2. This is your step-by-step todo-list for making a piece of blueberry cake. The recipe might have been handed down for fifteen fucking generations, tested double-blindly in a lab, or a lone crackpot’s delirious dream.

3. “Here are seven blueprints, all the details we need for building a shrine in a river, a fortress on the mountain cliff, three types of garden sheds (pick the large one if you have a lot of stuff), an obsolete circus tent, and a white picket fence. But we are under a tree embargo and the master-carpenter is down with the flu.”

They say that a story is as good as the bad guy. Here they have all the villainy qualities you could wish for in the Japan of the 1700, while good guys can only rely on ethical backbone and honest craft. The showdowns are really as asymmetrical as that sounds.

The hero is a Dutch clerk, revealed as a clever but uninteresting accountant type. His goal is to return home as well-to-do trader, worthy of marrying his sweetheart, as her father is rather unromantic about his lack of cash.

All the characters walk their talk, with an array of views about things like science, politics, capitalism, human nature, and slavery. This can get a bit uncomfortable, if you accept that opinions of the past are things that reasonable people could believe. The writer knows historical details that Western Europeans or humanists can’t look at without blinking.

Many of the characters have occupations in medicine and war, such as doctor, nurse, soldier, and sailor: we get a close look at the finer points of life and death. The heros, from both East and West, are led to the point where they have no choice but risking death for their principles. The dilemmas only seem real up until the moment of decision. Then we get a stream of highly poetic consciousness. These are kamikazes in the true sense, while the bad guys kill anyone for survival or profit.

What makes this novel a masterpiece is that the plot is either mystically ancient Eastern or modern scientifically Western, depending on your lens. While the age of the samurai is ending and the age of Enlightenment is starting, a thing like chi is either a magical force of life that can be controlled by ritual, or a superstition that can throw someone into psychotic delusion. Looking through the eyes of the characters, the reader is shown only the facts that sharpen this divide, without resolving it.

For example, at some point one of the heros finds a graveyard with a certain number of anonymous tombstones. The reader knowns that there are two overlapping sets of people that could have been buried there. If we only knew who had died, then the mystery would be solved.

But it never is. In 1700, and maybe even today, there are too few ways of separating science from mystery.

Ever since Interview with a Vampire, the vampire genre has declined, with Twilight at the lowest point. Some of the new movies have creatures worthy of being called vampires, yet they are still decadent: they portray unnatural characters as mere humans with qualities of an animal of prey. Examples include the Underworld and Blade movies. Others, such as Van Helsing, have not added much, but at least stayed true to the original rules of the genre. These beautiful but degraded unnaturals can only thrive in purified action scenes.

John let his in-house designer tweak the colors and layout, but she couldn’t hold the visitor’s attention. Her optimizations being ignored, she ran away screaming. The webmaster now hired some of the local SEO consultants noted for their skill in getting traffic. They were let loose on the stats, researched new keywords, recruited virtual assistants, and set up a massive content network. The website now ranked highly in Google for competitive keywords, yet after failing to convert even one visitor, the SEO consultants had to give up too.

The webmaster became desperate and tried to optimize his website himself. Relying on detailed knowledge of his product, he rewrote his landing pages, listing all the brilliant features of his product. But every effort was wasted, for the traffic bounced faster than lightning. Before clicking on anything, it had already vanished. He was sweating heavily and finally decided to give up the chase.

As a last resort, he sent for a web consultant widely known for her mysterious ways as a world-class traffic converter. The web consultant did not look in any way especially different from the other consultants that had been invited to boost sales. The webmaster didn’t think much of her, but showed her his website. She went to work quietly and slowly, as if she didn’t really know what she was doing. The target audience, however, went wild. After she nonchalantly changes a few lines, the visitors kept clicking on the “Buy Now”-button as if hypnotized.

A Grand Session
That evening, all the consultants who had taken part in the project held a grand session at John’s house, and respectfully asked the great web consultant to take the seat of honor. They made profound bows before her and said: “We are all noted for guts and savvy, but never realized that there was such a fucking difficult target audience. None of us was able to do anything until you came; and how easily you carried the day! We all wish you to divulge your secrets for our benefit, but before that, let us see how much we all know about the craft of e-commerce.”

The blackhat consultant came forward and said: “I was born in a family of renegade programmers who are notorious for their skill in the art. Since my young days I have trained myself to become a great link builder. I can to leap over firewalls; I know how to squeeze link juice from the worst neighborhoods of the web, and I’m proficient at all kinds of hacks to enhance a website’s ranking. I cleverly make the audience think that a website is legit, and if they try to leave, I strike at them with pop-ups . Even those running exotic add-ons cannot escape me. It is a shame that today I had to give up on that weird audience.”

The great web consulting veteran said: “What you have learned is only the technique of the craft. Your mind is always planning how to fight the competition. The technique of making a sale have been devised by the ancient masters, and it is natural and simple. Those who follow the master fail to grasp his principle and are too focused on sharpening their technical expertise and manipulatory skill. The end is achieved, and cleverness is efficient, but what does it all amount to? Cleverness should follow human nature. When natural relationships are lost, and mere cleverness is the aim, it gets abused and will become side-tracked. This is to be remembered well in the craft of e-commerce.”

The whitehat consultant now stepped forward and expressed his view: “What is important for websites is to add free value. I have long trained myself in the making of great content. I now work from a moral high ground, serving a loyal audience. When a competitor enters my niche, my expert status alone defeats him, and victory is on my side even before the to actual fight for attention. I have no conscious scheme as to the use of technical skill, but it comes out spontaneously with the changing situation. But this strange audience moved along, without leaving a shadow. The reason is beyond me.”

The web consultant replied: “You know how to make the most of your expertise, but your strong knowledge has a shadow: while you were learning, you missed opportunities to learn the more ordinary and general skills that most other people have. Your blind spots have grown with your expertise. These blind spots are matched against the luck and street-smarts of your competitors. You don’t even know what you don’t know. A desperate competitor often proves stronger than a domain expert. He is cornered, the fight is for an escape of a dead-end job, and a sleazy marketer doesn’t care about truth and service. His scrappy attitude defies every possible danger: It is wired to the gills to compete, and no domain expert can withstand its steel-like resistance.”

The grayhat SEO consultant now came forward and said: “As you tell us, all expertise, however strong, is always accompanied by it shadow, and the competition is sure to take advantage of that. I have disciplined myself not to force a fight, but to assume a yielding attitude. I always do careful competition analysis with Market Samurai. When the factors show that I can’t compete in a niche, I just brainstorm another one. When I see a niche I could compete in, I build a network of feeder-sites and have my virtual assistants write articles for it, which I then which I recycle with spinner software. I buy into link networks an rent IP-addresses. I control my ranking perfectly, never spending more than necessary to keep my number one-position in Google. Even strong Internet marketers see no way to compete with me. But the niche we had to deal with today has no parallel. The target audience is unlike any I have seen in my life.”

The seasoned consultant answered: “What you call a yielding attitude is not in harmony with the nature of sales; it is stratagem worked out in your conscious mind. When you try to use it to crush the opponent’s competitive drive, he will quickly see any sign of wavering in your mind. If you rely on the yielding attitude, artificially invoked with Market Samurai, you have some mental muddiness that will mess up your business acumen and agile action. For then the Way of Sales feels blocked in its spontaneous course.”

The Way of Marketing and Sales
“To make the Way of Sales display its mysterious way of closing the deal is to do away with all of your own thinking, contriving, and acting; let demand have her own way, let her act as it feels in you. There will be no shadows, no signs, no traces whereby you can be caught; then none of your customers and competitors can resist you.”

“I’m not saying that all the discipline you have each so far gone through has been useless. After all, the Way of Sales works through its vessels. Technicalities have a natural logic, and when it is in harmony with human nature, it fits any change in the environment perfectly. When the yielding attitude is used like that, it ends competition on force.”

“But the most important thing is this: not to cherish even a speck of self-conscious thought. When this is present in your mind, all your acts become self-willed, human-designed tricks, and are not in conformity with the Way. It is then that people refuse to yield to your approach, and turn against you. When you are in a state of mind known as “mindlessness” (mushin), you act as if one with nature, without using crafty tricks. Please note that the Way is infinite, and all this talk of mine doesn’t cover it well.”

“Some time ago there was in an Internet marketer in one of my niches who slept the days away, showed no sign of web savvy, and looked like a frozen image. People never saw her make a single sale, but wherever she roamed no competition ever dared to appear. I visited her and asked for the reason. She gave no answer. I asked her four times, but she kept silent. It was not that she was unwilling to answer, but she really didn’t know how to answer. So we note that those who know don’t speak, while those who speak don’t know. That seasoned marketer had forgotten not only herself, but all things about her website; she just didn’t have traffic goals. She reached guruship and didn’t compete. I’m not to be compared with her.”

The consultant continued: “Well, I’m a only a consultant; I charge an hourly rate, and what do I know about entrepreneurship? But if you allow me to talk some more, remember that marketing is an art of realizing, at a critical moment, the reasons of life and death. It is not meant just to beat the competition. A businessman ought to be mindful of this, and study culture as well as marketing. First of all, he needs insight into the reason of life and death. When his mind is free from selfish thoughts, he has no doubts, no distractions; he is not buried in a spreadsheet, nor does he second-guess himself; he at peace with supply and demand, responding freely to the market. On the other hand, when a thought or desire is stirred in his mind, it calls up a world of form; there is ‘I’, there is `not-I’, and contradictions ensue. As long as this opposition continues, the Way blocked. You are already pushed into the darkness of starvation. How can you then expect to rise and wager your fate against the competition? Even when you win market share, it is just an accident, and against the spirit of marketing.”

Reference

Suzuki, D.T. (1959).  The Swordsman and the Cat.  Zen and Japanese Culture, Appendix IV, Pantheon Books. 1st published 1938.

There are reasons that compel someone to see value in a thing, ranging from obvious to dubious. Merchandise that are harder to appraise are sold on more complex marketing. Types of sales follow a grayscale: on one side, there is the pure white of the purchase of an ideal commodity; on the other side is the mysterious swindle. The gray area is made of deals that involve varying shades of deception.

Appraisal and Audience
Some things are easily appraised, such as bricks and tea. Buyers can’t fail to get their money worth. Simple merchandise enable some openess toward the customer: the value is known, and it is the only reason for buying. In a commodities business, the fight over value happens between companies, at the level of business strategy. The relationships with customers stay relatively innocent.

Difficult appraisals change the balance: the seller has more leverage, causing risk and moral hazard to come into the transaction. People are usually careful when they want to buy a car. If the use of the product relies on skill and effort, the total value derived from it is uncertain. For example, the price and value of clothing varies widely: some people know how to look fashionable for cheap, while others wear designer clothes of the wrong size.

Many kinds of businesses offer questionable things to an ignorant target audience. They have the option to aim for high margins. In the worst cases the seller delivers none of the promises and vanishes with the payment.

Hidden Cost Structure and Dubious Benefits
Sellers of things that are hard to appraise, or difficult to use, can afford less openness and integrity. If you sell such things, you are not only up against your competition, but partly against your customers as well. Both of you will push for a favorable appraisal: they will make a wild guess about the total value in the deal, and try to get most of it, while you try to make the total value as murky as possible.

By using murkiness as leverage, sellers can win a larger share of the total value by lying and bullshitting: the truth is a risk to their livelihood. The customers face a mystery. There is no pie of a measurable size, with neatly-cut pieces. Instead, they see the value like the five blind men that think an elephant is the body part that each happens to touch. Perspective matters. The typical sale is closed through the psychology of the buyer, and the typical consequences follow from the philosophy for the seller.

The lighter grays of the scale describe purchases of obvious things that everyone knows about. But the seller still has to hide the profit margin and sales volume. This is the territory for people who sell things like new cars, drinks in a bar, haircuts, soap, etc. The murkiness that benefits the seller is in the supply line. Prices are set by old industry standards that customers can’t afford to figure out. The reasons for buying are mostly physical: you buy from a store close to where you live, you are hungry, or dirty, or you need to go from A to B.

The darker grays describe sales with such a murky total value that the reasons for buying are mostly psychological. Sellers spend more on marketing, building up an illusion, targeted at a specific weakness in a well-understood audience: a demographic with a blind spot of badly-controlled desire. This option is available to anyone who can see over some other person’s head. Your market-savvy enables a proposal that closes the deal, but will cause collateral buyer’s remorse.

Margin and Remorse
In most industries, this remorse remains unconscious. People don’t like to question themselves as competent buyers, and will rather raise their opinion of their purchase than consciously take a loss. But their market-savvy has improved: unconscious remorse will make them hesitate to buy the next offering of that type. Their aroused desire will be second-guessed by a little voice inside. As the pool of unsophisticated buyers dries up, the market matures.

Businesses that sell dubious benefits have to decide how much margin they take on a sale. Murky valuables in new markets have a price that is first defined by the competition, just as in commodity markets. But unlike commodities, desired illusions leave some room in the profit margin. The more you optimize for total revenue, the more total buyer’s remorse will exist.

The highest possible profit margin depends roughly on the price at which the average customer’s buyer’s remorse stays unconscious. When too many people feel conned and spread the news about your scam, you are no longer optimizing total revenue and you are destroying your reputation.

As long as the complaints are few, and the competition isn’t eating you, you have room for building clever illusions. In the gray area, your business’ profits are obvious and personal, and the unconscious regret of your customers is hidden, distant, and abstract. While you enjoy success, don’t forget that their remorse is out there, ‘maturing’ your market.

Wealth is the central obsession of life, as a means to homeostasis, respect, and self-actualization. The push of needs, and the pull of wants, drive us toward the work that shapes our lifestyle, because desires are satisfied by goods made of capital with labor added. Your lifestyle depends on the types of capital you work with. Over a given period you can work to get more stuff, more leisure, or more mobility, but never all three at the same time. They are fundamentally at odds.

The deep tension between the three types of capital is what makes meaningful work feel painful. When you don’t invest real effort, the balance settles; life flows toward a stable state of mediocrity, defined by the norms of the town you live in, like water fits in a puddle. You may be happy, but you will not be interesting. Those who plan to make a dent in the world must face the pain of adding labor to capital, at the edge of polite society.

• Stuff is the most obvious kind of capital. Real estate, machines, furniture, food, etc. Stuff with high liquidity, such as money or paper assets, is used for exchange and storage of value. Labor is most visible when done to raw stuff, in order to make more valuable stuff. In the past, this type of work absorbed all the energy of most people, but nowadays technology makes stuff cheap.
• Mobility is any change of pace and surroundings. It keeps the heart and mind fresh with excitement and wonder, in flow. Rich experiences require freedom from drag, obligation and routine. It is the opposite of “knowing the place like the back of your hand.” Mobility is capital, because those who have it can go after what they desire quickly, at the right moment, for the right price. The mobile have no single-point-of-failure. They can explore and exploit any environment to the point of diminishing returns, insured against anxiety and boredom.
• Leisure is rest, and to busy people it will never be more than that. But a long stretch of free time allows for the reflection that breeds art, science and philosophy. True leisure is disinterested, revolving around things that are immune to change, viewed from an eternal perspective. There is no transcendent clarity without stillness.

Labor and Lifestyle Design

Hard effort applied to the world gets you two kinds of wealth, while you sacrifice another kind of wealth at the same time. Labor is characterized by its opportunity cost; any interesting lifestyle is defined by a painful lack. That tension is The Lifestyle Triangle.

The Lifestyle Triangle

This Lifestyle Triangle goes beyond standard microeconomics by adding mobility to the traditional conflict between work and leisure. It shows that self-actualization demands a painful sacrifice. You will have to let go of either time or materials.

The shape of a triangle ensures that any change of position within it creates and destroys wealth simultaneously. The whirl of work is the lifestyle within that given time interval. The center is an everyman land, and toward the edges and corners we find the more archetypal lives that are interesting enough to appear as characters in stories.

All hard work moves you closer to the edge, and with total focus you will become possessed by a corner archetype. The purest lifestyles designs fuse two kinds of wealth together at the cost of one huge sacrifice. There are three final destinations in life: Nomadic Minimalists roam around, scouting for a serendipity that allows them to catch a self-actualizing prize. Creating Careerists make deep trades with time and materials, and Jetting Aggrandizers are on the move to the next information hot-spot.

Creating Careerists

The lives of the Creating Careerists play out in the traditional economic tradeoff between material goods and leisure: they trade labor for increased access to both, while locking themselves down into a network of specialists. Each new resume- or portfolio item shapes their mind more to the task that the market demands, like a tree grows deep roots so it can reach toward the sun. Examples of lifestyles that approach this corner are corporate professionals, virtuoso artists, lawyers, and farmers. Creating Careerists are builders of lasting value. The purest cases succeed at fusing life, work and love into their next achievement.

Any valuable creation demands that they put the nose to the grindstone, swallowing boredom to stay within certain bounds of proven tradition. They put their 10.000 hours in, striving to know the place like the back of their hand. Movies about famous artists, scientists or entrepreneurs portray the achievements, while neglecting the cost of the effort invested.

Nomadic Minimalists

Nomadic Minimalists explore the tension between mobility and leisure while minimizing total cost of ownership. While most will pursue money and paper assets just like the other types, they avoid the bother of illiquid assets and real estate. As Baltasar Gracian put it, they “stroll through the open spaces of time to the center of opportunity.” Moving from place to place, weaving a web of otherwise unconnected friends, their lives are filled with deep and pleasurable experiences. Their boundary crossing keeps them fresh, but the risk of their unstable flows of capital keep poverty close by, forcing them on rough patches of social- and material discomfort.

Colorful examples are beggar monks, hippies, and the Sinti- and Roma people. The modern version of this lifestyle has recently been explored by the Minimalist movement, led by Leo Babauta of zen habits. It has since decayed into a ridiculous fight over who owned the least number of things. Steps toward this corner lead to ocean sailing, backpacking, geoarbitrage, island hopping and couch surfing.

Fictional examples include Hideous Kinky, in which Kate Winslet’s character bums around in Morocco with two young children. She hopes for enlightenment with the Sufis but finds danger and poverty. In Pulp Fiction, when Jules plans to “roam the earth,” Vincent chastises him for deciding to become a bum.

Jetting Aggrandizers

These types make fortunes by gaming the systems of stuff on a large scale. They live within electric fences and their assistants manage their flights between Aspen, Manhattan and Monaco. While they do not work in a way that is recognizable to a careerist, they are always ready for battle. They never keep still, because where the stuff-side of the triangle approaches the mobility-side, material wealth is most ephemeral. At the point of the Jetting Aggrandizer, mobility and stuff have become pure information, the resource with leverage on the future. It absorbs all the time and attention of the owner. As traffickers of nitroglycerin they cannot relax.

This kind of life is understood well from Richard Connif’s funny observations in Natural History of the Rich, which views them as a dominant subspecies with unique display behaviors and mating rituals. We cannot infer their motives from what they say, because they hide the volatile truth. Conniff discovered The Three Big Lies of the subspecies:

1. “Money doesn’t interest me,”
2. “Power doesn’t matter to me,”
3. “I don’t give a damn about impressing other people.”

Rich people casually drop a line like that early in the conversation. We need a fictional Jetting Aggrandizer to get to the essence of their work. In Lord of War, Nicholas Cage’s character is an arms dealer who says in voice over: “The only problem with an honest buck is they’re so hard to make – the margins are too low, too many people are doin’ it.”

Be careful to not look at the wrong things when you put a tag on someone’s corner lifestyle: the pure types are distinguished by the capital they sacrifice, not by their net worth and ethics. Many rich people are Creating Careerists, such as Henry Ford and Bill Gates, and a psychopathic con man is more a Nomadic Minimalist than he is a Jetting Aggrandizer.

The labor that moves you toward the corners of the triangle also moves you away from the good at the opposing side. Your sacrifice becomes a Jungian shadow that must be managed with a minimal effective dose of that good, in order to maintain homeostasis. The careerist’s vacation is far away and crams a year of mobility into “sight-seeing” managed by a “tour guide.” Even the purest minimalist has to maintain reliable access to food, tools, clothing and health care. Aggrandizers tend to get the reflective time of leisure forced on them through nervous breakdowns, “type A”- behavior-heart attacks, and rehab clinics.

Living on the Edge

Stories are nearly always about people that move toward the edge. On the stuff-edge of the triangle live bankers, consultants and entrepreneurs. On the leisure-edge are zen students, writers and stoners, and on the mobility-edge we find expats, post-doc researchers and con artists.

In the industrial age the villains tended to be owners of stuff, as with Robin Hood vs. the sheriff of Nottingham. But the ephemerality of the information age has made villains more mobile. Screenwriters have become aware of that source of power: the villains in the early James Bond movies are captains of industry, while the later ones are information brokers, smugglers and gamblers.

Some stories are specifically about a chemistry between people with opposite corner lifestyles. In Priceless we see how gold diggers work themselves up along the mobility-edge toward the the top of the triangle, attracted to places where former aggrandizers slide back into leisure.

A common type of scene is where one character criticizes the lifestyle choices of another. These are the resting points between the action, where the viewer gets a look into the motives that drive the story. The following dialogue is between two Jetting Aggrandizers, one of which is trying to move toward the middle of the Lifestyle Triangle.

Bill: And what are you doing for a J-O-B these days?
Beatrix: I work in the record store.
Bill: Aso. It all suddenly seems so clear. Do you like it?
Beatrix: Yeah. I like it a lot, smartass. I get to listen to music all day… talk about music all day. It’s really cool. It’s gonna be a great environment for my little girl to grow up in.
Bill: As opposed to jetting around the world, killing human beings, and being paid vast sums of money?
Beatrix: Precisely.
Bill: Well, my old friend… to each his own.

Or this scene near the end of Once Upon a Time in the West. A pure Nomadic Minimalist, Harmonica, faces his arch enemy Frank, another minimalist who has tried and failed to become an owner of stuff.

Frank: Morton once told me I could never be like him. Now I understand why. Wouldn’t have bothered him, knowing you were around somewhere alive.
Harmonica: So, you found out you’re not a businessman after all.
Frank: Just a man.
Harmonica: An ancient race. Other Mortons will be along, and they’ll kill it off.
Frank: The future don’t matter to us. Nothing matters now – not the land, not the money, not the woman. I came here to see you. ‘Cause I know that now, you’ll tell me what you’re after.
Harmonica: …Only at the point of dyin’.
Frank: I know.

Drama and productivity happen when someone acts to change his or her position within the Lifestyle Triangle. All else is happy busy work and widget-cranking that no one wants to watch.

People whom inspire trust tend to talk, act and dress like they really are. It is like the barber you go to for a haircut when staying in a strange town. His shop is close to central square, because only a good barber has enough customers to support the rent of a prime spot. He shows his feathers quickly, and wins.

Personality is visible in the face and body. People inspire trust with relaxed faces and clear eyes. The sound of a voice broadcasts the owner’s mood. The judgment of onlookers is also steered by cultural signs. When a man walks through a red light while wearing a suit, people are more likely to follow him than when he is dressed casually. A hip outfit causes some people to approach, while others will stay away; any type of clothing can inspire trust in a target audience.

A person’s good name grows out of skilled results, as members of an audience place bets on his or her behavior, putting their own name on the line. John recommends Peter, and if John is known as a good guy, then Peter is expected to be a good guy too. If John predicted rightly, he earns himself a favor. The human mind handles these ordinary relationships instinctively.

Virtual contact

The web allows for relations that do not benefit from common social instincts. The scripts that shape traditional contact are stretched. People can have deeply specialized discussions and business with people they might not like to meet face-to-face. Where the traditional communication script is stretched, the important facts about others become local and situational. Trust is forced to flow along the poor medium of text, or, when justified, through Skype calls.

Virtual relations give rise to new benefits. There is no limit to the number of people you could transact with; web users broadcast- and filter signs of trustworthiness, to enable the best possible transactions.

Mystery and trust

After crude filtering by search or curation, you guess the value of their business, based on their web presence. You also make a guess about how well you guessed. When they outclass similar people you know, you trust them and want to talk with them. When you don’t trust your own guess, you find them mysterious, and you might want to talk about them with people you know who know about them.

For example, if you are looking for a web designer, your depth of knowledge of web design shapes the trustworthiness and mysteriousness of the designers you might want to talk to. If you are an expert, a glance at their work is enough to decide on them. If you don’t know anything about web design, you rely on the recommendation of someone you trust. When you know some things about web design, you talk about promising profiles with people that know more than you do.

Web-savvy people market a profile to their audience with a controlled level of mystery. For example, a level of education tells the audience about the minimum performance of the candidate, but it only weakly suggest their top performance. In contrast, a portfolio sets a range of imaginable projects that is as rich as the number of clients on it. People broadcast the mix of education, jobs, and portfolio items that looks best to the target audience. The worst profiles show everything.

After a profile is past the filter and leads to a meeting or phone call, common instincts of trust take over again.

Strangers and assessment

People at the edge of your organic network tend to resemble you. You share the accent, style and views of your region, class or profession. But a meeting with a true stranger can go in strange directions, because unpublished facts about them could matter to you.

These strangers are likely to be better business partners than people around your organic network. First, because of mere physical distance, you could take advantage of geoarbitrage: outsource to people in emerging economies, sell to people in rich places, and spend the profit in sunny and cheap places. More importantly, when they inspire enough trust, their social distance and vastly different history can cause comparative advantages you could not have imagined.

Contact with them stretches the traditional communication channels, and you stretch with it. Before contacting someone you don’t know yet, your mind naturally fills the gaps. You subconsciously build an image of them, using parts of yourself and people you know, to fill in the gaps. That image is reliable when meeting new people around the edge of your organic network. But the strangeness of people behind profiles causes the gaps to be filled with the wrong pieces.

The abilities they have are scaled by your memories of people in your organic network. A virtual stranger can be horribly bad or magically good at things you thought you were bad or good at. Apparently, you compared yourself with a few regulars you resemble. This stranger shows that comparative self-assessment is a provincial mistake, a sampling bias.

In a virtual space, where contacts with any stranger can falsify comparisons, relative self-knowledge is dead and fresh comparative advantages come alive. Mysterious strangers have benefits to offer, and make you a stranger to yourself.

What Evil Plans actually is depends on the reader. It is a magnifying glass in front of a mirror, with two effects:

First, it magnifies the reader’s expected future self. Like his first book, it shows that art, marketing and meaning can’t be separated. MacLeod’s commercially artistic cartoons are about art, meaning and marketing. Expert bloggers like him have spent years of fusing the medium with the message. They walk the talk of independence, energy, love and sacrifice. We are invited to join that elite, and the tune never gets old. Evil Plans shows it to us just another time, reflecting the reader’s enlarged ego back.

Second, it magnifies the marketer within. The message did get more sophisticated, for those with eyes to see. If you are in the persuasion business (and aren’t we all?), you can get a deeper look into the future, as it is conceived by the cool kids. We have to be amazing or we’ll starve. We must create meaning or we aren’t human. True, especially if you believe it. As it turns out, telling people this every week, year after year, is enough if you are an experienced cartoonist. Apparently we crave that harmonious repetition. The similarities between the first and the second book hint at this. Audiences crave.

Glass and light have their distortions. What is here called an Evil Plan, is just living by the Sex & Cash theory as explained in the first book. And as before, your thing has to be simple, amazing, and you have to do it every day, the world has changed, change with it or be loser, and so on. Although Evil Plans has a sequel’s usual flaw of regressing to the mean, there are some new tricks of execution.

The New Stuff

Ignore Everybody told us “to put the hours in,” but now we are to go further by joining the overextended class, to sleep rough, and to accept that it will cost us our life. We get more examples of how people did it (some of which are already on Gapingvoid.com), some new marketing tricks, and further proof and reassurance that it’s worth it. What entrepreneurs can learn from artists, and vice versa (a trick question), more on gifts, and what’s good about having trolls and haters. Mostly common sense we need to see from yet another angle.

The Message Between the Lines

When I first started to think about how marketing is done on the web, I somehow kept getting to the concept of a treasure map. Over time, the following scene grew some facets and angles:

A man sits alone in a bar at a sea port. A sailor approaches him with glinting eyes, and whispers:

“Hey.. Do you want to buy a treasure map?”

The man has a short list of reactions, but there is a wide variety of stories going from there. The number of value judgments about those stories is infinite. When you figure that scene out, you figure the web out.

As an ex-advertising man, and as a marketer of the Godin school, Hugh MacLeod knows that people in his audience don’t read his books for practical information. They use them as a badge, a sign that acts as prop in the story of their own deepening creativity. The meaty ideas are on his blog, for free (of course), and the reader buys Ignore Everybody or Evil Plans to seal his or her decision, and to say Thank you.

Treat training as a part of normal life with your spirit unchanging; your spirit must not be any different from normal.

See distant things as if they were close and take a distanced view of close things. With your spirit open and unconstricted, look at things from a high point of view.

However you hold the weapon, it must be in such a way that it is easy to cut the enemy well, in accordance with the situation, the place, and your relation to the enemy.

If you think, “Here is a master of the Way, who knows the principles of strategy”, then you will surely lose.

When preoccupied with small details, suddenly change into a large spirit, interchanging large with small.

Strategy is the craft of defeating the enemy in a fight, and nothing other than this.

The small white lights respond lively to the traffic sensors around the crossing. When one of the other roads is clear, the corresponding white lights count down faster, and when that road is busy, the small lights halt. The movement entertains and relaxes; time goes faster. Attention stays with the traffic light, and there is no longer any dozing or tensing.

In the past, the only use of displays in traffic was to show important things. In cars, they showed speed and the amount of fuel left in the tank. Over time they became useful to show neutral numbers as well, such as the temperature inside the car. They also appeared in new places. Digital signs on the side of the road remind speeders that they should slow down. The cycle of white lights is the next step. Apparently, a trifling guess of a useless fact is wanted. Someone who is waiting, craves attentional gum.