenient for him. He already knows the quality.
Once an individual customer’s needs have been taught to the firm, the value of the firm to that particular customer increases dramatically.
The more needs differentiation there is within the customer base, the more benefit can be realized from a Learning Relationship.
Look for all the opportunities to remember differences among customers.
The trick is to visualize the product in the broadest sense possible. See it as an object that provides a service. What is the service my product is providing?
The focus is to find more products for its customers.
Know which customers have which needs without overexposing any single customer to a whole range of irrelevant services.
Community knowledge comes from the accumulation of information about a whole community of customer tastes and preferences.
Anticipate what a particular customer wants, even before she herself realizes she wants it.
You must teach customers as well as be taught by them. The enterprise services as a conduit for spreading knowledge within the industry.
Teaching: bringing out products benefits, improving the customer’s usage process, and breaking new ground with the customer.
Do an inventory of interaction events between the enterprise and the customer. Manage the complete dialogue, across all media, and integrated by individual customer.
Don’t ask for everything at once. Let the customer choose. What is preferred media?
If we had all the customer specific information we could possibly want, what would we do differently in conducting business with our customers?
Assign a customer manager and reward each customer manager for increasing the value of the customers within his or her own portfolio. The responsibility is to manage each customer relationship, supervising the firm’s dialogue, finding products and services for each.
Measure the Share of Customer (SOC). Why is the share of customer so low? Are you not reaching the right decision makers? Does your company not make the products they need? Do they have special needs that you might be able to meet better with a less standardized product?
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/038548755X
Strategy Pure & Simple II: How Winning Companies Dominate Their Competitors
Strategy Pure & Simple II: How Winning Companies Dominate Their Competitors
© 1997 by Michel Robert
The best competition possible is having no competition. Have a distinctive strategy and change the rules of the game. Neutralize and paralyze the leader. Surprise the enemy.
Manager’s vision is often operational, not strategic.
The leader needs to focus on long-term goals and ignore short-term distractions.
Strategy can be based on products, customers, geography, market segments.
You must differentiate on one item only:
1. Product
2. Customer
3. Markets
4. Product capability
5. Technology know-how
6. Sales/marketing
7. Distribution method
8. Nat’l resources
9. Size/growth
10. Return/profit
Have only one driving force for company. Profit is the result of strategy, not its objective. If you feel the driving force changing, the company is drifting. A good strategy stays in place over a long period of time. Management gets seduced by opportunities and suffers change by accident not design.
What is the business concept? If you are market driven, do lots of market research and focus on user loyalty. Control the sandbox. Identify which competitors your strategy will attract. Anticipate future strategy.
People cannot implement what they don’t know.
People don’t implement properly what they don’t understand.
People don’t implement what they are not committed to.
Don’t form an alliance to correct a weakness.
Never license proprietary technology.
Form an alliance to exploit unique strength with strong partner.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0070531331
© 1997 by Michel Robert
The best competition possible is having no competition. Have a distinctive strategy and change the rules of the game. Neutralize and paralyze the leader. Surprise the enemy.
Manager’s vision is often operational, not strategic.
The leader needs to focus on long-term goals and ignore short-term distractions.
Strategy can be based on products, customers, geography, market segments.
You must differentiate on one item only:
1. Product
2. Customer
3. Markets
4. Product capability
5. Technology know-how
6. Sales/marketing
7. Distribution method
8. Nat’l resources
9. Size/growth
10. Return/profit
Have only one driving force for company. Profit is the result of strategy, not its objective. If you feel the driving force changing, the company is drifting. A good strategy stays in place over a long period of time. Management gets seduced by opportunities and suffers change by accident not design.
What is the business concept? If you are market driven, do lots of market research and focus on user loyalty. Control the sandbox. Identify which competitors your strategy will attract. Anticipate future strategy.
People cannot implement what they don’t know.
People don’t implement properly what they don’t understand.
People don’t implement what they are not committed to.
Don’t form an alliance to correct a weakness.
Never license proprietary technology.
Form an alliance to exploit unique strength with strong partner.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0070531331
22 Immutable Laws of Branding
22 Immutable Laws of Branding
© 1998 by Al Ries
Marketing is building a brand in the mind of a prospect. A branding program should be designed to differentiate your cow from all the other cattle on the range.
A successful branding program is based on the concept of singularity. There is no product on the market quite like your product.
The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope.
In their minds, most people try to assign one brand name to each product. Customers want brands that are narrow in scope and are distinguishable by a single word, the shorter the better.
Good things happen when you contract your brand rather than expand it.
The best way to generate publicity is by being first. By being the first brand in a new category.
Create a new category rather than a new product in an existing category.
Leadership is the single most important motivating factor in customer behavior.
You must focus your efforts on owning a word in the prospect’s mind - a word that nobody else knows.
You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute. - an attribute that nobody else already owns in your category.
Ask not what percentage of an existing market your brand can achieve; ask how large a market your brand can create by narrowing its focus and owning a word in the mind.
Never forgot leadership. Never assume that people know which brand is the leader.
The best way to build a quality perception in the mind is by following the laws of branding. You become a specialist rather than a generalist. And a specialist is perceived to know more than a generalist.
Expanding a brand and being a generalist tend to destroy your ability to select a powerful name.
High price is a benefit for customers.
A better strategy in a sea of similar products with similar prices is to deliberately start with a higher price. Then ask yourself, what can we put into our brand to justify the higher price? Combine a narrow focus with a better name and a higher price.
What happens when you narrow the focus to such a degree that there is no longer any market for the brand? There is an opportunity to introduce a brand-new category.
You have to promote the new category. Customers don’t really care about new brands they care about new categories.
By first preempting the category and then aggressively promoting the category, you create both a powerful brand and a rapidly escalating market.
Promote the benefits of the category, not the brand.
You need to put your branding dollars behind the concept itself, so the concept will take off pulling the brand along with it. The rightful share of a leading brand is never more than 50%. There’s always room for a second brand.
Big brands always put pressure on small brands.
The dominant brand should welcome competitors.
Choice stimulates demand. Competition increases the noise level and tends to increase sales in the category.
Brands should avoid generic names like the plague. The vast majority of brand communication takes place verbally, not visually.
The mind does not deal in letters, it deals in SOUNDS.
When customers feel they have to use both your company name and brand name together, you usually have a branding problem.
The key to a family approach is to make each sibling a unique individual brand with its own identity. Resist the urge to give the brands a family look or a family identity.
Most managers are too internally focused to see the power of a separate identity. They want to “take advantage of the equity” their brand already owns in the mind in order to successfully launch a new brand.
Focus on a common product area. Select a single attribute to segment. Set up rigid distinctions among brands. Create different, not similar sounding brand names.
Launch a new sibling only when you can create a new category.
Logos should be 2 and 1/4 units wide and 1 unit high. Avis is almost the perfect shape. Logotype should be like a windshield.
A brand should use a color that is the opposite of its major competitors.
There are five colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue.
A brand cannot get into the mind unless it stands for something. But once a brand occupies a position in the mind, the manufacturer often thinks of reason to change. Markets may change, but brands shouldn’t - ever!
Brand building is boring work. What works best is absolute consistency over an extended period of time. When people do boring work, they get bored. You should limit your brand. That is the essence of branding. Limitation combined with consistency is what builds a brand.
A brand is a proper noun that can be used in place of a common word. A brand is a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of the prospect. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887309372
© 1998 by Al Ries
Marketing is building a brand in the mind of a prospect. A branding program should be designed to differentiate your cow from all the other cattle on the range.
A successful branding program is based on the concept of singularity. There is no product on the market quite like your product.
The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope.
In their minds, most people try to assign one brand name to each product. Customers want brands that are narrow in scope and are distinguishable by a single word, the shorter the better.
Good things happen when you contract your brand rather than expand it.
The best way to generate publicity is by being first. By being the first brand in a new category.
Create a new category rather than a new product in an existing category.
Leadership is the single most important motivating factor in customer behavior.
You must focus your efforts on owning a word in the prospect’s mind - a word that nobody else knows.
You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute. - an attribute that nobody else already owns in your category.
Ask not what percentage of an existing market your brand can achieve; ask how large a market your brand can create by narrowing its focus and owning a word in the mind.
Never forgot leadership. Never assume that people know which brand is the leader.
The best way to build a quality perception in the mind is by following the laws of branding. You become a specialist rather than a generalist. And a specialist is perceived to know more than a generalist.
Expanding a brand and being a generalist tend to destroy your ability to select a powerful name.
High price is a benefit for customers.
A better strategy in a sea of similar products with similar prices is to deliberately start with a higher price. Then ask yourself, what can we put into our brand to justify the higher price? Combine a narrow focus with a better name and a higher price.
What happens when you narrow the focus to such a degree that there is no longer any market for the brand? There is an opportunity to introduce a brand-new category.
You have to promote the new category. Customers don’t really care about new brands they care about new categories.
By first preempting the category and then aggressively promoting the category, you create both a powerful brand and a rapidly escalating market.
Promote the benefits of the category, not the brand.
You need to put your branding dollars behind the concept itself, so the concept will take off pulling the brand along with it. The rightful share of a leading brand is never more than 50%. There’s always room for a second brand.
Big brands always put pressure on small brands.
The dominant brand should welcome competitors.
Choice stimulates demand. Competition increases the noise level and tends to increase sales in the category.
Brands should avoid generic names like the plague. The vast majority of brand communication takes place verbally, not visually.
The mind does not deal in letters, it deals in SOUNDS.
When customers feel they have to use both your company name and brand name together, you usually have a branding problem.
The key to a family approach is to make each sibling a unique individual brand with its own identity. Resist the urge to give the brands a family look or a family identity.
Most managers are too internally focused to see the power of a separate identity. They want to “take advantage of the equity” their brand already owns in the mind in order to successfully launch a new brand.
Focus on a common product area. Select a single attribute to segment. Set up rigid distinctions among brands. Create different, not similar sounding brand names.
Launch a new sibling only when you can create a new category.
Logos should be 2 and 1/4 units wide and 1 unit high. Avis is almost the perfect shape. Logotype should be like a windshield.
A brand should use a color that is the opposite of its major competitors.
There are five colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue.
A brand cannot get into the mind unless it stands for something. But once a brand occupies a position in the mind, the manufacturer often thinks of reason to change. Markets may change, but brands shouldn’t - ever!
Brand building is boring work. What works best is absolute consistency over an extended period of time. When people do boring work, they get bored. You should limit your brand. That is the essence of branding. Limitation combined with consistency is what builds a brand.
A brand is a proper noun that can be used in place of a common word. A brand is a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of the prospect. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887309372
Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing
Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing
© 1997 by Harry Beckwith
If you sell software, you know that your core product is the software, but that the critical part of your product is all the augmentations: the documentation, toll-free services, publications, upgrades, support, and other services. Your users are buying a service.
Nothing works more powerfully than simplicity.
The core of service marketing is service itself. Get better reality.
Too often, service sucks.
First, before you write an ad, rent a list, dash off a press release - fix your service.
Assume your service is bad. It can’t hurt and it will force you to improve.
Everyone’s focus for marketing this year is “How do we sell this?” They should ask, “Is this viable anymore? Is this what the world wants?” Always start at zero.
Create the possible service; don’t just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love.
Conduct oral phone surveys, not written and not in-person.
Never ask, “What don’t you like?”
Every act is a marketing act. Make every person a marketing person.
Go where others aren’t.
Study each point of contact. Then improve each one - significantly.
Execute passionately. Marginal tactics executed passionately almost always will outperform brilliant tactics executed marginally.
The world champion in baseball has to win only 57 percent of its championship games.
3M went almost 2 years without a sale. Then in 1904 it tried sandpaper. William McKnight became the assistant bookkeeper in 1907, settled for stock instead of cash and retired with $500 million in 1978.
Prospects rely on familiarity. So whenever they are in doubt, prospects choose the familiar. People choose what seems most familiar.
Familiarity breeds business. Spread your word however you can.
Use the recency effect, be the last company to present. Always follow-up with something that is as well conceived and powerful as anything in your presentation. Take advantage of the recency effect - follow-up brilliantly.
People do not simply form impressions. They get anchored to them. People with little time are more apt to make first impressions as snap judgments, and then base all their later decisions on them. Identify and polish your anchors.
It is less risky for Peggy to do NOTHING. Do not put more sale in, take some of the fear out. Free trials, money-back guarantees, ask for a project, and offer to do something. Peggy is afraid. The best thing you can do for a prospect is eliminate her fear. Offer a trial period or a test project.
The more alike two services are the more important each difference becomes.
Accentuate the trivial.
Your position should be singular, one simple message.
You must sacrifice.
You cannot be all things to all people, you must focus on one thing.
You must have a fanatical focus on doing one thing well.
Stand for one distinctive thing that will give you a competitive advantage.
The Fear of Positioning
Why all the fear? Because standing for one thing means you cannot expressly stand for other things. You must sacrifice. “No! We cannot give up that business! We have to say we are this and this and this! We’re sacrificing opportunity.”
Forget it!
Rather than sacrificing opportunities, a narrow focus often creates opportunities.
To broaden your appeal, narrow your position.
What special skill could your business develop and communicate that would, by lesser logic, position you strongly in other areas? What is the big skill you could develop and market that clearly implies other valuable skills? In your service, what’s the hardest task? Position yourself as the expert at this task, and you’ll have lesser logic in your corner.
“What makes your service different?” Every service is different and creating and communicating differences is central to effective marketing. History shows that everything can be made different.
Don’t start by positioning your service. Instead, leverage the position you have.
Craft bold dreams and realistic positioning statements.
Choose a position that will reposition your competitors; then move a step back toward middle to cinch the sale.
In positioning, don’t try to hide your small size. Make it work by stressing its advantages, such as responsiveness and individual attention.
How much price resistance is just right – about 15-20 percent. 10 percent will complain about any price. Some want a deal. The other 10 percent are the resistance which is normal.
Make selling easier, faster, and cheaper. Build a brand.
Brands with unusual names are strong brands. Virtually no one or nothing else carries any of these names.
Your first competitor is indifference. If you deliver two messages, most people will process just one of them. Say one thing. Saying many things usually communicates nothing.
Your prospects have one basic question:
What makes you so different that I should do business with you? Give me one good reason WHY? It’s a simple request that begs for a simple response. After you say one thing, repeat it again and again.
Don’t use adjectives, use stories. Attack your first weakness, the stereotype the prospect has about you. Create the evidence of your service quality. Then communicate it.
If you think your promotional idea might seem silly or unprofessional, it is.
Give your marketing a human face. If you are selling something complex, simplify it with a metaphor. The power of words is not only to describe reality, but to create it.
Tell people, in a single compelling sentence, why they should buy from you instead of someone else.
There are six peaks in Europe higher than the Matterhorn. Name one. Get ink.
If you want more publicity, do more advertising.
Make your service easy to buy.
What sells? I understand what you need.
We want to smile more. Read through everything you send to clients and prospects. How does it FEEL? Does it sell happiness or the hope of it? Above all, sell hope.
A hotel wraps the toilet and wraps the glass. It is not just the hotel’s service quality that wins us; it is the hotel’s merchandising of its quality.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446520942
© 1997 by Harry Beckwith
If you sell software, you know that your core product is the software, but that the critical part of your product is all the augmentations: the documentation, toll-free services, publications, upgrades, support, and other services. Your users are buying a service.
Nothing works more powerfully than simplicity.
The core of service marketing is service itself. Get better reality.
Too often, service sucks.
First, before you write an ad, rent a list, dash off a press release - fix your service.
Assume your service is bad. It can’t hurt and it will force you to improve.
Everyone’s focus for marketing this year is “How do we sell this?” They should ask, “Is this viable anymore? Is this what the world wants?” Always start at zero.
Create the possible service; don’t just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love.
Conduct oral phone surveys, not written and not in-person.
Never ask, “What don’t you like?”
Every act is a marketing act. Make every person a marketing person.
Go where others aren’t.
Study each point of contact. Then improve each one - significantly.
Execute passionately. Marginal tactics executed passionately almost always will outperform brilliant tactics executed marginally.
The world champion in baseball has to win only 57 percent of its championship games.
3M went almost 2 years without a sale. Then in 1904 it tried sandpaper. William McKnight became the assistant bookkeeper in 1907, settled for stock instead of cash and retired with $500 million in 1978.
Prospects rely on familiarity. So whenever they are in doubt, prospects choose the familiar. People choose what seems most familiar.
Familiarity breeds business. Spread your word however you can.
Use the recency effect, be the last company to present. Always follow-up with something that is as well conceived and powerful as anything in your presentation. Take advantage of the recency effect - follow-up brilliantly.
People do not simply form impressions. They get anchored to them. People with little time are more apt to make first impressions as snap judgments, and then base all their later decisions on them. Identify and polish your anchors.
It is less risky for Peggy to do NOTHING. Do not put more sale in, take some of the fear out. Free trials, money-back guarantees, ask for a project, and offer to do something. Peggy is afraid. The best thing you can do for a prospect is eliminate her fear. Offer a trial period or a test project.
The more alike two services are the more important each difference becomes.
Accentuate the trivial.
Your position should be singular, one simple message.
You must sacrifice.
You cannot be all things to all people, you must focus on one thing.
You must have a fanatical focus on doing one thing well.
Stand for one distinctive thing that will give you a competitive advantage.
The Fear of Positioning
Why all the fear? Because standing for one thing means you cannot expressly stand for other things. You must sacrifice. “No! We cannot give up that business! We have to say we are this and this and this! We’re sacrificing opportunity.”
Forget it!
Rather than sacrificing opportunities, a narrow focus often creates opportunities.
To broaden your appeal, narrow your position.
What special skill could your business develop and communicate that would, by lesser logic, position you strongly in other areas? What is the big skill you could develop and market that clearly implies other valuable skills? In your service, what’s the hardest task? Position yourself as the expert at this task, and you’ll have lesser logic in your corner.
“What makes your service different?” Every service is different and creating and communicating differences is central to effective marketing. History shows that everything can be made different.
Don’t start by positioning your service. Instead, leverage the position you have.
Craft bold dreams and realistic positioning statements.
Choose a position that will reposition your competitors; then move a step back toward middle to cinch the sale.
In positioning, don’t try to hide your small size. Make it work by stressing its advantages, such as responsiveness and individual attention.
How much price resistance is just right – about 15-20 percent. 10 percent will complain about any price. Some want a deal. The other 10 percent are the resistance which is normal.
Make selling easier, faster, and cheaper. Build a brand.
Brands with unusual names are strong brands. Virtually no one or nothing else carries any of these names.
Your first competitor is indifference. If you deliver two messages, most people will process just one of them. Say one thing. Saying many things usually communicates nothing.
Your prospects have one basic question:
What makes you so different that I should do business with you? Give me one good reason WHY? It’s a simple request that begs for a simple response. After you say one thing, repeat it again and again.
Don’t use adjectives, use stories. Attack your first weakness, the stereotype the prospect has about you. Create the evidence of your service quality. Then communicate it.
If you think your promotional idea might seem silly or unprofessional, it is.
Give your marketing a human face. If you are selling something complex, simplify it with a metaphor. The power of words is not only to describe reality, but to create it.
Tell people, in a single compelling sentence, why they should buy from you instead of someone else.
There are six peaks in Europe higher than the Matterhorn. Name one. Get ink.
If you want more publicity, do more advertising.
Make your service easy to buy.
What sells? I understand what you need.
We want to smile more. Read through everything you send to clients and prospects. How does it FEEL? Does it sell happiness or the hope of it? Above all, sell hope.
A hotel wraps the toilet and wraps the glass. It is not just the hotel’s service quality that wins us; it is the hotel’s merchandising of its quality.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446520942
