Expert Professional Advice

The problem with provocative self-help books and approaches is that when times are good you can use them to bolster your hopes, but when you really need to settle your mind and move forward these approaches fall apart, hold you back, or when hope is slipping the approaches of the authors appear nearly worthless. There is no salvation – soothing words from people that don’t care, unless they are promoting their books or seminars, are an obstruction; life remains life, nothing can change that.

And while tapping into some form of internal energy to heal ourselves in an emotional and mental sense, and to manifest our desires in a physical sense, is pushed by authors and speakers as engaging in success, the reason it fails is that we, as a people, are unreliable when it comes to productively dealing with ourselves. How can a mind that is divided be of any practical use to manifest nirvana? It cannot. At best, what they are doling out has already been established in other forms of religion, or concepts of being, and even if the gurus could give each one of us the answer – the truth is that we cannot implement it because we have no systematic method for dealing with our greatest obstruction to happiness – ourselves and our own limited understanding of our existence.

For those few folks that love to deal in investments because it is aligned with the ebb and flow of their existence, fine, be merry in all facets of all stock markets because playing the game is no more than dealing with yourself and how you make decisions. For the majority of folks that invest it seems they are in the game for the wrong reasons – or their actions are not aligned with the true purpose of their initial investments: to accumulate capital to provide for themselves many years from now in their retirement. So, the average retail investor risks his or her account value today and allows his or her investment holdings to diminish by refusing to sell – this decision is contrary to providing for yourself. When the day comes that the Dow and S&P 500 index fail to regain about half what it loses after a large drop and deviates from the pattern of partial rebound, that is the signal, or perhaps evidence, that the crowd of players no longer has the will to risk as foolishly or the capital to play the game in the same way: the market falters for the long-term because the players perception shifts: they look for other games.

The power of the crowd and how it shapes business: According to the book, the first recorded instance of crowdsourcing is the 1714 British government offering of 20,000 pounds (roughly $12 million today) to anyone who could invent a way to determine longitude on a sailing vessel. The solution – a clock that operates with superb accuracy, even during the rigors of an overseas voyage – was developed by John Harrison, an uneducated cabinetmaker from Yorkshire. A modern example might be: WellPoint, X Prize launch $10M health care contest (this was not part of the book). The book reminds us that when you mine the crowd you will often find the best ideas and approaches from those that do not have a specialty in the field in which they solve a problem. The author’s tips for applying crowdsourcing:　

Pick the right model:

Collective intelligence or crowd wisdom (creating conditions in which they’ll expound that knowledge)

Crowd creation (outsourcing)

Crowd voting

Crowd funding (example, sellaband.com)

Pick the right crowd (optimum size begins around 5,000 people)

Offer the right incentives (people need to feel rewarded for their efforts, even if the money is a token amount)

Keep the pink slips in the drawer

The dumbness of crowds, or the benevolent dictator principle

Keep it simple and break it down (divide tasks into the smallest possible components)

Remember Sturgeon’s Law (90 percent of everything is crap – some would say this is a low ball figure – I agree) Crowdsourcing’s chief merit lies in providing a previously nonexistent outlet for talent.

Remember the ten percent, the antidote to Sturgeon’s Law: Provide a venue – no aptitude or ability required, then let the crowd sort it out.

The community’s always right. You can attempt to guide the community but ultimately you will follow them.

Ask not what the crowd can do for you, but what you can do for the crowd. Crowdsourcing works best when an individual or company gives the crowd something it wants. Satisfy the upper most tier of hierarchy of needs – people are drawn to participate because some psychological, or emotional need is being met.

　

The book discusses the evolution of Wikipedia from the perspective of its founders. And although interesting, I’m going to present an additional example, not from the book, but also an example of community organization: Freebase, a flexible underlying structure that is very different from conventional databases that use rigid organizational structures, or schema, to organize information. Freebase’s open, wiki-like approach to information organization means that Freebase can grow without formal, centralized planning. As a result, anyone can contribute information about their areas of interest, create new schemas to organize information, or build collections of topics that reveal new, interesting, and fun relationships among their subjects.In terms of taking the crowdsourcing dynamic and integrating into an enterprise, although not mentioned in the book, an offering called Spigit seems to integrate the components necessary to rollout and maintain such an organization/corporate initiative. Spigit uses social collaboration for measuring social interactions in on-line communities to identify quality content as well as key influencers. Businesses can use Spigit’s smart, social collaboration platform to discover key influencers within their organization, engage employees and innovative ideas into real solutions.

You can heal your financial life: pare your holdings until you can discharge your stress. If your stock holdings don’t go up significantly, you don’t win because you don’t have enough margin of safety, if your holdings stay around the same price as you paid, you’ll probably worry that they could decline and it will be stressful, and if your stock holdings decline in price significantly… you don’t have an investment any more, you only have hope. That kind of hope is never as good as having the money in your account, hope doesn’t pay the bills and it doesn’t provide for your retirement.

All the success chasing fools are left with broken gurus – in better times self-proclaimed success experts claimed that success was simply a few steps away for anyone that wanted to claim it and initiated by changing your thinking; and now with undeniable enormous systemic problems facing the nation – illicit collaboration between the business community and government in a ponzi scheme effort to steal from the public, a government that committed fraud to convince the public to support an armed invasion of Iraq, the failure of the government to properly address relief for people in poverty that had nowhere to go and suffered as a result of hurricane Katrina and failing infrastructure, the failure to handle real problems of the public, such as homelessness and an inadequate health care system. A government that tells the people to support a bailout due to subprime and credit default instruments when this same government couldn’t prevent the Savings & Loan crisis, and couldn’t put a plan together to effectively prevent another crisis less than twenty years later – the current man-made crisis. And most shamefully an administration that proposed allocating funds from the bailout to go to executives that were part of the undoing of the financial system. Capping executive compensation is foolish, no form of compensation for the wrongdoers is acceptable, and maximum prison terms for government officials and business partners must be mandatory.

And now all the self-proclaimed success experts are frozen and without genuine words of inspiration, they cannot spew the same kinds of foolishness into the public air, as it is evident that their methods do not work, and are of no comfort in a perceived crisis. At one time, here is what they loved to shove at us:

(1) Money and Finances
(2) Health, Wellness and Longevity
(3) Time, Time Traps and Overload
(4) Mission, Life Calling, Destiny
(5) Service and Philanthropy
(6) Relationships and Intimacy
(7) Psychology and Emotions
(8) Spirituality, Religion and Enlightenment

Personal responsibility is a concept lost on the public. Remember when false gurus claimed The Power of You will take you closer to the goal of achieving true abundance, wealth, inner peace and happiness? It was the power of fools that helped build the self-help business.

Suffering is optional and happiness is a choice. (Wrong, wrong, wrong – remember all those foolish high-paid speeches and seminars? What is beauty without ugliness, or average appearance? What is gain without loss? What is up without down, fast without slow, great without horrible? Suffering and happiness are linked… people will postpone happiness but they don’t relinquish their suffering – they value it as some kind of asset!)

Wisdom lessons will tell you the secrets of how real people have used the power of personal responsibility to guide you on the path to:

Making more money than you ever believed possible
(risk!)

Living a life of radiant health and freedom from pain and chronic illness
(placebo!)

Extending your life by more than 20 years
(start at -20)

Conquering the crippling emotions of depression, anxiety and fear
(give up false concerns and suffering – if you dare!)

Freeing yourself from time traps, overload and burnout
(life itself may be an expression of freedom and beauty, but our minds are traps)

Discovering your unique ability that will take you to your destiny & calling in life
(And you want to get there by reading someone else’s map?)

Finding true meaning in life by sharing with others (share your wallet… buy a book and expensive workshop to make the dream directors of inspiration rich.)

Rising above the ocean of mediocrity into true greatness (Mediocrity cannot be risen above by many, by it’s nature, and what would the gurus promise if we didn’t have the mediocre? Apparently we need them in order for us to think about improving.)

Finding true love, intimacy and meaning in relationships (the greatest promise unfulfilled – wouldn’t it make more sense to teach true love to find us instead?)

Learning to turn shame, rejection, abandonment and guilt into true happiness and inner peace (Do I have to buy another book?) Being fully present in the moment (Cherish that moment – it doesn’t last long, and it takes repeated practice all through our existence to enter those meaningful moments.)Living a life of freedom and unconditional self-acceptance (Oh no, people are at times very loving creatures, but are fools by nature – world history has proven this.)

You have within you the power to have everything you ever dreamed of and more! You will revolutionize your life, your wealth, your body, mind and spirit and take you to levels of greatness that you knew were possible but didn’t know how to achieve them.

Or you could take responsibility for being the damned fool that you are (as we all are), put the book back on the shelf or discard it and go for a walk. I think a long walk is more useful.

Every End Is a Beginning

Although we have come to the end of this book, our journey is far from complete. We are now entering the Personal Success Revolution, a force that will change the world.

Each of you has greatness within, and now is the time to release it. (No, I recall your comment about an ocean of mediocrity… and each of us may have the capacity for greatness, how can either of us prove anything? – but that does not equal inherent greatness. We mostly wallow in foolishness, and must have an equal or greater amount of foolishness within each one of us.)

Each of you has a story to tell. Each of you has a unique ability. Each of you has faced and overcome enormous obstacles. (It would be mostly a short dull story, and the ability, perhaps unique, wouldn’t be worth much. And each of us overcoming enormous obstacles? No, it would be mostly trivial. You kind of forget the day-to-day nothingness unless you keep a diary or journal.)

We want to hear—from the very depth of your heart and spirit—how you have faced your challenges and used your dynamic power to lift you from the brink of despair to the height of joy.

Do not ever rely on governments, bureaucracies, people, places or things to take care of you. They will do what they can to stifle your unique ability and drag you into the vast ocean of mediocrity that is swirling around you. Rise above this and do not tolerate it, because you deserve more and you are worth it! Let your voice be heard. Go deeply into the core of your being and release your power of personal responsibility for the world to see.

(What? Personal responsibility must be imposed upon us, apparently we’re too removed and out of context, the mind is a terrible thing to taste.)

The fall of America isn’t about outside forces, like the economy, global growth, terrorism – real or government sponsored, or increasing oil prices, it has to do with the realization that the false perception a nation has looked up to has been shattered. What the American people viewed as great only existed in their minds – no matter how much we became attached to the belief that this is the land of plenty for everyone… the truth asserted itself, this is the land of plenty for a few. The government failed to represent the people – that is the ultimate failure, an erosion of freedom, because the appearance of freedom will never be as valuable as authentic freedom. Members of the government allowed themselves to serve their interests first and those of their business partners above what is best for the people. That is the great failing – everything else would pass more easily if the people and media would focus on the steps to begin healing a nation – forcing the members of the government to admit their malfeasance, forcing the business people to admit their crimes, and to begin rounding up all of these lawbreakers for maximum prison terms, and taking back the money that was stolen from the public and returning it to the people. No wrongdoer must escape the consequences of the law. You must search the globe to dig up this money and return it to the people so that those that commit the crimes do not benefit from them. You have to treat it like Nazi gold. And if we fail at that, the nation has fallen.

This is perhaps the greatest question to trigger a self-induced shock… it leads to the great questions that have not been adequately answered by our government. Michael Moore raised several thought-provoking points in his book but stops short from directly accusing the government: And maybe we, the people, are afraid to know the whole truth because it could take us down roads where we don’t want to go, roads that end with a sinking feeling because we know too much about the people who run this country.

On page 37 Moore does bring up a shocking fact: President Bush was quoted twice in town hall meetings saying that he watched the first plane hit the tower. Michael Moore notes: The only problem with the story is that you didn’t see the first plane hit the tower-no one saw it live on TV, as the tape wasn’t aired until the next day.

Last Thursday I saw a plane with a banner – SOS Blog 7 Smoking guns www.AE 911truth.org.

It is a collective of architects and engineers that dispute the official claim that the towers could have come down in such a short amount of time from a fire.

What gets me is, the towers were surrounded by cameras, what about footage of a plane striking the building from a building camera? And what Michael Moore neglects to bring up in his book is, the Pentagon must be surrounded with like 600 cameras, but there is no footage of a plane hitting the Pentagon.

Dow 30,000? No, Dow 3,000. A book written during boom times claimed the Dow was worth and would climb to 30,000 by 2008. The two academic researcher authors were fools caught up in boom times. In 1993 the Dow was around 3,000 – Why couldn’t it return to that level? It could. People forget that in the early eighties the DJIA was around 1,000. When the DJIA went from 3,000 to 10,000 people didn’t necessarily get rich, even if the index had gone from 10,000 to 30,000 most investors wouldn’t get rich. Wealth in the stock market arises from betting on the strongest stocks in the best performing sectors, and from understanding what will move a particular stock. What investors forget is that if they didn’t get rich during the bubble – when tech stocks were zooming to higher and higher prices based on a very positive market outlook, what makes these fools in the market believe hanging on in unfavorable market conditions will bring them wealth? If you didn’t get rich in the stock market then, you missed the most favorable period, and you’re better off putting your capital to work someplace else. When enough investors feel that way, or when perception adjusts we’ll see if the DJIA returns to where it was in 1993 to 1994 at 3,000 to 4,000.

It is by non-interference that all is naturally accomplished. The wise individual seeks to return to his or her root by emptying the mind of thoughts to attain an absolute stillness of the mind. Remove all desire because desire feeds on itself, and leads to an accumulation of more and more things. Even a craving for knowledge must be resisted, for learning only leads to filling the mind; a Tao practitioner subtracts day by day, decreasing until he or she finally reaches non-action and an emptiness which Tao alone can fill. The wisdom of the Taoists:

A wise man knows others. A clear-minded man knows himself. A strong man masters others. A truly powerful man masters himself. It is riches to know when one has enough.

When the ancients talked about achieving their ambition they were not talking of carriages and ceremonial caps. They were simply talking of a joy to which nothing could be added.

The man who has forgotten self may be said to have entered heaven. (I like these – it is the hidden idea in the I’m No Expert book… if you can still find the book.)