Does Hypnotism work? Of course.

Does subliminal marketing work? Of course.

Years ago I pulled up two dozen research papers on suggestions and subliminal advertising. Back when I still had access to Elsevier and all the academic stuff. My quick summary: Amazed. Mostly amazed how this research isn’t more widely used.

The key element of marketing – of any kind – is understanding how ideas work in the brain. Creating an effective simplified model so you know what the heck you’re doing.

I’ll give you the two keys of my model:

1 – The core mind only works by increasing degrees of association. To make you like ice cream, I put an image/text/idea of something you ALREADY like next to it. Net result: You like ice cream a bit more and whatever I showed you a bit less. To make you hate ice cream, I put something you already hate next to it. Net result: You like ice cream less and the thing you hate you like a tiny bit more. Picking the concepts carefully you can manipulate the ideas in your audience – pick weakly anchored ideas or just plain wrong ones and it can backfire.

2 – The core mind does not understand negatives. This is ESSENTIAL. Saying “This doesn’t taste like ice cream” is the same as “This tastes like ice cream”. The mind will only really get “Taste Ice Cream”

Back to the motivation of this post… Every time I hear “When you were young” by The Killers I remember I want to write about its lyrics and how they are a PERFECT example of hypnosis. The song is like a full hypnosis session crammed into three and a half minutes. Really, brilliant. Here is a table with the original lyrics on the left side and what your mind interprets when listening to the song. Really amazing. The song basically tells you to remember when you were young, the place you used to live, and imagine a boy that looks like Jesus.

Some years ago (and while having a corporate job, now its a moot point) I decided my social media was mine and mine only and everyone that thought otherwise could go fuck themselves. In practical terms this meant I never tweeted the bullshit my employers wanted me to tweet, posted what anyone wanted and when it came to Facebook my policy was simple: People I work with directly can’t be my FB friends (especially my own business unit), people I worked with in the past yes. This was a very simple rule designed to help me be a little more free in posting what I want to post without having to stop and think if I’m writing about pansies, panties and butterflies while I’m supposed to be paying attention to a “Critical recovery action plan” phone meeting – the real problem there isn’t what I’m writing as much as when I am writing it.

What I’ve learned about the collision of social media and traditional employers can be summed up in four words: Be Yourself. Show Yourself.

Be Yourself: Be yourself – Accept yourself. Forget everybody else. Sounds retarded, yet the moment you stop to think about what others might think, you’re at risk of being phoney and losing your identity.

Show Yourself: You can’t read minds, so stop trying to imagine what others might think. It doesn’t matter if your hobby is collecting Barbie dolls and cross-dressing on the weekends, the only thing that EVERYBODY wants is to know a REAL person. Everybody loves real people because there are way less masks, facades and play-pretend.

Remember: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

This picture today reminded me of the book. So true how we dream of release just to get to tomorrow without actually doing anything today.

I need to make one of these about ad networks instead of browsers…

Its easy to quit your day job when you’re 20-something and you are working retail jobs; or when you have your parents to fall back on; When you could live on government cheese, or when its just you with no family or kids.

In my case quitting was a little more complicated. Its not so easy when you’re already in your 30s, you have your own family, mortgages, can’t go back to your parents, and you already have a six figure salary doing something a little more interesting than Starbucks barista.

How did I do it? Luck x Effort

By 2009 I had gotten an MBA to add to my technical degree and joined the marketing division at IBM. For the first year I had a blast, over time Sandy Carter, the vice president I was working for started slowly DRIVING ME FUCKING NUTS to the point I routinely fantasized how awesome it would be to get fired. One day in August 2009 she asked me to do some shit I can’t recall with grandmaster douchebag Jeremiah Owyang who was then at Forrester, that’s when I read this article. Before learning about internet marketing there I had been selling junk on eBay (circa 2007), and before that I tried a little startup of my own (2004-2005) on the side which flopped. All in all I’ve been trying to give my corporate overlords the boot for almost ten years.

Of course I didn’t spend ten years locked in a basement trying to leave or working on affiliate marketing stuff. In those ten years I had two kids, got an MBA, changed jobs a couple of times, change wife too. The constant was simple: The writing was on the wall, I had to strike out on my own.

Why? Because I planned for greatness, and found myself stuck in mediocrity. At one point in time I was on a great career path, then something happened – I don’t know what or how, still around 2003 or so I realized I was no longer on track to be a Fortune 500 CEO – so time to clock out.

Fast-forward to 2009, that article from Jeremiah Owyang led me to John Chow. Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not endorsing John Chow in any way, hes so full of shit we could terraform Mars with it. Still… One thing led to another…

I tried doing a blog like John Chow’s. I really did. I gave it all… It didn’t work. Along the way I started reading other blogs… PPC.bz among them. The first time I read it I was sure of two things: 1 – There is something good here. and 2 – I had no fucking clue what was going on. I also started reading some of the blogs on the blogroll and slowly piecing together a larger picture of affiliate marketing.

Then every time I read a “Friday Affiliate Interview” story at JonathanVolk.com it felt like a slap in the balls: Here were people doing what I wanted to be doing, successful at what I wanted to do, and I was still sucking bottom. Jonathan Volk himself with his Christian fervor was also motivational, though not in the way he might have hoped for. I thought if someone so slow as to have invisible friends could be successful at internet marketing, that left me the one possibility that maybe, just maybe, all these folks were  smarter and generally better than me. This I refused to believe, yet it provided some serious proof that I was headed in the right direction and a boatload of motivation to prove myself – to myself.

That was 2010… What did I do between 2010 and 2012? Everything.

Top ten tips to quitting your day job with affiliate marketing, based directly on my recent experience:

1 – Focus on ONE THING. One traffic source, one niche, one offer type. Sleep, eat, drink, be the offer, the customer, the traffic – One with the matrix.

2 – The Lifecycle of an Internet Marketer from Adam Bunch and published by Mr. Green was an awesome post, so much so that I printed it out and keep it on my desk.

3 – Your head has to accept the change. I exercised listening to songs about change – Especially awesome in every way is Butterflies and Hurricanes from Muse, that song steals the show for embracing and driving radical change. It says things like “change everything you are”, “Your number has been called” and “You’ve got to be the best”.

4 – Affiliate Summit events. They are an investment, make it. I went to ASW 10, ASC 12 and ASW 13. The value I get from these events keeps GROWING tremendously. Its really not about the sessions for me – Its about the Meet Market and the social networking.

5 – Transparency. The best business relationships I’ve made have come about and are nurtured daily by being completely transparent – about what I promote, where and how. If you think someone is going to steal your stuff, you need to work on your mindset – You are the creator, you have abundance, you make one good thing after another, fear of someone stealing your stuff makes you inefficient and ineffective. At the end of the day there are real human beings behind everything – if you are clean and transparent, people compete to do business with you – because the other folks who are playing “Batman” with cloak-and-dagger hush-hush games are just plain hard to deal with.

6 – Push the envelope without breaking the rules. Forget black-hat shit. Personally, I grew up on TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview original edition from 1996 and packet analyzers. So all the black-hat tricks are within arm’s reach – they will however lead you absolutely nowhere. Sometimes I see very clever black-hat tricks and invariably think to myself how that person could be stacking 10x the cash by using all their knowledge the way its supposed to work.

7 – Stop worrying about what others are doing and get busy. In the beginning I used to “protect” my landing pages, cloak, hide, log IPs and serve up dummy pages, read browser’s histories to see if you were an affiliate. Guess where that got me? Nowhere at all. It wasted a ton of time I could have used for building more campaigns or doing something else. Who’s really going to jack my campaign? Successful affiliates don’t need to jack your crappy landing page, and they will see it anyways sooner or later, because they’re watching the traffic like a cat stalks a mouse. The other folks that can jack your page are unsuccessful affiliates – and guess what they’re going to do with it? Exactly what they’ve been doing so far: Fail. …. Get busy and forget about the idiots.. When you’re too busy to pay close attention to one single campaign, when you’re too busy to work on silly cloaking, that’s when the magic happens.

9 – Understand understanding. You will not understand what the fuck is going on during your first try, or your second, or your tenth. Stare at it. Read it again. And again. And again. Think about it. Think about it again. In time you will start getting valuable insights, these insights only come if you actually do shit and fail repeatedly – They don’t come if you throw up your arms and walk away.

10 – Its all a mind game. Its you against you.

Wrap-up

If you’re willing to bust your balls, this can be very rewarding. I have only one word of warning I shared with my fellow blogging friend Mike Chiasson at ASW – I went from working a lot, to working A LOT MORE. Of course I now work for myself, and work twice as much, twice as hard, and my balls are on the line every day.

This is clearly not for everyone – If somewhere in the dark recesses of your mind you secretly believe you’ll hit a home run and walk home a billionaire with strippers lining up at your door to do tricks on your overworked appendage, you’re sorely mistaken. This is hardball, and hardball isn’t for everyone. As for me… I AM FUCKING LOVING IT!

ADHD Highlights:

• By definition “Alternative”medicine is medicine that has not been proven to work, or has been proven to not work.
• Alternative medicine that has been proven to work is called… Medicine.
• Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.
• Watch Scooby Doo. Throughout history, every mystery ever solved turned out to be… Not Magic.
• Isn’t THIS amazing natural world enough that we have to invent MORE shit?

Finally, someone shoots tobacco companies a torpedo below the water line. Removing branding elements is an idea I’m sure more than one marketer, myself included, has had in thinking how to deal with a problem like tobacco.

We’ll see how fast the rest of the world follows – because they will follow.

Would something like this actually reduce smoking? You betcha. It will destroy their ability to capture new minds.

Question 2 of 2:
Now that you passed Test #1, comes the hard part. Test #2. Can you find the odd one out of THIS screenshot:

Do you have a favorite stuck-in-time site?

Abstract

To see whether estrus was really “lost” during human evolution (as researchers often claim), we examined ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by professional lap dancers working in gentlemen’s clubs. Eighteen dancers recorded their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days on a study web site. A mixed-model analysis of 296 work shifts (representing about 5300 lap dances) showed an interaction between cycle phase and hormonal contraception use. Normally cycling participants earned about US$335 per 5-h shift during estrus, US$260 per shift during the luteal phase, and US$185 per shift during menstruation. By contrast, participants using contraceptive pills showed no estrous earnings peak. These results constitute the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females, in a real-world work setting. These results have clear implications for human evolution, sexuality, and economics.
© 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
PDF download here

Skechers is about to pony up $40 Million to settle FTC charges that it claimed (unsubstantiated) their shoes would make you lose weight, increase heart health, get stronger and longer erections, grow hair, increase breast size and even whiten your teeth if you rub the insole against your gums.

Now really dear old pal’FTC… How about turning the old death ray at the beauty and cosmetics industry?

I didn’t have to go very far to research it – I personally know a couple of Starbucks baristas – and I’m sure this isn’t exclusive to Starbucks at all. Turns out it is very-very-very common for baristas to stick you with decaf if you’re a dick, with the definition of being a dick up to the barista’s particular preference that day, and your chances of getting decaffed for being a douchebag increasing somewhat if you’re going through the drive-thru .

Here’s my secret: When you are rude to service staff I know that, regardless of your present situation, your upbringing was that of a street rat, and in your heart of hearts you’ll always be that rat hoping to show the world how much better you are. This I keep a secret so I can spot the rats from afar and stay away from any dealings with them
whether personal or business – never ever deal with a rat.

Rude Customers Get Decaffed at Starbucks

This is a four-minute clip from Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business and Beyond - an awesome game theory course.

You may ask “What does bounded rationality have to do with buying my stuff or filling out my leadgen?” – Quite simply: Your prospects will apply bounded rationality with whatever you show them – they will limit the amount of mental effort they make when evaluating that landing page you just showed them. Load them with elements that are positively associated in their minds, then give them a call to action when they are tired of analyzing and you’ve got yourself a click, a sale or a lead.

Beautiful.

This part of the 10-hour video course was an amazing “a-ha!” moment for me, because before he even finished stating the example I had shortcutted the logic and figured out the right answer would be “Zero” – which is also a bad answer; it shows I didn’t understand bounded rationality and points to a several wrong assumptions I have likely made many times before.

What was your guess on what the right number would be to win the $100?

BASF Love you too!

To the their credit, the video is good, it has a 70s feel which tells me the target demographic, they are using “affection marketing” – they start off by saying they believe love is a chemical reaction and blah, blah… Anyhow, next time I’m looking for chemicals for my next batch of meth, I’ll be sure to hit up my BASF rep.

Seems like ClickBooth is also departing for Cake.

The cake might be a lie, but it works really well for affiliate marketing.

Their PR handling of the affair looks pretty non-existent I will add. When you fuck up like this, its fairly easy to get back on the right track – you have to have the balls to man-up and do it, though. It involves at least these three simple elements:

1 – Putting a link on the homepage and making a public statement about the outage.

2- Explaining CLEARLY what happened including an “It was us” statement – don’t shift blame.

3- Explaining why this can’t ever-ever-ever ever happen again.

Speaking of apologizing effectively, this is the way Dale Carnegie and several other describe it as a really effective way. Needless to say, this only works once.

Here’s the thought process:

A copyright is intended to aid the creation and dissemination of new works by providing the economic benefit derived from real and artificial scarcity

Scarcity is becoming harder to come by these days. We have abundance.

In the past/present pretty much everything you do is your property and copyright. The default is “protected”

I propose a system where you have to apply for a scarcity license. This isn’t like simply filing for a copyright for a piece of work – this is much more than that – it puts the burden on the creator to DEMONSTRATE that if they are granted an “Artificial Scarcity License”, then society will actually benefit. Society has to benefit here, not the creator of the work exclusively (I have a feeling the Generation Y and Millenial tree huggers would love this idea).

So you could prove that by protecting your motion picture that cost xx to make, next year you’ll be able to provide audiences with a better movie they will enjoy more. If the protection wasn’t there, we’d be limited to youtube clips. You could prove that protecting your blog post will give you a chance to make more good posts. Protecting your software will allow you to make better bug-free software. You might also be able to prove something similar for your music if you’re a music label. You probably won’t be able to prove this unless your business delivers something other than just scarcity and rapes the market. The key here is you have to prove you have been doing this broader improvement of the art, the economics or society, or can at least plausibly deliver on your promise, and will be accountable to do so with your Artificial Scarcity License on the line if you don’t.

In the age of abundance, the burden of proof needs to lie with those that desire scarcity. We will give you scarcity, only when you work in favor of our broader abundance.

PS: No, I’m not actually going to do anything substantial other than write about this. I’m a big-picture whiz-bang idea guy – Let the folks with OCD figure out the details.

PPS: Yes, this is similar to patents.

Assumptions:

• Apache 2.x
• Cpanel
• You have shell access as root

Instructions:

• Step 1 – Download the C API from http://www.maxmind.com/app/c

Specifically:

http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/c/

• Step 2 – Download Apache module from: http://www.maxmind.com/app/mod_geoip

Specifically:

 http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/mod_geoip2/

• Step 3 – Upload both to server as root, login via SSH as root, go to where you put these files and gunzip both, then “tar -xvf” both.

• Step 4 – Go into directory where you just uncompressed the C API to, and execute this (pay attention to leading dot):

 ./configure; make; make install

• Step 5 – Go into the directory for the Apache module and execute this:

apxs -i -a -L/usr/local/lib -I/usr/local/include -lGeoIP -c mod_geoip.c

• Step 6 – Take a look, there is now a line that talks about mod_geoip

 cat /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf |more

• Step 7 – Update distiller with the changes the intaller just made to the Apache configuration (note there is a double-dash “–” before “update”)

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update

• Step 8 – Rebuild the config file

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/build_apache_conf

• Step 9 – Make sure the changes stuck around and didn’t get wiped

cat /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf |more

• Step 10 – Make a backup of httpd.conf

cp /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd-RestoreThisOneIdiot.conf.bkp

• Step 11 – Add this to your httpd.conf – Note that these are my preferences for settings

<IfModule mod_geoip.c>
  GeoIPEnable On
  GeoIPDBFile /usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat IndexCache
  GeoIPScanProxyHeaders On
  </IfModule>

• Step 12 – Rebuild the config file (again)

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update

 /usr/local/cpanel/bin/build_apache_conf

• Step 13 – Make sure the changes stuck around and didn’t get wiped (again)

 cat /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf |more

• Step 14 – Enter the following commands to get the latest City-level database in the right place

cd /usr/local/share/GeoIP/
 wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz
 gunzip -f -c GeoLiteCity.dat.gz > GeoLiteCity.dat

• Step 15 – Go into Cpanel and restart Apache

• Bonus Step – Drink Martini. Make note to invite me one at ASC 2012 or ASW 2013!

Story time:

Years ago I was single and going out to bars with a married friend. He would always want to hit on women, would rarely muster the courage, yet would always be my wingman. Excellent guy yet I couldn’t shake the idea of what the fuck was he doing by my side when he was married – His wife would work for several months out of state. So I started to ask him.

-”What do you think is going to happen now?”

-”I don’t know”

-”Do you think one of these women is going to like you?”

-”Yeah, of course”

-”Then what? What will happen after you talk to her?”

-”Well… Sex?”

-”So what will happen next is one of these women is going to go sleep with you tonight on a one-night-stand out of the blue?”

-”Yeah”

You can guess that never happened. Of course, if you try one million times, you’ll eventually get lucky. Yet luck needs a big helping hand. Beyond the point of this being a setup for him cheating – the sequence he was expecting was unrealistic. Sure, if you’re a PUA (Pick-up-artist) chances are high you’ll sleep with one that night. Yet thats not what my friend was saying or doing.

He was going from stumbling drunk in a bar to a one-night stand with a stranger without the intermediate steps.

This was many years ago. Ever since then I ask myself “What do you think will happen next” all the time – Because I don’t want to be a frustrated drunk bozo.

Forget PUAs and bars, though. This is something you need to ask yourself on every situation you face. Especially if you’re going into something where there is a preconception of results.

For example, you read in John Chow’s blog how he makes $40,000 a month and decide to set up your blog. You write shit, and nothing happens – Guess what, you’ve been Chowed. After you read the inspiring article from Chowderhead and decide to go his route ask yourself.

“And what will happen next?”

You see, even you can’t lie to yourself in the face that bad. Asking the question brings up the obvious: There is no more magic – Harry Potter fucked it all up.

“I am going to build a million dollar a month blog empire! I am signing up to WordPress.com right now”

-”What do you think will happen next?”
“Option a) the entire population of mainland China will click your ads tonight, next week you’ll be on Jay Leno telling the world how to bank with The Google and The AdZen in The Interwebz”
“Option b) You’ll have a brand new blog with a scribble for an article and robots for traffic.”

-”What do you think will happen next?”
-”I will write awesome articles on raising snails”

-”And what next?” “Option a) You’ll start to develop a community or Option b) You’ll get a $50,000 check in the mail from SnailFarms for promoting their product so well”

The idea here isn’t to discourage yourself out of things – on the contrary. The idea is to have realistic expectations about what you are about to see next and what you will do after that. The idea here is to have a plan. To understand “What happens next”.

If you don’t ask yourself that question, you’ll always be surprised of the results no matter what they are – and in most areas of life the result will be disappointing simply because an enormous expectation is being built around everything and every experience by marketers such as myself.

Your customers, your leads (and of course you) are the sum of their lifetime choices, and even the choices of their parents and ancestors – Can’t underestimate the power of cumulative advantages; yet that’s besides the point so we’ll leave the ‘cumulative advantages’ chat for another day.

If your site visitors are going to make the poor choice of the buying the Google Money kit, or take out your Payday loan, they have likely been making poor choices all along in the same vein – So what kind of choices are your potential customers making right now, the day before they head to your highly competitive URL? Or type in that expensive keyword? Find them one day sooner and save a bundle on traffic.

This thinking is similar to trying to create “Personas” – just more direct.

You just HAVE to watch this video. Here’s the source page too.

Gotta love the call to action: “Start your lethal agent training.”

So I go… “Who the fuck is Anik Singal and why would he do such a movie?”…  I visit his site and the first thing I see is the motto “When Life Pushes You… Stand Straigh, Smile & Push Back” – I like it, reminds me of Cave Johnson’s ‘lemmons’ bit… When life gives you lemmons, burn life’s house down! Fast-forward to 1:00 minute on this next video – it is a funny part of Portal 2.

So I dig a little deeper by visiting someone with a nose fine-tuned to the smell of bullshit and a keen disdain for just about anything: PPC.BZ,  best useless affiliate news source out there, and discover Anik actually swore off bullshitting people two years ago. Check it out, its kind of amazing what he admits on the video there, especially since he never stopped doing it.

Here’s the “People buy my lies and expect the magic that I duped them into believing, to actually happen” video. I’m not sure what is more amazing, that he actually did this video or believing your BS to this level. I guess the latter – I wish I could take the blue pill like he does.

Strangely enough, Anik seems to be only a tiny blip on The Salty Droid’s radar.

Now personally it doesn’t matter to me if he is out to scam the planet, the way I see it he keeps the idiots busy. This whole secret agent theme and movie gig is just hilarious, though – Had to share.

• If your bids are high, you’re kinda wasting money and messing your stats.
• If you browse a low-bid/low-activity URL and interact with your pop-up, you end up screwing up your CTR stats.
• If you remember to add a low-traffic unrelated URL to the campaign, you have to contend with two problems: 1- The ad network will sometimes not approve it, for example they might not approve a diet pill pop-up on a seemingly harmless nursing mother website. 2- You have to come up with different URLs that actually exist each time or you’ll really mess up.

Solution for dumb people like myself: A simple .htaccess file that invisibly rewrites ALL requests for anything inside a folder to a simple “TEST” page.

The HTACCESS snippet:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	Options +FollowSymlinks
	RewriteEngine on
	RewriteRule ^(.*)$ test.html [L]
</IfModule>

The Dummy HTML file:

<html>
<body>
This is a test page
</body>
</html>

How to use:

• Hopefully your server runs Apache like most of the web. If you have no clue what your web server runs, give up now before the gurus take all your money.
• Save the HTACCESS snippet to a file named “.htaccess” (lowecase letters, please, and don’t forget the leading period)
• Upload your new .htaccess to a new empty subdirectory, for example “/testingpop” so you can access that directory as “http://mydomain.com/testingpop”
• Save the Dummy HTML file snippet to a file named “test.html”
• Upload test.html to the same directory where you put the new .htaccess file
• When you add targets to a campaign, simply add as a target this subdirectory and append the name of your campaign without any spaces. For example, if you were selling self-confidence courses you might add a url like “http://mydomain.com/testingpop/USA-Grow-your-dick-03″

When you access that target you added to your campaigns on the last step, it will always work, it will always get approved because it just says “This is a test”, it will always have the minimum bid and will always be unique because you used the campaign name, its easy to remember, contains no sodium or CFCs and was never tested on animals although I did kick the dog at random intervals while writing this post just to remind him who the alpha male is around here.

If you had ADD, this is what you’d get from this post:

I kick the dog at random intervals just to remind him who the alpha male is around here

You are not MY customer either.

So stop trying to act like YOU know what THEY want and GO FIND OUT.

It never fails. Every time I tell someone what I do with affiliate marketing, sometimes even other marketers, I get this look of “You are so dumb, that will never work – you are doomed“.

The typical assumptions I find folks make when discussing online marketing:

• “I am normal, most people are normal, so most people act like I do”
• “I would not do X, therefore most people will not do X, therefore your idea is stupid, forget the $50,000 you made off of it, you are crazy”
• “Everyone on the entire planet speaks English, and uses the same sites I do yet somehow I’m the only one who knows there is porn on the net.”
• “We all know the same things. We all want the same things. We all have the same problems.”

Usually I get told I am targeting too narrowly and need to come up with something EVERYONE wants… Like a better Facebook than Facebook – Because we all know the little jew made out like a bandit and we all know we need another networking site. Next time this happens, I’m going to slap my forehead and shout “Of course! Jesus, I gotta get coding now! See ya!”.

This is childish. Every little boy and girl out there doesn’t stop to think that other people have a different set of knowledge and beliefs until they develop a “Theory of mind“. Clearly some adults have a hard time acknowledging world views that are radically different from their own… If this is you, go visit around the world and make an effort to meet the locals you would normally not meet.

The best part of all this is we routinely ignore the subtle cues that tell us we are in the minority – Evidence that you/me/they are not EVERYONE. Here is an example from this morning… I decided to search on Google “Why does time appear to slow down at the speed of light?” from my iPhone. Take a look at the suggested popular queries that start with “Why does…” that I got:

Now if you really were just like your customers, then you would have the hots for your mom, an itchy ass, graying hair, a cat that licks you, a dog that eats your shit, a rotten belly button, a habit of shitting in large bodies of water and a raging urinary infection. Whatever you do, just skip the handshake next time we meet.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we are unable to provide any additional information. Google reserves the right to disable any ads when deemed necessary per the AdWords Terms and Conditions: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder. Again, we apologize for any frustration. Your AdWords account will remain suspended unless you have the ability to edit the content of the sites for which you were previously advertising.

The whole thing is pretty insulting.

Over the past few days there were some really great comments on the original post – with some really good ideas.

Since the BBB channel got nowhere, I decided to file a complaint with the FTC – Federal Trade Commission. The FTC doesn’t attempt to resolve individual complaints – at the same time the FTC can do a lot to solve everyone’s complaints about something like AdWords and their practices – especially as Google gets as big as it is now. The only way for that to happen, though, would be for them to get a bunch of complaints, not just two. I’ll put in my grain of sand and wait for the avalanche. Maybe the FTC will get a hundred complaints over three years and act like they got them all last Tuesday – playing the same time-distortion games Google plays with everyone else.

In case you’re interested, and it helps you file your complaint, here is the full text of the complaint I filed.

Google AdWords service is using misleading and deceptive language, policies and practices with regards to suspending accounts. Furthermore they offer as a way of resolving AdWords service problems a course of action that is either impossible (modify sites you dont own) or would involve committing a crime. They offer no real recourse. They bar you from their advertising program as an individual, for life, and mark accounts that may be associated to your person. This does make me a less valuable professional in real life. If this was the corner coffee shop, that would not be a problem. The problem arises when Google uses these policies that provide no realistic recourse, and at the same time controls the great majority of search traffic worldwide.

I filed a case with Google’s local BBB (the San Jose BBB, case #<withheld>) and received Google’s final reply of  “Your AdWords account will remain suspended unless you have the ability to edit the content of the sites for which you were previously advertising.”  These sites they are referring to are sites I dont own and Im not trying to advertise at all – It has been over two years since I advertised those sites. Google is knowingly acting in a devilishly deceptive manner, while ruining my good name and barring me from their system with no recourse.

Google AdWords is taking permanent and continued action starting June 2011, based on events that took place at least a year ago, which merited a warning in 2010. Google unilaterally escalated the perceived severity of past actions and provides as a possible way of resolution an avenue which Google fully understand is impossible to execute. While Google’s explanations seem rational (‘fix the website’), and it may fully fit within the processes Google has defined, that doesn’t take away nor satisfactorily explain nor resolve the material facts that Google has permanently suspended me personally based solely on activity that took place a year ago, which they reviewed in due time a year ago, and provide no viable course of action to resolve the dispute amicably. “Fixing” a website I don’t own is not a viable course of action and Google insists that is their only acceptable means of resolution, and puts the onus on me. Google is knowingly asking to perform an impossible task, so Google can bar me from their system with the deceptive claim that I am unwilling to fulfill their requirements for compliance.

Google continually cites they “Reserve the right to disable any ads…” That is not an issue here. The issue is that they are barring me for life with no recourse; that is not the same as reserving the right to disable non-compliant ads.

Please give me a call if you have further questions.

To file a complaint with the FTC, just go here and click the big “FTC Complaint Assistant” graphic.

You’ll need a bit of Google’s business details, which they kindly provided via the BBB, and are these:

Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy
Mountain View, CA 94043-1351
Phone: (650) 330-0100

Have fun!

6/22/11 update: Don’t forget to also file your complaint with your state’s Attorney General. You can find your states attorney general webpage (and their online complaint form) right here in the National Association of Attorneys General directory or just Slash it with blekko.

It doesn’t matter if you delete the ads by over-writing them with blanks like I did. It doesn’t matter if you delete the ads, then the ad groups, then the campaigns and all the campaigns in your account and don’t do much of anything for a year. You might as well be advertising child porn to soccer moms during Christmas.

So now you know how to avoid getting banned. Simply put: Never, ever, ever, use AdWords to take users to a page you don’t control. They insinuate they let you get ‘unbanned’ if you correct the pages – which you obviously can’t do if you don’t own them.

Curious to know exactly what happened to my account? Here are the details. If you’re interested in more background, here’s a post with images from the first time they sent me a warning. Note that since about a month before the time of that warning, I haven’t ran a single impression, ad, click, or unpaused any campaigns – all I did was delete my campaigns several months ago and now enter new billing info in the form of a coupon they sent me.

The low-down

I used Google AdWords to advertise fatloss4idiots.com and (another site). Several months after I stopped all my advertising to those sites, on July 8th 2010 I received an e-mail from LPQ-Support@google.com letting me know those two sites violate the landing page guidelines. I had not advertised those sites for several months. They asked me to make changes to the sites. Which I can’t do – fatloss4idiots.com is not my property, so I agree to never advertise them again and delete those campaigns. I have not advertised anything on AdWords since July 2010. All my campaigns have been deleted for several months now. On May 18th I receive an e-mail from Google Adwords (adwords-noreply@google.com) with a $100 coupon, saying “Here’s $100 to come back to AdWords” it seems to be a coupon for people that have not advertised in some time. So I log in to my AdWords account and put the code. The code works fine – $100 is added to my account – and I don’t touch anything else on my account. On June 8th I receive an e-mail that states my AdWords account has been suspended forever. I call their support line and after describing the problem, then I get e-mail saying their decision is final, to not to ask them why or call again. I called them again on Thursday and on Friday I get the same “our decision is final” email with no information or recourse.

Reality check:

To keep the post at the “reality” level, lets keep in mind that all the Google policies and procedures are optional, they can be over-ridden by management, they can be applied selectively, they are defined in one meeting on Monday and changed around on Thursday. Just because someone tells you something is their process, it doesn’t mean it is a law of nature – It means the people you are talking to don’t know or don’t want to help you – it doesn’t mean things can’t be changed. Corollary: Everything changes, its up to you to find out how to make it change the way you want it.

What next?

Not sure. I’m not sure my time or money would be well spent getting this overturned. I haven’t used AdWords for anything for a year now. This is a problem I might have to solve when the need arises. Without an active income stream from them, its hard to justify spending time and resources on this when there are better things to do – I can see it having some strategic value, and it pisses me off ‘to infinity and beyond’ – yet it doesn’t seem to make much business sense to do something with it right now. So… Not sure.

Update 6/15/2011:

After posting on the blog I decided to cut and paste a chunk of this post and send it to Google via the BBB as a complaint. As Mike pointed out, the BBB is useless and powerless. Google had this to say today:

We write in response to {witheld}. We understand that your AdWords account was recently suspended. Paused ads for disabled sites are still subject to review by our team. Please keep in mind that pausing or deleting ads related to the disabled sites will not automatically re-enable the ads nor remove the violation history. Our team has confirmed that this suspension was correct. And the account will remain suspended unless the violating sites are brought into compliance according to our Site and Quality guidelines. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but unfortunately we cannot provide any further assistance in this matter. Google’s primary objective is to provide safe, relevant experiences for our users. The decision to suspend your account was made after careful review of your account and the low quality landing page experiences promoted through your ads. We do apologize that this issue came to our attention shortly after you received a promotional offer. Our Terms and Conditions, to which you agreed to when you signed up for AdWords, state that Google reserves the right to disable any ads when deemed necessary. You can review these Terms and Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
Initial Response Summary
We have reviewed the AdWords account and confirmed that the suspension was correct.

This is a standard mind-fuck response. In case you’re wondering what’s going on here: Its a set-up. They’ve pulled a process out of their ass that makes sure you can’t fix your situation, yet it sounds reasonable and they offer no alternatives. In other words, they do whatever they please – Like that was news.

So I wrote them a little response, really for the principle because I don’t want the BBB to say “Yay! Successfully resolved the case!” when what happened was nothing. My rebuttal:

The explanation about the internal processes of Google does not satisfactorily resolve the material facts: Google has taken permanent and continued action starting June 2011, based on events that took place at least a year ago, which merited a warning in 2010. Google has unilaterally escalated the perceived severity of past actions and provides as a possible way of resolution an avenue which Google fully understand is impossible to execute. While Google’s explanation seems rational, and it may fully fit within the processes Google has defined, that doesn’t take away nor satisfactorily explain nor resolve the material facts that Google has permanently suspended this account based solely on activity that took place a year ago.

So, next up should be where Google says “Lalalalalala I’m not listening! You are gone!” and case closed. Stay tuned.

Inspired by Finch’s hilarious “How not to crack an international market” post, I decided to share this juicy spreadsheet. I got it during my MBA, probably from one of the professors – I had never seen it before, and have never seen it posted since. The spreadsheet form comes from Neil Sandford who got permission from the original researcher, Professor Geert Hofstede.

What’s in it an how it was made

(Original simple article in Chinese)

These ideas were first based on a large research project into national culture differences across subsidiaries of a multinational corporation (IBM) in 64 countries. Subsequent studies by others covered students in 23 countries, elites in 19 countries, commercial airline pilots in 23 countries, up-market consumers in 15 countries, and civil service managers in 14 countries. These studies together identified and validated five independent dimensions of national culture differences:

Power distance, that is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This represents inequality (more versus less), but defined from below, not from above. It suggests that a society’s level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders. Power and inequality, of course, are extremely fundamental facts of any society and anybody with some international experience will be aware that ‘all societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others’.

Individualism on the one side versus its opposite, collectivism, that is the degree to which individuals are inte-grated into groups. On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word ‘collectivism’ in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state. Again, the issue addressed by this dimension is an extremely fundamental one, regarding all societies in the world.

Masculinity versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of roles between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found. The IBM studies revealed that (a) women’s values differ less among societies than men’s values; (b) men’s values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women’s values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women’s values on the other. The assertive pole has been called ‘masculine’ and the modest, caring pole ‘feminine’. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men’s values and women’s values.

Uncertainty avoidance deals with a society’s tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity; it ultimately refers to man’s search for Truth. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, different from usual. Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious level by a belief in absolute Truth; ‘there can only be one Truth and we have it’. People in uncertainty avoiding countries are also more emotional, and motivated by inner nervous energy. The opposite type, uncertainty accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many currents to flow side by side. People within these cultures are more phlegmatic and contemplative, and not expected by their environment to express emotions.

Long-term versus short-term orientation: this fifth dimension was found in a study among students in 23 countries around the world, using a questionnaire designed by Chinese scholars It can be said to deal with Virtue regardless of Truth. Values associated with Long Term Orientation are thrift and perseverance; values associated with Short Term Orientation are respect for tradition, fulfilling social obligations, and protecting one’s ‘face’. Both the positively and the negatively rated values of this dimension are found in the teachings of Confucius, the most influential Chinese philosopher who lived around 500 B.C.; however, the dimension also applies to countries without a Confucian heritage.

Scores on the first four dimensions were obtained for 50 countries and 3 regions on the basis of the IBM study, and on the fifth dimension for 23 countries on the basis of student data collected by Bond. Power distance scores are high for Latin, Asian and African countries and smaller for Germanic countries. Individualism prevails in developed and Western countries, while Collectivism prevails in less developed and Eastern countries; Japan takes a middle position on this dimension. Masculinity is high in Japan, in some European countries like Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and moderately high in Anglo countries; it is low in Nordic countries and in the Netherlands and moderately low in some Latin and Asian countries like France, Spain and Thailand. Uncertainty avoidance scores are higher in Latin countries, in Japan, and in German speaking countries, lower in Anglo, Nordic, and Chinese culture countries. A Long Term Orientation is mostly found in East Asian countries, in particular in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.

The grouping of country scores points to some of the roots of cultural differences. These should be sought in the common history of similarly scoring countries. All Latin countries, for example, score relatively high on both power distance and uncertainty avoidance. Latin countries (those today speaking a Romance language i.e. Spanish, Portuguese, French or Italian) have inherited at least part of their civilization from the Roman empire. The Roman empire in its days was characterized by the existence of a central authority in Rome, and a system of law applicable to citizens anywhere. This established in its citizens’ minds the value complex which we still recognize today: centralization fostered large power distance and a stress on laws fostered strong uncertainty avoidance. The Chinese empire also knew centralization, but it lacked a fixed system of laws: it was governed by men rather than by laws. In the present-day countries once under Chinese rule, the mindset fostered by the empire is reflected in large power distance but medium to weak uncertainty avoidance. The Germanic part of Europe, including Great Britain, never succeeded in establishing an enduring common central authority and countries which inherited its civilizations show smaller power distance. Assumptions about historical roots of cultural differences always remain speculative but in the given examples they are quite plausible. In other cases they remain hidden in the course of history.

The country scores on the five dimensions are statistically correlated with a multitude of other data about the countries. For example, power distance is correlated with the use of violence in domestic politics and with income inequality in a country. Individualism is correlated with national wealth (Per Capita Gross National Product) and with mobility between social classes from one generation to the next. Masculinity is correlated negatively with the share of their Gross National Product that governments of the wealthy countries spend on development assistance to the Third World. Uncertainty avoidance is associated with Roman Catholicism and with the legal obligation in developed countries for citizens to carry identity cards. Long Term Orientation is correlated with national economic growth during the past 25 years, showing that what led to the economic success of the East Asian economies in this period is their populations’ cultural stress on the future-oriented values of thrift and perseverance.

Enjoy. If you are using Excel 2010 or higher, you’ll have to allow editing to be able to interact with the charts. Here’s the spreadsheet:

Creamed your pants yet?

That’s what Integrate does for me. They are the wide open field of affiliate networks and marketing. Instead of fighting for table scraps with three thousand other hungry affiliate dogs, you get to go hunt your own prey in the whole wide world.

The catch, and some background:

A few weeks back a great affiliate manager introduced me to Integrate.com – First I have to say “THANK YOU” that quite literally rocked!

Now here’s the catch -  I honestly wasn’t sure they would let me in to the platform since they are clearly geared towards high-end businesses – So don’t get your hopes flying high as a kite here, you might bounce like a rubber ball on this one. I can’t stress enough how much weight human relationships and your connections will have here – and everywhere that matters, really. How you handle human relationships is what separates momma’s pimple-ladden garage-dwellers from the men – The men know this, the boys are in denial, and the men know the boys are in denial. Enough cheap bullshit… Here is where that affiliate manager friend made all the difference in the world.

Here’s what sets Integrate on a whole ‘nother level:

• You can chat/email with the people who own the offer you are promoting
• You can negotiate a payout increase directly with the offer owner based on your lead quality and your marketing expenses – You can create a win-win!
• You now see and negotiate your “cap” for each offer. You can have a set allocation (in number of leads or conversions) per day and per month of each offer – This is part of the initial and ongoing negotiation with the owner of the offer. This helps control cashflow immensely.
• You can ask the owner of the offers for permission to run in some traffic source or promotion method they didn’t even dream of
• You can ask for other countries, other demographics, other ANYTHING
• You have TWO people helping you get balling – a product specialist to help you find deals that work for you and even negotiate terms, and an account support person for the daily activities.

The offers Integrate has fall into one of four main categories:

• CPA (Cost per Action): You get paid when the user completes and action on the offer website. This is the bread-and-butter of just about every other affiliate network out there.
• CPL (Cost per Lead): This is sometimes called “Host and Post”. You own the webpage that captures the information and then send that information over the Integrate platform to the offer owner.
• CPIC (Cost per Inbound Call): You get paid when you get someone to call a pre-set phone number.
• CPLT (Cost per Live Transfer): If you have a call center, you can transfer hot leads to the offer’s call center and get paid when the caller stays on the line X number of seconds.
• CPFCLD (Cost per Full Contact Lap Dance): You wish.

The variety and ways of promoting all these just boggles the mind – and the Intgrate platform has a checkbox and offers for pretty much anything you can think of.

Advertising networks feel cramped with retards and brand advertisers when you try to promote something and the costs are out of this world. Then you go to the 2nd tier ad networks and you can’t target shit because the traffic volume is so low you don’t even know if its working, that’s if they have any decent targeting controls.

Now imagine having the medium’s minimum cost and the ultimate in flexibility.  This is what happens when YOU set the rules of the game. Co-reg? No problem. Incent? Sure thing. Want to roll your own content lock? Go ahead. Promote in Swahili to Tanzania? Just ask!

There is only one downside to Integrate – It can take you a couple of days to negotiate with some offers – you get your own terms, your own pages, your own cap, etc – at the expense of some planning before hand; So sometimes you can’t just decide to go live spur-of-the-moment, throw some traffic and see what happens. In this system you also have a reputation to keep track of, and you can view the reputation of people putting in offers too!

Which brings me to the brilliance of Integrate… The trust system.

A key to dominating a market is to own a trust system, ideally the first one, like eBay. Inside of Integrate you can actually see the different companies putting offers, their descriptions, their volume, their volume of leads and the volume of returned leads per each and every single campaign they put up. Conversely, they can see YOU – they can see how many leads you are driving per month, they can see how many leads you sent that were returned to you for bad quality, heck they can even see the average of how long it takes you between the time you agree to run a campaign and when you start sending it live traffic.

ADHD summary:

• Integrate is not a CPA network, its a unique platform.
• It rocks.

Update 6/1/2011:

I see some folks took me up on this network -  Leave me a comment with your impressions if you get approved!

Sometimes its hard to visualize the possibilities without an example. So here’s one, without factoring in negotiating anything – just taking stock offers:

Grab a campaign that promotes a Dell or Hewlett Packard webinar (there are tons) promote it on Facebook to people working in IT. You create the landing page where you capture the user’s information, use Google website optimizer to optimize the heck out of it. When the user submits the information – where do they go while you send their data out? They go to a page that thanks them for the webinar submission, confirm their data just in case they typed it wrong, and asks them if they are interested in furthering their education with a Master’s or PhD. As they fill that out or confirm your pre-fill, you can ask them if they are also interested in the ITNews (I made this one up) newsletter that takes co-reg – since you have all the data, all you have to do is provide them with a little checkbox. You could do this last co-reg bit up-front too.

Disclosure: I don’t do paid posts, nor do I whore my blog. If the review here was valuable, you may use my links as a thank you. If it wasn’t valuable, you got the wrong blog – keep staring at the titties and ignore the text.

Ever had what people call a “religious experience”? Here’s a secret: Its all in your head.

Here’s how to have a transcendental/religious experience – it takes about 90-120 minutes and I guarantee you will never forget it:

1 – Sit straight on a chair or the floor staring a blank wall – close enough that you only see a blank wall. Make sure you will not be disturbed or interrupted at all.

2 – Turn on some ambient instrumental music, this will come in handy later.

3 – Imagine you are flying.

4 – Keep at it for 90-120 minutes. Nothing much will happen the first hour – brace yourself for the final 20 minutes.

Yup, that’s all there is to it folks – your brain does the rest for you.

But wait, there’s more.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get this epic endorphin boost without the two hours of sitting in a chair doing nothing?
Of course – and there is a way, without shooting heroine. You’re probably not going to like it, though, since it involves work.

All you have to do is repeat this experience once every day or every other day for about two weeks. Always play the same music. After that the first few tries you’ll notice the time it takes to feel like you just creamed your pants with joy becomes shorter and shorter, and the effect quite a bit stronger.

After the two weeks, you’ll probably be able to conjure up an experience like this in a matter of 15-30 minutes or less.

Do it enough times an eventually you’ll get to the point you don’t need the music – it helps, though you don’t need it.

Eventually you’ll get to the point you can get a high virtually anytime, anywhere, while doing almost anything. Walking, weightlifting, anything where you can have some spare brain cycles – heck even typing this blog post.

One word of caution – Pick your “trigger” music well. New Age music worked for me. I say pick it carefully because hearing the music will trigger a conditioned response and get you flying high whether you wanted it or not – You don’t want to pick something popular.

Pavlov would be proud.

Brutal Honesty

Its that simple, really. Plain old honesty.

Most of the time folks asking about getting approved into CPA/CPS networks are afraid they won’t get accepted since they have very little experience. The formula that has worked perfectly for me is just being completely honest.

If you have zero experience, just say it.

Think about what will happen if you manage to convince your interviewer that you have more experience than you really do, or that you can crap smoking hot leads out of your ass.  What next? Three likely scenarios:

1. Nobody will notice or care
2. Your affiliate manager will notice you’re a tool and don’t fit the network – At best you’ll get shit treatment.
3. You’ll get booted out, never to be let back in.

What would happen if you are brutally honest and tell them: “I was just reading this blog with naked chicks and….”. Two likely scenarios:

1. They’ll approve you.
2. They’ll tell you to come back with some battle scars and you can re-apply some time down the road.

Brutal honesty in this case means that:

• If you have only done SEO with Clickbank and nothing ever worked – and hope the network CPA offers work better – Say so.
• If you just want to add the same offer from multiple networks to a rotation, say it.
• If you just read a blog and have no clue where your ass is, say it.

You can’t lose with the truth on this one. Worst case, you’ll come back some other time. Best case, they’ll help you learn what you need.

And the truth shall get you dough…

PS: If you do things even half right, as the affiliate managers you work with start moving around networks and companies, they’ll hit you up to see if you’re interested in working with them at their new place – This can open some pretty interesting doors for you.

Never.

This is easily the best movie I have ever seen.

People blessed with ADHD simply watch this trailer and move on

Mr Nobody tells a story the way I personally view reality.

I’ll be brutally honest here: I’m putting my money on 98% of people not being able to grasp half the concepts the movie is based on. That shouldn’t keep anyone from enjoying the pretty pictures, though – its a beautiful film every way you look at it. Now that I’ve finished insulting everyone, lets move on to the movie…

Mr Nobody shows the life of a person who:

1. Is conscious across multiple parallel worlds in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics.
2. Can see / move across a Static Interpretation of Time
3. Knows everything at once thru the static interpretation of time and the many-worlds interpretation, so he can unravel determinism behind the chaos in chaos theory.
4. Weights potential against realization – and has a hard time making decisions.

Here’s one of Nemo’s main choices:

Trust me on this: Pick the one on the right

Like the movie’s main character ‘Nemo’, I will play in my mind dozens of possible outcomes and try to figure out the likelihood of each – I hope lots of other people do this too or we’re fucked. Years ago when dating and creating an online profile I had to put up a “range” of ages I wanted to date and match against, I sat down for a few hours and ran through my mind the most likely scenarios of what would happen with women of each and every single particular age, that way I could determine how low and how high I would go… Of course I don’t do this when choosing the flavor of my next ice cream – for big deals like that, its worth it to think and decide. Just like Nemo does with Jean, Elise and Anna.

Nemo's difficult decision at "Chance" station

Which brings me to another interesting area of the movie: Decisions. Nemo has a very hard time choosing – he seems to want to make a perfect choice, and given that that is extremely difficult, he hesitates and tries to stretch the amount of time where a decision remains potential and unrealized – by NOT choosing. While personally I do quite the opposite – I do it for the exact and opposite reason the movie shows – to remove potential and bring reality – its amazing to see and imagine what life would be on the flip-side.

"You have to make the right choice. As long as you don't choose, everything remains possible."

What also struck a chord was the idea of clearly identifying decisions. I call them simply “decision points” in my life – and I keep a close eye on my decisions – I also make sure I clearly identify if a decision is in the past, present or future and act accordingly – Unlike Nemo I can’t remember the future so I guess my best and try my best – However I sometimes screw up on purpose – If I could only really control myself.

The movie does not at any point explore the ideas and implications of simulated realities – That would have probably been one twist too many. There are passages that look surreal and hint at all of the reality we have just seen being in the mind of the child trying to make a decision about which parent to go with. He seems to choose none, runs off to a field and blows on a leaf – literally using the “butterfly effect” from chaos theory to alter the events of his life years down the road.

The leaf he blows at age nine alters his reality at age 34

There are loads of things Nemo does in the movie that I sometimes do myself. This made me feel not-so-crazy. Every couple of months I’ll sit quietly in a particular place in a particular park and try to imagine what my future self would tell me if he could speak to me. Then I imagine what I would tell myself if I could speak to myself in the past.

Mr Nobody Talking to Himself

There was one bit of the movie which boggled my mind for about three weeks: Why did they open the film with an explanation of Pigeon Superstition? … Just to say “what did I do to deserve this”? – that opening needs no pigeons.

Religious Pigeon

Pigeon superstition is in every human being – Ever heard of cargo cults? Religion? Well… What if… What if what we hold as basic truths – from gravity and throwing a ball up and having it fall down, to every part of our existence was our own interpretation of something outside of our awareness and comprehension?

I’m not talking about bearded gods and flying saucers -I’m talking about being too retarded to understand the very nature of our existence. That seems a lot more likely than a deluding myself the epicenter of the universe.

Mr Nobody at 118 years old

When I mix pigeon superstition, many-worlds interpretation and static time  what I get is the idea that even the most basic of our assumptions about how the world works and how causes relate to effects are perhaps nothing but our limited interpretation of something entirely beyond our comprehension. Some (like Pauli) have pointed at a complete disconnect between causes and effects, with the only relationship being synchronicity as we perceive it and nothing more. Which had always brought to my mind the question of why am I experiencing this reality and not another one? And is there a way to move to a different one? What is my consciousness? Does it even really exist? What is the meaning of being alive in a deterministic universe? Does it even make sense?

Ah…  Most everyone else already has all the answers – You know… Zodiac signs, gods, rules, natural laws, etc, etc — Meanwhile I’m still looking for the right questions. That’s why Mr. Nobody strikes a chord with me. It spares me the answers and gives me more questions in an amazing format.

2. My mother taught me RELIGION.
“You better pray that will come out of the carpet.”

3. My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL.
“If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to knock you into the middle of
next week!”

4. My mother taught me LOGIC.
” Because I said so, that’s why.”

5. My mother taught me MORE LOGIC.
“If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you’re not going to
the store with me.”

6. My mother taught me FORESIGHT.
“Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you’re in an accident.”

7. My mother taught me IRONY
“Keep crying, and I’ll give you something to cry about.”

8. My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS.
“Shut your mouth and eat your supper.”

9. My mother taught me about CONTORTION-ISM.
“Will you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!”

10. My mother taught me about STAMINA.
“You’ll sit there until all that spinach is gone.”

11. My mother taught me about WEATHER.
“This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it.”

12. My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY.
“If I told you once, I’ve told you a million times. Don’t exaggerate!”

13. My mother taught me the CIRCLE OF LIFE.
“I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.”

14. My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION.
“Stop acting like your father!”

15. My mother taught me about ENVY.
“There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who don’t
have wonderful parents like you do.”

16. My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION.
“Just wait until we get home.”

17. My mother taught me about RECEIVING.
“You are going to get it when you get home!”

18. My mother taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE.
“If you don’t stop crossing your eyes, they are going to freeze that way.”

19. My mother taught me ESP.
“Put your sweater on; don’t you think I know when you are cold?”

20. My mother taught me HUMOR.
“When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don’t come running to me.”

21. My mother taught me HOW TO BECOME AN ADULT.
“If you don’t eat your vegetables, you’ll never grow up.”

22.* _My mother taught me GENETICS._*
“You’re just like your father.”

23. My mother taught me about my ROOTS.
“Shut that door behind you. Do you think you were born in a barn?”

24. My mother taught me WISDOM
“When you get to be my age, you’ll understand.”

25. And my favorite: My mother taught me about JUSTICE
“One day you’ll have kids, and I hope they turn out just like you”

Click to Enlarge: Wicked way to enhance AdSense text units

My initial reaction was

“Wow, I didn’t know Google allowed explicit ads like that“…

As my mind started reeling at the possibilities I noticed something…

“Wait, those look like Facebook ads because of the images… and Google ads because of the text – New ad Format?” ..

So I clicked one – yup, it was a legit Google ad and all, leading to something like Estee Lauder –

“Estee Lauder wouldn’t put up an image of a naked chick on an ad. WTF is going on? Are they over-laying the Google ad with something?“… Close…

They are standard vertical AdSense units, and the website is just placing the little square images on the left side of where each little ad sub-unit would fall.

I remember from a long time ago something on the AdSense Terms of Service about making sure ads didn’t look like part of the site content – However I don’t remember anything about making part of the content look like an ad and slapping it next to a real ad! The content layout on this site makes it very clear the stuff at the top is “just ads”, and the content is below, so the ads aren’t blending into the content and causing spurious clicks. The ads are getting a little enhancement from their placement.

Fucking brilliant for epic CTR – I do imagine this is not kosher with Google and very likely to get your AdCents account banned – TOS or no TOS.

PS: If you pay close attention to the actual ads, you’ll notice this browser is being re-targeted quite a bit… PPC management and hosting offers on a Tattoo site? I’m surprised the Bald Storm on Demand Dude didn’t make a nude appearance here too.

This should send an epic shockwave through the “guru” ranks – The lawsuit talks about contributory trademark infringement and contributory cybersquatting. That means helping or motivating SOMEONE ELSE to do trademark infringement or cybersquatting. Microsoft is saying that not only did these guys do the dirty, they encouraged other people to do it too.

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog posted court documents relating to Washington at Seattle case C10-0653 RSM. This suit has been going on for a while – If you look at the title of the court document, it says “Denying Defendant Amended Motion to Dismiss”. PDF File for your enjoyment here:

Click for PDF: Microsoft vs Magic Bullet System

AFAIK civil cases are public records in the US, so this should be a fun read for quite some time to come.

You can find all the dirty online if you know where to look.

Quote:

Defendants allegedly providing instructions and their alleged sales
of a method known as the “Magic Bullet System,” which is meant to teach buyers how to use Microsoft marks in order to sell the emoticon-related software

I had seen this idea in one of the intro videos to the Magic Bullet System. I actually thought the trick was clever – Though not my style.

Their system or idea was this:
Get a domain name that has some allusion to MSN Messenger in it, like “world-favorite-msn-messenger.info” or some such shit. Then they would use their “magic bullet” or WordPress, can’t remember, to create a Google and seo-likeable website (you know, Privacy policy, Terms of service, farticles).
On that website they would offer the MSN Messenger for download and soft-bundle it with a smilies toolbar. The smilies were a CPA offer pulled from some network. I think the pitch was to tell people “Now that you got the toolbar, here are the Super-Mega-Dopey Similies” or something like Step 1- Get Messenger, Step 2- Get Smilies.

Now you have the idea… You could do this with something that isn’t trademarked, or at least be a little more careful about your pick of domain names and such so you’re not next in line.

ADHD Summary (idea shamelessly stolen from Mr. Green):

1 – Hide yo launches, MSFT be suing everybody out here

2 – Don’t fuck with Microsoft

3 – Guru shit will get you fucked by Microsoft

TIP: Go full-screen, High Def is the only way to watch boobs falling from the sky.

Here is “The making off…”  .. Even more tits and ass…

This is from 2008… Watching boobs fly never gets old for me.

If you look closely at my blog, or any e-mail or IM you might have received from me, you will find one of my best secrets – Actually, you won’t find it because the secret is what remains unsaid. I relax my standard a bit on the blog, so you’re bound to find some slips – Still…

The secret is to never, ever, ever use to word “but“... Not in conversations, not in e-mails and not in instant messages.

What the heck could this possibly do? You wouldn’t believe it. I actually shared this little tip with two friends who run different companies about three years ago. Last year I asked them about it. They both remembered distinctly the idea -because they had tried it with surprising results. They both pretty much reported the same thing – Everything – meetings, conferences, etc – started going much, much smoother. People around them would be more positive and things would get done better. They both pretty much independently said it was like fucking Voodoo.

Why “but“? Because it is the “undo” of language, it is worse than hesitation – its an outright “cancel what I just said“. There are many other ways to “undo“, by using commas for example – yet none is so flagrant as “but“. The easiest way to replace “But” is to use “and“, a comma, or like I did above using “yet”. If you can’t say it without “but” or no good alternative presents itself – then you need to think about whatever it is in a different way and say something entirely different – pure and simple.

Try it, it costs $0, results are immediate and pretty fucking unbelievable.

Winona Chiropractic Defaced Website Screenshot

As a marketer, you’re going to see two levels of possible explanations here:

Level 1 – Disgruntled web designer defaces website

Level 2 – Firm (that likely does something other than web design) tries to get viral attention by creating fake defaced website. There is money in attention, so even this kind of negative attention is monetize-able.

There is yet another likely explanation – And this is why I love con artist movies and why I’ve been watching the BBC series Hustle so much (thanks to Yaxx for recommending it). Because it helps you think in oblique ways and see beyond. A third possibility is:

Level 3: Extortion – Someone set up a fake website targeting ALL Winona chiropractors, they put a single chriropractor’s info in there and try to get money from them in exchange for taking the website down. After collecting money, they change the information to another chiropractor’s office details and try to extort money from them.

And there you have it folks, a criminal model of local lead generation.

PS: Highlight in bold colors the “criminal” part – If you tried this, even without success, chances are very high you’ll end up someone’s prison girlfriend in no time.

PPS: This is by no means the only shady shit out there – DDoS extortions have been around for a long time.

Sounds too good to be true? It really isn’t – Like all things that are good and beneficial,  it just takes time, work and moolah. Its something I bumped into several years ago: The Alexander Technique.

Its a way of re-training you on movement and posture. Unfortunately, it isn’t something you can get even a basic understanding by reading a book or watching the few training DVDs that roam the net – this is something you have to take a class on and experience it yourself. Trying to understand it fully or learn even a little bit by reading or watching would be like trying to learn how to swim -even a little bit- without ever getting in the water – It just ain’t happening.

I found some really inexpensive Alexander Technique lessons at a local university campus – on their non-credited courses… I’m sure you can find an instructor wherever you are – do yourself a favor and go to just one session, then tell me what you think.

Not so weird. And not a resolution. I don’t do “resolutions” – as if my willpower was lacking and it could be improved by merely “willing it” or “really, seriously, positively deciding”. That only works in the fantasy wonderland where most for self-help retard gurus live.

Its a goal I’ve been working my balls off towards achieving for a while now – and it isn’t going to get any easier.

Every single word of my goal is important. I need to move in controlled fashion – There are a lot of people depending on me and I have to make sure I don’t drop any balls along the way or as I make the jump.

My guesstimate here is that I will be able to pull this off around August-September 2011 – So that’s what I’m shooting for.

I’m not a young kid in my mom’s garage anymore, so it takes planning and foresight – This whole transition feels like preparing for a samurai duel on a tightrope: There is no margin of error, there is no dodging, there is no out, there is only pure focus on execution.

So, I’m going to kick off my 2011 main goal by going to ASW 11 in Las Vegas on Saturday and getting completely shit-faced! … Oh, yeah… and networking with folks!

And no, I’m not biased in trying to justify to myself my purchase – Lets get that out of the way.

The way I make decisions is: Fast, once and over – This was no different – And part of choosing the $999 one-time payment option boils down to not wasting time re-evaluating the tool constantly. Once and done.

So the first thing I saw when I accessed the tool was… Ho-hum.

I have a box that runs some of these pop-up toolbars so I already peek at what folks are doing out there – Is this tool better than my own research?

A bit of background – Before getting into PPV, I was doing PPC with Google, Yahoo and Bing and using a tool called PPCBully. PPCBully is really a top-notch tool, yet it stopped being useful to me – never mind the “warning” I got from Google, the real problems with PPCBully were somewhere else – and they happen to PPVSpy too.

PPVSpy will give you a nice sorted listing of what pop-ups it has seen the most. Slight problem – Not just the most popular pops, the entire majority of them, are from two sources I don’t want: 1 – Advertisers going direct to the PPV network  and 2 – direct-linking noobs. So this nice sorted list, instead of telling you what works, just tells you where people are spending money.

1 – Sit back and think about that last point for a second – it is the fatal flaw I found on PPCBully too. Its the cashflow model. If you are a lead brokerage firm, and have an offer on an affiliate network where you pay idiots like me $5 per e-mail and address, you have a ton more margin (plus less middlemen) and a ton of leverage to get a massive discount at the PPV network. The spread between what you as a direct advertiser can afford versus what an affiliate marketer can, is very wide… Sometimes you find an offer has an exclusive deal when you try to advertise it and the network tells you it can’t accept your ads because they have an exclusive agreement – pretty upfront and not much sleuthing there. Either way, if your funnel or cashflow model doesn’t match what you’re “spying” on, then it isn’t really useful.

2 – Direct-linkers. It can be hard to tell at first sight someone who is direct-linking apart from the owner of the offer, yet not impossible – just look how they’re getting to the offer (direct or via network) and what if any affiliate ID they use. Judging by this, there is a deluge of direct-linkers. This is actually easy to see when you have the toolbar installed – Direct-linking is everywhere. These are usually new PPV users and are losing money – Wanna know which URLs they’re losing money on? Go right ahead. If you’re making bank direct linking, good for you – it never works for me.

In this area of finding profitable stuff PPVSpy (just like PPCBully) gets a ton of “noise” and very little “signal” simply because “signal” to me is someone who matches my business model for a particular niche and is being successful. Everything else is noise… And there is an awful lot of noise that literally drowns out the signal. In niches you’re familiar with, or for targets you know, you can -with some effort- extract some signal from the noise.

PPVSpy will also give you a nice breakdown of offers and niches… So I thought – “Awesome, lets see if I can jump on a niche I know very little about, like dating…”

So I open the Dating niche pop-up thumbnails and see… Well, I have no fucking clue what I’m seeing… And therein lies the problem… I can’t tell apart what is a direct-linked/advertiser offer from an affiliate landing page, let alone figure out which one is working. – The reason is simple, I haven’t been spending the past two weeks looking at dating offers and their landing pages on different networks, and know didly about them. The same goes for practically every niche I haven’t been researching already. This makes the task of getting some “signal” (ie: info on popups that work) from that “noise” (everything else) impossible – you can’t tell it apart until you go do your normal research.

So does it have any good points? Yes, of course… I’m learning a ton from different niches on how offers are run. … This tool is great for breaking out of “Pop-up block” and seeing things a bit differently.

Is some of what I see something I can “copy, paste and bank“? No. I can’t just decide I’m going into a niche without doing the real research – its a guaranteed epic fail. There may be something I can use in niches I’m already researching or new ideas I can port from other niches – This tool is excellent for that. … This isn’t exactly push-button marketing.

What does it really do for me? It accelerates and augments my research.

Do I still have to do the same research? Less so – The difference is I can feel more confident of my conclusions faster and get to market faster – that’s my bottom line.

Is it worth $1k ?Absolutely – Where else can you learn from the market itself and keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in so many niches at once while in your pajamas?

Will it pay for itself? Don’t be silly, of course not. You have to do real work to recover the money.

Enough talk, more action!

In this little story below there is a tale of how massive amounts of people get screwed, along with an opportunity for you.

Quote straight from Robert Cialdini’s “Influence” book:

So the toy manufacturers are faced with a dilemma: how to keep sales high during the peak season and, at the same time, retain a healthy demand for toys in the immediately following months. Their difficulty certainly doesn’t lie in motivating kids to want more toys after Christmas. The problem lies in motivating postholiday spent-out parents to buy another plaything for their already toy-glutted children. What could the toy companies possibly do to produce that unlikely behavior? Some have tried greatly increased advertising campaigns, others have reduced prices during the slack period, but neither of those standard sales devices has proved successful. Both tactics are costly, and have been ineffective in increasing sales to desired levels. Parents are simply not in a toy-buying mood, and the influences of advertising or reduced expense are not enough to shake that stony resistance.

Certain large toy manufacturers, however, think they have found a solution. It’s an ingenious one, involving no more than a normal advertising expense and an un-derstanding of the powerful pull of the need for consistency. My first hint of the way the toy companies’ strategy worked came after I fell for it and then, in true patsy form, fell for it again.It was January, and I was in the town’s largest toy store. After purchasing all too many gifts there for my son a month before, I had sworn not to enter that store or any like it for a long, long time. Yet there I was, not only in the diabolic place but also in the process of buying my son another expensive toy—a big, electric road-race set. In front of the road-race display I happened to meet a former neighbor who was buying his son the same toy. The odd thing was that we almost never saw each other anymore. In fact, the last time had been a year earlier in the same store when we were both buying our sons an expensive post-Christmas gift—that time a robot that walked, talked, and laid waste. We laughed about our strange pattern of seeing each other only once a year at the same time, in the same place, while doing the same thing. Later that day, I mentioned the coincidence to a friend who, it turned out, had once worked in the toy business.

“No coincidence,” he said knowingly.

“What do you mean, ‘No coincidence’?”

“Look,” he said, “let me ask you a couple of questions about the road-race set you bought this year. First, did you promise your son that he’d get one for Christmas?”

“Well, yes I did. Christopher had seen a bunch of ads for them on the Saturday morning cartoon shows and said that was what he wanted for Christmas. I saw a couple of ads myself and it looked like fun; so I said OK.”

“Strike one,” he announced. “Now for my second question. When you went to buy one, did you find all the stores sold out?”

“That’s right, I did! The stores said they’d ordered some but didn’t know when they’d get any more in. So I had to buy Christopher some other toys to make up for the road-race set. But how did you know?”

“Strike two,” he said. “Just let me ask one more question. Didn’t this same sort of thing happen the year before with the robot toy?” Wait a minute … you’re right. That’s just what happened. This is incredible. How did you know?” No psychic powers; I just happen to know how several of the big toy companies jack up their January and February sales. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. Now here’s where the genius of the companies’ plan comes in: They undersupply the stores with the toys they’ve gotten the parents to promise. Most parents find those toys sold out and are forced to substitute other toys of equal value. The toy manufacturers, of course, make a point of supplying the stores with plenty of these substitutes. Then, after Christmas, the companies start running the ads again for the other, special toys. That juices up the kids to want those toys more than ever. They go running to their parents whining, ‘You promised, you promised,’ and the adults go trudging off to the store to live up dutifully to their words.”

“Where,” I said, beginning to seethe now, “they meet other parents they haven’t seen for a year, falling for the same trick, right?”

“Right. Uh, where are you going?”

“I’m going to take the road-race set right back to the store.” I was so angry I was nearly shouting.

“Wait. Think for a minute first. Why did you buy it this morning?”

“Because I didn’t want to let Christopher down and because I wanted to teach him that promises are to be lived up to.”

“Well, has any of that changed? Look, if you take his toy away now, he won’t understand why. He’ll just know that his father broke a promise to him. Is that what you want?”

“No,” I said, sighing, “I guess not. So, you’re telling me that the toy companies doubled their profits on me for the past two years, and I never even knew it; and now that I do, I’m still trapped—by my own words. So, what you’re really telling me is, ‘Strike three.’ ” He nodded, “And you’re out.”

In the years since, I have observed a variety of parental toy-buying sprees similar to the one I experienced during that particular holiday season—for Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo dolls, Furbies, etc. But, historically, the one that best fits the pattern is that of the Cabbage Patch Kids, $25 dolls that were promoted heavily during mid-1980s Christmas seasons but were woefully undersupplied to stores. Some of the consequences were a government false advertising charge against the Kids’ maker for continuing to advertise dolls that were not available; frenzied groups of adults battling at toy outlets or paying up to $700 apiece at auction for dolls they had promised their children; and an annual $150 million in sales that extended well beyond the Christmas months. During the 1998 holiday season, the least available toy that everyone wanted was the Furby, created by a division of toy giant Hasbro. When asked what frustrated, Furby-less parents should tell their kids, a Hasbro spokeswoman advised the kind of promise that has profited toy manufacturers for decades, “I’ll try, but if I can’t get it for you now, I’ll get it for you later” (Tooher, 1998).

There are a couple of things you can do with this info, other than not promising toys that will be in short supply. One of those things would be to figure out what toys will be in short supply, get there first and bank on eBay. Another would be to catch these parents looking for these toys during the holiday season and offer an alternative. Another would be to re-target these parents AFTER the holiday seasons with, say.. An Amazon affiliate link – I can already see the landing page “Remember the toy you promised? Its available NOW”…

Jesus saves, everybody else uses MasterCard.

A while back I started reading The Salty Droid’s blog.

Honestly, I don’t get it. The guy behind The Salty Droid is funny and brilliant – I laughed my ass off with his videos.

What I don’t get is how “The Syndicate” are totally evil scumbags.

I just listened to 90 minutes out of two hours of a Syndicate conference call The Salty Droid posted on his blog. I was really hoping to find some really juicy stuff – You know, killing kittens and human sacrifices to Cthulhu. All I found was a couple of guys trying to figure out how to do their product launch to get the most money – Their products may be good, or they may be shit – They’re probably shit, yet that’s not for me to judge. What I can make a judgment call on is the tone of the conversation and their intentions.

Yes, they sell an overpriced dream. And they use many of science’s best marketing tactics available. And they are fairly well organized, to the point they can surround you with the message. Almost like a true cult… So? Life is chock-full of friends, and also brimming with people trying to fuck you over. What else is news? They belong to the “People trying to fuck you over” category – If we lived in the world of “The Invention of Lying”, then I would be shocked, as it is, these guys are kiddie candy thiefs – Why so much hate?

I was hoping to hear how they were going to fuck people over by having them hand over their retirement funds in exchange for the philosopher’s stone – or something like Enron, or like Jim Jones and “The People’s Temple”, and really all they talk about is how to structure the launch so it sells more. I was hoping to hear how they were going to take the money and run to Bermuda. Or how they were going to escape the FBI. Or how they were going to embezzle ClickBank. Jeez, at the very least I was hoping to hear them talk about their customers in a condescending tone! Not even. WTF. Where is the video of Sekhmet drinking the blood of Syndicate  adepts?

It starts to get very creepy and ridiculous after a while, though. The bald dude from Storm on Demand has been following me around the net for over a week – I see him several times a day. I’m already a customer – this isn’t making me interested in buying more or inviting the dude for drinks or something.

If you’re about to do a retargeting campaign, please think long and hard about your creatives.

I for one wouldn’t mind if the ones chasing me around the net were Playboy bunnies – I’d be delighted. Then again I wouldn’t want hosting from dumb blondes.

I’ve only shared this story with close family members, as it stereotypes and isn’t very scientific. That didn’t matter for my young mind – Young minds don’t care about science as they’re trying to make sense of the world.

[Fade to sepia]

As I was attending elementary school (not in the US and not in Asia) I happened to have quite a few schoolmates of Asian descent. As a young kid, I could tell these kids were just as sharp as me, and sometimes even smarter, more patient, methodical, etc. We did have dumb kids, and even kids with true learning problems – this is not a story about kids with real problems.

Among my Asian friends I noticed two distinct behaviors – Some would behave just normal, like me. Others would play the “language” card and pretend they didn’t understand things because of the difference in language – they had figured out they could get away with less school work and less demands from the teachers if they played like they were dumb… And they did, they kept playing dumb from the point I have clear school memories (about second grade) to the point they graduated from school six or seven years later.

The teachers saw a dumb kid, with learning problems and a language barrier, struggle through school for several years and make it out.

I saw a normal kid who played dumb since second grade – and by the time they were in seventh grade they had BECOME dumb. They were no longer faking it – you could tell the little spark of focused attention had been put out. It was like they became a little autistic as part of their act, and they became their act.

My little mind understood something about intelligence in very straightforward terms:

• If you play dumb, you will get away with doing less, and you will become dumb.
• If you do what you’re supposed to do, you will get smarter in the same time that slackers become dumber.

[Fade to color]

Play dumb, be dumb. Play smart, get smart.

This is an excellent piece of the book “Drive” By Dan Pink

The big a-ha! moment:

If you believe intelligence is a fixed quantity, then every educational and professional encounter becomes a measure of how much you have.

If you believe intelligence is something you can increase, then the same encounters become opportunities for growth.

In one view, intelligence is something you demonstrate; in the other, it’s something you develop.

Why this matters:

These two types of thinking trigger contrasting responses to adversity—one of helpless,” the other, “mastery-oriented.”

The full explanation cited directly from the book:

Mastery Is a Mindset

As with so many things in life, the pursuit of mastery is all in our head. At least that’s what Carol Dweck has discovered.

Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has been studying motivation and achievement in children and young adults for nearly forty years, amassing a body of rigorous empirical research that has made her a superstar in contemporary behavioral science. Dweck’s signature insight is that what people believe shapes what people achieve. Our beliefs about ourselves and the nature of our abilities—what she calls our “self-theories”—determine how we interpret our experiences and can set the boundaries on what we accomplish. Although her research looks mostly at notions of “intelligence,” her findings apply with equal force to most human capabilities. And they yield the first law of mastery: Mastery is a mindset.

According to Dweck, people can hold two different views of their own intelligence. Those who have an “entity theory” believe that intelligence is just that—an entity. It exists within us, in a finite supply that we cannot increase. Those who subscribe to an “incremental theory” take a different view. They believe that while intelligence may vary slightly from person to person, it is ultimately something that, with effort, we can increase. To analogize to physical qualities, incremental theorists consider intelligence as something like strength. (Want to get stronger and more muscular? Start pumping iron.) Entity theorists view it as something more like height. (Want to get taller? You’re out of luck.)

If you believe intelligence is a fixed quantity, then every educational and professional encounter becomes a measure of how much you have.

If you believe intelligence is something you can increase, then the same encounters become opportunities for growth.

In one view, intelligence is something you demonstrate; in the other, it’s something you develop.

The two self-theories lead down two very different paths—one that heads toward mastery and one that doesn’t. For instance, consider goals. Dweck says they come in two varieties—performance goals and learning goals. Getting an A in French class is a performance goal. Being able to speak French is a learning goal. “Both goals are entirely normal and pretty much universal,” Dweck says, “and both can fuel achievement.” But only one leads to mastery. In several studies, Dweck found that giving children a performance goal (say, getting a high mark on a test) was effective for relatively straightforward problems but often inhibited children’s ability to apply the concepts to new situations. For example, in one study, Dweck and a colleague asked junior high students to learn a set of scientific principles, giving half of the students a performance goal and half a learning goal. After both groups demonstrated they had grasped the material, researchers asked the students to apply their knowledge to a new set of problems, related but not identical to what they’d just studied. Students with learning goals scored significantly higher on these novel challenges. They also worked longer and tried more solutions. As Dweck writes, “With a learning goal, students don’t have to feel that they’re already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart.”

Indeed, the two self-theories take very different views of effort. To incremental theorists, exertion is positive. Since incremental theorists believe that ability is malleable, they see working harder as a way to get better. By contrast, says Dweck, “the entity theory . . . is a system that requires a diet of easy successes.” In this schema, if you have to work hard, it means you’re not very good. People therefore choose easy targets that, when hit, affirm their existing abilities but do little to expand them. In a sense, entity theorists want to look like masters without expending the effort to attain mastery.

Finally, the two types of thinking trigger contrasting responses to adversity—one that Dweck calls “helpless,” the other, “mastery-oriented.” In a study of American fifth- and sixth-graders, Dweck gave students eight conceptual problems they could solve, followed by four they could not (because the questions were too advanced for children that age). Students who subscribed to the idea that brain-power is fixed gave up quickly on the tough problems and blamed their (lack of ) intelligence for their difficulties. Students with a more expansive mindset kept working in spite of the difficulty and deployed far more inventive strategies to find a solution. What did these students blame for their inability to conquer the toughest problems? “The answer, which surprised us, was that they didn’t blame anything,” Dweck says. The young people recognized that setbacks were inevitable on the road to mastery and that they could even be guideposts for the journey.

My Notes

Most of the “Drive” book is ok so far.

This idea, however, is different. This idea is huge. It has huge practical applications from the workplace to the family. I challenge you to go around your house or through your friends and dig up what their belief is regarding intelligence as a fixed attribute or a malleable skill.

Better yet – I went to my kids and checked their understanding of intelligence to make sure it aligned with mine – this is one concept I was keeping a close eye on already as it is tied to self-esteem – now I know exactly how it works its magic and what it must be shaped like to be beneficial.

That right there is a powerful agent of positive change. The power lies in SAYING that phrase and seeing how silly your stories sound.

“That’s My Story, and I’m Sticking to It”

That’s the phrase I began chirping every single time I said – or heard someone tell me- something that sounded even a tiny bit like a whim, hidden excuse or faulty reasoning. I decided to start doing this after reading “All Marketers Are Liars” for the fourth time and thinking about our everyday stories for a long time.

I thought this would be a good way of explaining the stories of marketing, by making folks notice their everyday actions and how they put stories around it – even stories that made no sense at all.

It worked wonders. My entire family laughed – and laughs. They all now chirp it back to me and make everyone conscious of why we do what we do.

In action it looks like this:

Wife: “If it was warmer, we’d be out jogging”
Me: “Yep, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!”

Me: “I’m gonna get a Wii for Christmas… It has really nice games *FOR THE KIDS*… and that’s my story and I’m sticking to it”

Kids: “I love Cheerios, they’re good for your heart”
Me:” That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!”

Wife: “I really need these boots for the winter so my feet don’t freeze… That’s my story and I’m sticking to it…” (while rearranging 50 other pairs of boots in the closet)

Its really nice to see a whole new level of consciousness in everyday living – lifting the veil of the little stories we tell ourselves to justify doing what we’re doing.

It separates reality from the story and makes YOU accountable for doing whatever you are doing – it takes the story out of the picture, as an optional mental masturbation, and puts you back in control.

I firmly believe everything is optional – there is not one single thing you have to do. Sure, there are risks, consequences, rewards, whatever… Yet nothing is mandatory. These little stories we hear on TV or from other people and then we tell ourselves give us quick ways to deceive ourselves. We live out the lies we tell ourselves. Kill the lie. Then dissect it and take a look at its guts.

If you’re a marketer, you then take that dead, dissected lie, you stitch it back up, and you sling it out into the world as a marketing piece:

“Newsflash: In Winter, consumers stop going to the Gym and turn to Acai Berry Detox to combat Holiday Weight Gain”

“Get a Wii for the Kids for $25? Only at Bidiot.com!”

“Free Heart-healthy Cheerio Samples. Enter your e-mail (and entire medical history)”

“You’ve won free UGG Boots! Just claim your prize in the next two minutes by entering your cell phone number in the next screen!”

Word.