The huge baby Trump protest balloon, allowed by London’s mayor, SadiqKhan, will float above Westminster during Donald Trump’s visit during week ending 13th July and yes indeed that is a Friday!
At the time of writing they may have had the OK by the mayor, but air traffic control hadn’t give the thumbs up as yet.
The Brits love a polite protest, which after all it is.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7nPkbSGQVU[/embed]
We give ourselves too much credit for being focussed. It takes about 24 minutes to refocus on the taks in hamd after an interruption. (23 minutes and 15 seconds, to be exact) according to Gloria Mark, who studies digital distraction at the University of California, Irvine. (23 Jul 2015).
Most of us have the attention span of a fly (if there’s even such a thing) and the concentration of a goldfish. I’m not trying to be rude to the fly and the goldfish, I’m merely trying to remind ourselves that we are so easily distracted these days that we are losing the art of being mindful.
So now you know why ‘Mindfulness’ is getting so much traction these days, most of us are actually realising that we need to re-program our brains to be more mindful, because we’ve lost the art of it.
I went to the Opticians, recently for my 2-yearly eyetest. Good news by the way, my left eye has improved eyesight. Yes it does happen, my wife and eye set an intention years ago that our eyesights would improve and they are actually improving year on year. True story.
Anyway, I was asked to sit in the waiting room and there wasn’t anyone there. Few magazines and newspapers on a table, out of date of course and posters on the wall, advertising stuff and a few people concentrating on their work. I decided to watch this one person who was fixing a pair of eyeglasses working with full concentration on fixing it. It was a marvel to watch her human mind trying to organise parts, screwdrivers and hand movements to remove screws from the eyeglasses, replacing them and getting the lenses back in. So interesting to watch.
Had I sat down and got my phone out, I would have missed all that.
Then a young couple walked in and sat down on the chairs beside me. First thing the male did was get out his phone and started looking at it. He needed the distraction of his phone to allow him to pass time I guess.
So sad to witness.
Whilst driving to the Opticians I ended up in stationary traffic. There was along quque and I noticed a woman behind me in her car with her head down. Ever so often she would look up in a panic, to make sure she didn’t miss the traffic moving on. She did this at least 6 times. It was so obvious that she was looking at her phone and probably texting on it.
Happy mobile watching!
This weekend is THE most important match in English football history. I heard the other day that the manager Gareth Southgate and his team have been researching for months now the permutations of the different nations they might have been facing in the worldcup. They have gone into great detail to understand every aspect of each nation’s strategy. It inspired our latest cartoon. Good luck England!
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6fHKgpKCRE[/embed]
Because filling ourselves up with followers makes us feel less lonely, right?
When Social Media first lifted it’s ugly head (we didn’t think so at the time) we followed as many folks as we could on Twitter, because it was almost a dead-cert that they would follow you back and they did, stupidly!
There was an unspoken etiquette. I follow you and you follow me back, we didn’t have to ask for it, most of us just did it. Fast forward to 2018 and whenever we now follow someone on Twitter, we definitely do not get a follow back.
Then when we realised it was all going pear shaped, we didn’t follow people back and they didn’t follow us back, our follower and following tally became out of sync. Twitter limited our ability to follow, I think the number was more than 2000 twits, it then blocked us from following anymore until we ourselves got some followers back. To get the whole thing into balance.
The etiquette no longer exists, everyone is out for themselves and we want our stuff to be seen, never mind about the people we follow, we’re not even bothering to look at them.
It doesn’t matter the other way around. You can have hundreds of thousands of followers and you don’t have to follow any of them back. Roll on the celebrity in that case.
Twitter has become the home of celebrities who need social proof that they are loved and even compare the amount of followers they have with each other, like a real-time popularity contest. I’ve even heard Simon Cowell talk about this with his judging team on Britain’s Got Talent.
Happy tweeting!
We’ve become obsessed with self. Our self wants to be loved by complete strangers and social media has made us believe that it’s the only route to achieve that love from strangers.
Wrong!
As everyone is doing exactly the same thing as us, it means the love that we believe we receive via likes, comments, hearts, shares or whatever the new trendy term is that’s being invented by new platforms. We have to conclude that none of it is actually real.
It’s fake!
When we respond to people on social media when people are desperate for our attention, the dopamine hit doesn’t last very long at all. It may not even occur when our last post doesn’t achieve the same amount of interaction as the previous one. We could even conclude that if it hasn’t performed as well, we wonder what’s wrong with us and a small depression hit might actually occur instead of a dopamine hit.
Happy hearting!
We’ve all decided to do it, “content, content, content” is the biggest buzzword on the Internet. And we’re all totally petrified for missing out on this trend.
But what if this isn’t the answer, if we know that the average attention span is only 20 seconds, why do we continue publishing so much content, there’s just no proof that it even works.
Everyone’s busy creating content in order to feel that they are becoming a thought leader and that will lead ultimately to customers interested in your products and services, which leads to money and an interesting lifestyle, which potentially will lead to happiness.
And that is the ultimate goal, ‘happiness’.
Happy writing!
I heard a statistic the other day, every day 50,000 new blogs are started. In a working year that amounts to around 13 million blogs. The majority of those blogs are vanity projects, they are unlikely to be seen by anyone or rather be found by anyone.
Unless you are going to spend advertising dollars or pounds to get your blog seen it will probably become your little writing platform and that’s all.
Of course big corporates do spend millions promoting their blog or news channel, they believe that their customers or followers want to read their stuff.
Think about the amount of digital words you read in a day. I’m not talking about the Facebook posts, but you may wish to include that too. Yes, me too, I have no idea but if I were to make a guess it’s likely to be a maximum of 1000 words. That would be the very maximum. And yes I would include in to that any social media, although I’m no longer active on Facebook, so it excludes that, but I am including the Apple news app, which I scan very quickly.
Our attention span is suggested as being only between 8 and 59 seconds. I never understand why they give this spread, are we then supposed to calculate for ourselves the medium?
My personal guess is that it’s realistically around just 20 seconds and that’s exactly why I started creating a weekly cartoon, which is exactly 20 seconds.
Sure I’m still writing, but I have shortened my blogs considerably and yes for me I do believe they are my vanity project. I never wanted to blog, I didn’t consider myself as a writer and as English is not my first language I worried whether I would ever be able to pull it off. I’m pleased to say I have managed to train myself to write regularly now.
I did stop writing on my own blog and instead moved here to Medium as even though I don’t get that much engagement, at least the chances of being seen are greater.
Happy creating!
The customer is King (Queen)…but only if it suits us.
Corporations, small, large and micro are after one thing, your money!
Whether you are selling to consumers, involved in business to business dealings, selling on market stalls or an ecommerce hustler, you exist primarily to sell something in return for money.
That money pays for your expenses in trying to sell your stuff and then pays you and your employees’ wages so they can live in happiness.
Wrong!
Money doesn’t make anyone happy, it has been researched many times over, sure money helps, but it doesn’t make anyone happy as such.
Even Kings and Queens through the ages who’ve had it all, fame, power and money, but the one thing they didn’t have, guaranteed happiness.
Even making your customer King won’t make them happy either.
We often believe that in order to keep loyal customers we need to make sure they are happy and go out of our way to make sure they stay with us. Corporations go through huge expense in making sure that clients stay with them. They wine and dine them, organise events for them to attend, free tickets to sports matches and all in the hope and desire that they will stay with them for a lifetime. After all a loyal customer is a sure bet for profits.
And all those activities just make your products and services more expensive and inevitably increases the sales price to them, at which point they start looking elsewhere.
If we truly believe that the customer is King (Queen), we need to provide a fair price that sits well with the client, is competitive, honest and transparent. No frills, no extras, no entertainment, presents, gift cards, corporate hand outs, just honest and authentic business.
Practice this with outstanding customer service at every step of their journey and they will be a loyal customer for a very long time. And if the price hurts at any stage, tell them to speak with you and you will do what you can to assist them even on a temporary basis and they will do the same for you too. True partnership.
Happy selling!
When Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un met, they appreciated each other so much, it didn’t seem that real. There is a theory of course in NLP that in order to build rapport with someone you have to match their behaviour, tone of voice, mannerism etc. And as we know that’s exactly what Trump did with his ‘fire and fury’ and ‘rocket man’ statements.
They probably took a liking to each other because they are in fact so similar. Here they are sharing cuddly toys.
The Trump and Jong Un summit was a great success.
[embed]https://youtu.be/4gY13V0quwc[/embed]
“You’ve got to face the fact there may now be a meltdown. OK? I don’t want anybody to panic during the meltdown. No panic. Pro bono publico, no bloody panic. It’s going to be all right in the end.”
This was the secretly recorded statement Boris made during a debate on Brexit. It reminded us of Dad’s Army’s famous statement by Lance Corporal Jones, ‘Don’t Panic, Don’t Panic!’.
[embed]https://youtu.be/9X_R_284pog[/embed]
This is the spell that Harry Potter uses when he’s in a duel.
This how I feel sometimes when I’m duelling against the manipulation of the internet, email marketing and advertising.
No matter what I do I’m bombarded with these messages every day. They suggest that we are exposed daily to 5000 marketing messages. We don’t even know it’s happening to us.
A connection of mine Nolan Clemmons posted this fabulous graphic (see below) illustrating the routes that corporations use to manipulate us using email and the internet. Once they have us in their sales funnel they will bombard us with adverts wherever we browse, in our email inboxes and then eventually by phone.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe the Internet is a great invention, I’m an advocate a believer and yet I also believe that tech companies have carefully examined us humans as targets and data sets to be manipulated and controlled.
Governments actually love Facebook, they may suggest all sorts of action for data leaks, privacy hacks etc., but they themselves are the biggest users of searching for individuals using these technologies. I’ve sat in front of cyber security experts that have shown me a whole host of hacks they use to get the intel that governments, security firms, the police, MI5, the FBI, NSA, GCHQ and the CIA need in order to locate criminals. Well they can adopt these techniques for all of us too, for any of us. On the day of publishing this, I received this email.
By: Sarah Miller — Citizens Against Monopoly
Facebook Inc. is inviting Capitol Hill staffers to Washington DC’s “newest, most exclusive event venue” for free food and drinks. Events like this enable Facebook to peddle influence in the halls of power, and keep lawmakers from cracking down on its abuse of our democracy. In the first quarter of 2018, Facebook spent $3.3 million lobbying the U.S. government, more than ever before. That’s a key part of how it builds power and evades accountability, and events like this one are part of the process. At “A Place to Connect,” Facebook’s executive and top lobbyists will be schmoozing the people who are supposed to represent us, and trying to bamboozle Congress into believing that the company’s reforms are for real. For instance, a former corporate lawyer who is now Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer will try to argue that Facebook is stepping it up on privacy — all actual evidence to the contrary.
Sign the Freedom From Facebook petition. Tell the Federal Trade Commission to break up Facebook’s monopoly: https://freedomfromfb.com
You know when you get that sinking feeling, that what you’ve been doing on the Internet for over a decade in order to be noticed, get found and help your own small business is now catching up with you and the realisation that corporations are using all your data to make millions, no sorry, billions.
Today I sat through a presentation by the UK CEO of Cisco and he told us that in 2018, that’s right now, there are 18 billion devices connected to the internet, by 2020 it will be 50 billion and by 2030 it will be 500 billion, that’s ½ trillion devices connected to the internet. And that’s not just mobile phones by the way, of course it couldn’t be.
He also said there are more mobile phones in the world compared to toothbrushes. What a ridiculous statistic that is, but it’s true!!
Happy brushing!
Just saw this interview with Jaron Lanier on Channel 4 news in the UK. He confirms the manipulation point.
Privacy is dead, it’s official. Even when you delete all your data everywhere you know it’s being held, your data will be there until way after your death. It’s like plastic. Tiny little microscopic particles of your data will live on forever.
Well at least until we blow up the earth or it self-destructs into a fireball of internet mayhem.
After watching a 2013 documentary “Terms and Conditions May Apply” on Netflix, realising it was released 5 years ago and probably made a few years earlier then that, I now know without a shadow of doubt that my data, which I so willingly shared with so many websites and organisations, is being used and abused the world over.
The worst thing is I don’t even know how it’s being used and what profits are being made as a result.
I was the Social Media and Internet advocate, I was so excited and delighted when I first discovered it all, so happy that now we could talk to people all over the world and make relationships with strangers we’d never met previously at the drop of a hat. or maybe I should call it the ‘data hat’ or is it ‘data hack’?
Actually who cares, billions of people now adore the internet and in order to use it successfully, we have to give away every tiny bit of data about ourselves.
Happy surfing!
When I look inside
It reveals its ugly head
Dare I face it
Dare I chase it
Will it confront me
Or will I confront it
Those thoughts are not my own
They come in from foreign places
They still belong with me
I still have to face them
Is there a message hidden
Something to uncover within
Reveal it to others
With excruciating pain
Never mind, it will go away
To rear it’s ugly head again
It’s time to step up
To believe in myself
To share with the world
My vulnerable self
When I first saw adverts on TV, when I was a young boy in Amsterdam, I thought they were magical. Those short stories advertising usually food and stuff you’d like to own were mesmerising and actually very memorable. Well they repeated them over and over, day after day, many times during an evening and therefore they just stuck in your mind, potentially, forever.
I still remember that in between each advert they presented a lion character and he did strange things in between each advert. I was also very interested in seeing what he would do in between the adverts as well as the adverts themselves. Here is an example of a Dutch advert, advertising Dutch Peanut Butter. Notice the Lion’s antics before and after. I now realise that the Lion, played a massive part in getting you to stay watching and locking in a massive hook into your brain.
[embed]https://youtu.be/iy6AhWkSKo8[/embed]
After all, adverts are short interventions in your brain, they get lodged into your memory banks for recall at a later date. Have you ever found yourself walking around a shop and noticing a product that you actually didn’t need, but you still bought it? You may not have been able to make the association in that moment, you may not make any association to the advert ever, but the signal was still there without you even noticing, the signal to buy something you actually didn’t need.
Happy shopping!
You are already the most powerful storyteller walking on the planet, the only problem is you don’t realise it yet. As you are reading this text, your mind is more than likely starting to wander in different directions, you may be reading these words for sure, but what happens to those words when they integrate with your brain is something totally unique.
The words you are reading will only make sense when they match up with the stories you have created inside the depths of your neurons, which of course reside in your brain.
All of us have the ability to make sense of things that are happening around us and we do this through capturing short stories about the times, places, people and things that we observe, including the words that you are reading right now.
You have to create visual cues in your brain for many things and when you add some emotion and feeling to those visuals it will have a better chance of hard-wiring there. When our neurons hard-wire they stay inside our long-term memory for longer.
Stories when told well, will engender some emotion and feeling inside of you and when it does, that’s THE most powerful way for it to lay down new memory neurons. Therefore when you share stories make them relatable, memorable, different, unusual and stand out.
I love the following quote, it’s the one I always recall when creating stories.
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
~ Maya Angelou
Happy storytelling!
I would like to express my gratitude to you as a follower in my network here on Medium.
I have no idea if you’ve actually managed to read my Typewriting publication, but if you have and you’ve engaged with any of the short articles, I truly appreciate you.
If ever you’d like me to write about something you are curious about, do reach out and ask me. I would love to practice my writing, research and analysis on topics my followers would like to hear more about. Topics, I am happy to write about are, storytelling, marketing, engagement, whiteboard animation, mindfulness and minimalism. But I’m happy to contribute on other topics too. I am never short on opinions or advice.
Thank you so much and I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards, Michael
ps. I just discovered that I can send these letters to any followers of my publication on Medium. I assure you that I will not make it a regular habit to email and you can manage your email settings as well.
And fame, that’s what we’re supposed to be striving for correct? I was reminded about how it could turn out when I watched an interview on Recode’s YouTube channel, during their 2018 Code Conference, with Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg and colleague Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s CTO. You will know what they talked about, it’s been the most talked about technology internet event of 2018, followed closely by GDPR in the EU.
They likely have $$millions in the bank and maybe $$billions in stock options on top of that.
And they didn’t look happy, not in the slightest. They were being interviewed by the very tough interviewer Kara Swisher and being asked some very very tough questions, which actually they avoided mostly to answer completely.
If you wish to fill up 45 minutes of your time, you can watch it below.
[embed]https://youtu.be/i3QBy5T0qxw[/embed]
I have compassion for them, I truly have. Here you are working for the biggest Social Media company on the planet with billions of users and your greed and the greed of your shareholders has gotten the better of everyone involved with creating this monster of a company.
Can you truly be happy when your Uber drives you home after a long day of grilling by the media, accusing you of making too many mistakes, having to constantly apologise and promising that you’re going to do better? That must takes its toll on your human nature. Even when you might believe that it’s not you who is singularly responsible, you’re going to feel like you are, even when you are part of a team. After all you can’t let the side down and point the finger and say, it was his fault, why should I be taking the blame and all the media hassle?
Well, because you decided in a moment of madness that you wanted to work for the most famous social network in the world and you did actually sign up to take the good with the bad. The good has happened, your bank account is overflowing with more money then you know what to do with and now the bad is showing it’s ugly head.
There were a couple of times that both Sheryl and Mike solicited some sympathy from the interviewers and the audience. Mike suggested ‘I’m not trying to be one of the people that’s fired over all of this tonight’, brave thing to say actually with your boss sitting next to you. Sheryl asked if Kara had read her book. Her book is about the death of her husband and how she had to deal with that, it’s called Option B. They were looking for compassion but they didn’t get any. Maybe because we judge them for what they have and not for who they are as human beings?
Fortune is never what it lives up to be, fame is probably even worse. If you want adoration and feeling of wealth, love and respect for who you are and be satisfied with what you have right in this moment then look no further then yourself. If you can realise and see that you’re already happy when suffering is absent then you actually have it all. No fortune or fame will ever achieve that.
Happy trying!
‘Unhelpful thoughts that are not True’.
This was my response to a question posed inside a LinkedIn group asking: ‘What’s standing in the way between you and the person you most want to be?’
I’ve realised over my young years that unhelpful thoughts get me into all sorts of trouble with myself. Usually there’s nobody else involved it’s all my own doing. It stops me from moving forward, it stops me from staying in the moment, I overthink stuff and arrive at conclusions that are never reality.
Where does this come from?
How does this manifest?
How can I change it?
It’s as a consequence of years of self-programming that we do to ourselves, repeated thoughts that are not true become truths in your own reality. The more you think of something the more it gets hard-wired in our neural pathways. Tony Robbins has an acronym for it, NAC, Neuro-associative conditioning.
There is also another famous saying, which sums up what happens in your brain when you continuously think the same untruths.
Imagine each thought is a neuron, maybe a new one or likely an old one, because you’ve been thinking this stuff for a while. So when you think that thought a neuron fires with another neuron that then concludes it is the truth. Very likely it’s not, but you’ve just created that connection. Repeat the same thought over and over and those neurons fire over and over too.
‘Neurons that fire together wire together’.
Once wired together it’s very hard to get them apart. The same process that wired them together needs to commence to unwire them. So repeated thoughts of the opposite of the untruth are needed in order to lose the wired connection and create a new neural pathway instead. For example, the untruth of ‘I won’t amount to anything’ could be replaced with ‘I am perfect as I am in this very moment’. Repeat that thought over and over and eventually the other one will one day stop appearing in your thoughts. It sounds great in theory doesn’t it? Doing it is a much harder thing.
Happy thinking!
I am reading or rather listening to an audible book titled ‘The Art of Happiness’ by The Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler. Howard brings a Western perspective to Happiness and the two have a lively conversation about many issues related to happiness and the mind.
I have only listened to 1½ hours of a 10 hour book and it’s already having a profound effect on me.
‘Happiness is the absence of suffering’, a quote that will live with me forever.
How about looking at your day and reviewing it in terms of percentage of suffering vs percentage of happiness. This could be a fabulous measurement in terms of reflecting on how your mind behaves. More suffering each day will inevitably lead to depression, disease and discomfort at some stage. More happiness each day will lead, well, to more happiness longer term. Inevitably a longer life without disease or discomfort.
So what amounts to suffering?
This is just a starter for a list and feel free to add to it if you wish, I am sure you can think of more, but actually is there anything else?
Happy suffering?
It’s in the noticing
I notice
It’s in the reflecting
I reflect
It’s in the walking
I’m making progress
It’s in the fearing
I’m standing still
It’s when the suffering
Takes hold
It’s when the doubting
Slows me down
But in the absence
There’s happiness
And in the absence
There’s no suffering
I received this email from Citizens Against Monopoly.
A new story from the New York Times exposes yet another way Mark Zuckerberg has abused user trust to build Facebook into a social-network juggernaut. Facebook secretly “struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.”
Facebook gave the over 60 companies — including Apple, Blackberry, Samsung, Amazon, and Microsoft — “access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders.”
The full list of companies isn’t known.
These secret agreements look like clear violations of the 2011 consent decree Facebook signed with the Federal Trade Commission.
Facebook Inc. enjoys social networking market dominance, with strong majorities of Americans using one or a combination of its desktop and mobile products, which now include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Relatedly, Facebook holds a dominant market position in online advertising due in part to the unregulated collection of user activities through its social-media and tracking products and through data-sharing agreements with other data aggregators.
Story after story is now revealing that Facebook built that its dominance through repeated violations of user privacy and deliberate negligence — or, as Mark Zuckerberg himself liked to call it, by “moving fast and breaking things.”
As Rep. David Cicilline said, “Sure looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress about whether users have ‘complete control’ over who sees our data on Facebook.”
The five members of the Federal Trade Commission, which is the part of our government tasked with overseeing Facebook, has the authority and power to make Facebook safe for our democracy. Armed with the 2011 consent decree, the FTC has the immediate power to impose remedies that will break up Facebook’s monopoly power, give us the freedom to communicate across networks, and protect our privacy.
Together, we will make sure that they do.
Read the New York Times story.
Share the news widely.
Thank you,
CAM is a growing movement to protect America’s (and maybe the world’s) economy and democracy from corporate monopolies that undermine opportunity, competition, choice, and freedom of expression.
ps.
Facebook has a fantastic hack for businesses who wish to advertise directly to you (said sarcastically). All they need is either your email address or phone number and upload that list to Facebook. So now you’ve become a laser targeted object of adverts from people or companies you know. By the way this is not a suggestion to go and do this, but I understand this might happen too. It’s to highlight that once you’re on a list, they can do with it what they wish. Now, you can remove yourself from those lists, although it may already be too late, watch the video on how they do this. You need to go to settings in Facebook, select ‘Ads’, 4th items from the bottom to undo all those companies who have you in their list. Enjoy!
[embed]https://youtu.be/6uOdeWJsF10[/embed]