Blog Profit Café

This isn’t about Internet marketing. Though it is really, since a happy Internet marketer is probably a better Internet marketer. Ok, that’s arguable
Anyway, these are the most soul-feeding thoughts on happiness (What, someone still believes in it?) I have read for a long time. I had to post the whole thing; I couldn’t find any bits that weren’t important!!
This is by Michael Neill of GeniusCatalyst:

A few months back my best friend and his wife had a baby named Kai. When we went to visit baby Kai in the hospital, I was struck as I often am when in the presence of extremely young children at how peaceful and almost blissed out he seemed to be.
In fact, it was difficult to look at him without falling into a state of wellbeing myself.

Judging by the goofy looks on all the grownup faces in the room, I realized I was not alone in having this experience. Since I make a large part of my living by assisting people in accessing their own happiness and wellbeing in the pursuit of their goals and in the midst of challenging situations, I began to wonder how it is that that state of wellbeing we were all born into seems to fade over time and become more and more difficult to access.

Here’s where I’ve got to with it so far…

The way most people think about life is that their experience is a continuum ranging from misery to joy. The game of life is figuring out which things take you towards joy (and doing more of them) and which things take you away from joy (and do less of them).

At one level of consciousness, the path towards joy seems to be marked by having the right stuff - plenty of money, a good job, a great relationship and a nice home.

But we all recognize that there are plenty of people who have all those things on paper but are still pretty miserable in themselves. So we begin to look deeper and see that it’s not your stuff but your *actions* that make you happy or unhappy. Do the right thing and you feel good about yourself; do the wrong thing and your conscience will haunt you until the end of time.

The problem with this theory is that we all know that as often as not, good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. And though we may think that “doing the right thing” should be its own reward, life viewed from this level doesn’t seem remotely fair.

It’s thoughts like this that lead many people into a more internal-direction in their pursuit of happiness and wellbeing, and we quickly see that it’s not what happens but what we think about what happens that determines our experience. So we begin experimenting with things like affirmations and positive thinking, sure that if we could just control the flow of thoughts through our own brains, we would have the key to life-long happiness.

A lot of people get stuck at this level of understanding because of one simple, innocent mistake - they attribute their inability to think only positive thoughts to a lack of skill or effort on their part instead of recognizing that the theory itself is based on an incorrect premise - the idea that you can actually control which thoughts come into your head.

When you really stop to think about it, you realize that you can only choose which thoughts to dwell upon and make important - not which ones pop into your head in any given moment.

At this point, people come to what seems like an real sticking point. As one of my clients once put it, “if happiness doesn’t come from what I have or what I do, and I can’t choose my thoughts, doesn’t that leave me kind of screwed?”

And that’s certainly the conclusion some people come to. They decide that happiness is completely outside of their control, and they give up on the pursuit. Often times, they actually begin to feel better when they stop trying so hard to be happy, leading them to another false conclusion - that happiness can only be pursued indirectly.

The reason that’s a false conclusion is because it still makes happiness into a “thing” - something which we can have or not have, pursue directly or indirectly, successfully get or if we’re not careful, lose.

Some people take their pursuit of connection and well-being, or as we’re calling it “happiness”, and they decide that since we can’t control which thoughts come into our heads, the thing to do is to stop thinking altogether.

For reasons you’ll see in a few minutes, this seems to work, leading people into a complex set of routines, prayer, meditation practices, and a variety of other disciplines all designed to at least temporarily stop thought.

Since peace and well-being often follow these practices, the practices themselves appear to be the means to a happy end. But again, the problem with all of these practices is that they take practice - and while that may seem a small price to pay for such a precious jewel, there is still another level of understanding beyond this one.

What if, like the baby Kai, we are born at peace - in tune with the infinite, in touch with our bliss, resting in the well of our being. But even as babies, our very human needs from time to time interfere with our connection with this innate well-being. We experience physical discomfort. Because we do not yet understand the source of our discomfort, we do the best we know how to do - we scream bloody murder!

Then, to our delight and amazement, someone comes (this is in a functional household) and “makes it better” - they feed our hunger, dry our bottom, entertain our nascent brains with funny noises and rollercoaster type movements, and before we know it, we are back in touch with our innate well-being.

Over time, it would be the most natural thing in the world for us to connect/attribute that return to well-being to the people or activities that seem to be causing it - we are OK because Mommy loves us, we are OK because Daddy protects us, we are OK because the people around us, for the most part, appear to have our well-being at heart.

And then one day we do something in our joy that mommy or daddy doesn’t like - we splash colors on a wall, or cry when daddy’s tired, and suddenly the ocean of love we are used to swimming in is filled with sharks and other monsters.

Before long, we have bought in to the myth of love and well-being outside us.

But well-being - happiness, connection, love, peace, spirit - is your nature. And the reason you can never consistently hang on to it when you pursue it from the outside in is that it’s already inside you. It would be like looking for your keys in the street when you had left them in the house - no matter how long and hard you look, you can never find what’s not there.

Sitting in the hospital that day, watching the baby Kai as he slept off the rigors of his birth, it became clear to me that the source of well-being comes from deep inside us. It is not the fruit of something we do; it is the essence of who we are. And all our attempts to find wellbeing from outside ourselves, no matter how well intended and practically followed, are doomed to fail. Not because happiness and wellbeing are unattainable, but simply because it is impossible to find what has never been lost.

Have fun, learn heaps, and take some time this week to hang out in your own good feelings. Worst case, you get to feel good; best case, they may lead you all the way back to the source.

Michael Neill
copyright www.geniuscatalyst.com

Remember the Enron scandals of 2001? It seems so long ago now, yet the scandal that involved Enron Corporation as the protagonist in a sordid tale of accounting/tax fraud followed by the largest bankruptcy in history proved to be disastrous in the financial world. Wikipedia gives the full story here.

Prompted by this scandal and the alarm it set off in the business world, Shel Horowitz (author of the award-winning book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First) founded the Business Ethics Pledge - a movement whose aim is to “create a business climate where people at nearly every business in the world can hold their heads up high and be proud of what they do—and the remainder rise up in rebellion at the crooked practices of their employers”.

For more information and to sign the pledge click here.

I’m a nice person. Since nice people don’t do bad things they are never accused unjustly, because the impossibility of their ever committing any kind of misdeed (intentionally, anyway) is one of the fundamental laws of nature.

And then there’s the real world.

Still though, while I understand that Internet is a boundless ocean that numbers all kinds of scavengers and predators among its species, I don’t think that I should be classed as one automatically just because I’ve unwittingly “abused” the CPU usage of my host’s resources.

Yes, I’ve been branded with the scarlet letter S for Suspended, as in “This website has been suspended”.

And yes, like SOOO many who have had the same experience, the contortions and acrobatics I have had to master VERY fast in order to get my stuff online again were almost obscene.

Seriously, though, my 2 cents on the subject (i.e. what I have learned) is this:
When it happens, the greatest temptation (if you know you are in good faith) is to vent all your frustration on the host (well, they suspended me, after all) - and this is made REALLY easy often by the communication difficulties with the relative Help Center.

Personally, after receiving 2 and a half ’stock’ replies that, apparently, much more techno-savvy users than me have difficulty making sense of, I sought the wisdom of the forums and the blogs. You can always depend on your online family for real, human opinions. Not always objective, of course, but people are generally pretty aware of the power of words and do try to be fair.

Nevertheless, I came away from the forums and blogs with a scary impression that my particular host got ‘his’ kicks by being rude and arrogant towards us poor defenceless users. I was told that if you post anything negative on the host’s forum you’ll get banned and insulted, that the Help Center staff are all rude and nasty and never reply to e-mails, etc, etc.
Well, I did wait a whole day without getting a reply, tho’ to be fair, I live in Europe so there’s a time difference of 6 hours and therefore working hours don’t always jive. In the end i decided to post a really sweet and helpless request on the forum, explaining the problem and that I wasn’t being answered. After a few minutes my post just disappeared into thin air. So I tried again with another tactic, this time asking if anyone could tell me how to avoid the problem of CPU overuse - was there a way I could upgrade to a version that permitted more CPU usage? Again, after a few minutes the post disappeared.

Now it could well be a coincidence, but ten minutes later I received an e-mail saying that my account had been de-suspended! Hmmm…

Anyway, what I learned is that everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt - both the user that’s accused of some sort of violation of the TOS, and the service provider who seems not to be providing, or to be providing erratically, the service paid for. It’s so easy to think bad of people just because they’re not me. And I’m a nice person.

If Internet is the pulse of modern society it’s clear that we seem to be in a great hurry to get somewhere. Where? The far land of Wealth, of course, where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of Success (apologies to Narnia fans for the paraphrase!). Paradoxically, the only Internet Marketers whose ultimate goal isn’t to one day (asap) be able to slow down and stop worrying about money are those who have, in fact, ‘arrived’, and seem to spend their time lounging on deckchairs, laptop on lap, sending videos to the rest of us about the latest ‘time-sensitive’ alert. (This isn’t an ‘anti-guru’ rant, by the way; there are a number of highly successful marketers who have proved over and over that you can be rich and successful without losing your humanity, and do sincerely want to help others make it).
The point I want to make is about time.
Again, paradoxically, the two greatest truths regarding the business/phenomenon of Internet marketing are:
1. The key to success is to act now
2. The keys to success is to patiently, bit by, bit, build your business
Ok, these don’t seem to be in conflict, yet the call to ‘act now’ is more often than not found on a sales page that also warns about the time-sensitivity of the product being sold.
Personally, I don’t like being put under pressure and even though I do “realise that I’m passing up an amazing offer forever” I can’t help it… I prefer to decide in my own time.
If a product turns into a pumpkin at midnight and I lose my chance to make it with Prince Charming, well, never mind. There’ll be another one along soon.

Here’s an interesting site I just came across… It’s called Qassia, and they claim that for exactly 12 hours new users are paid $500 for each referral. Not REAL dollars (if there is such as thing!) of course, but more like points that, Qassia claims, serve to boost your website’s ranking. The site, currently in its beta stage, is “a credit-driven intelligence engine coupled to a cascading tag-based web directory. What exactly does this mean? It means that Qassia will change your life.” Users can submit sites for free (no link exchange required) and are encouraged to contribute ‘intel’, i.e. bits of intelligence on specialised subjects, which can be just about anything - the main thing is to share knowledge and enrich the community. Qassia promises that the more you contribute the more backlinks you will get, PLUS any revenue generated from the ‘intel’ is all yours. If you want to sign up do it from my profile page and you’ll make me rich!

If we were to make a quick list of the main characteristics of modern society, what would they be? Technological, fast, exciting, dangerous? Generally along that line, probably. In this shiny, high-speed and super-technological modern society we realise at an early age that life is going to be a fast roundabout and if we don’t want to be one of the kids that gets left standing we’d better learn to run. We grow up without the need to invent our own games because toy and software manufacturers make it their business to invent them first – all we have to do is persuade our parents to dish out the money (funny how the old mantra about money not buying happiness –as true as it may be - seems to be ever less convincing today).

Then there is the scary problem of fear. The vast majority of us, right from early childhood, are presented with an unfiltered, ‘as is’ world through television. This doesn’t need expounding upon – we all know well what it means – the constant alarms, alerts, breaking news (a term, incidentally, that traditionally refers to giving bad news).

As we continue to multiply and grow in number it becomes increasingly difficult to exchange comfort and strength and learning with others. Community is a term that is more and more an internet phenomenon. Internet separates people physically from their local communities and then joins them together virtually into one raceless global family (surely the most valuable aspect, from a human point of view, of the World Wide Web).

So once the dampers are put on natural growing rhythms, natural creativity and inventiveness, the security of innocence and identification with our local social ‘family’, we are left with a rather sorry picture of a population growing in numbers but becoming increasingly isolated.

The good news (phew!) is that Nature, Life, God or whatever else we might call it has a way of constantly following in the wake of our disasters to add some sort of balancing element, something that in some way seems to compensate – like the white moth left in Pandora’s box after she went and let all the bad ones escape (thought: could it be that life’s greatest law is that of balance?). And so along with the isolation caused by internet comes an unprecedented and limitless possibility for communication via the Web, and in the rush and the stress of modern city life the younger generations (in particular) reconnect with the slow and deliberate world of their ancestors, their gods and nature by adopting and adapting the ancient symbols.

Through these signs, painted and tattooed on our bodies or worn as jewelry, we are somehow reconnecting with our instinctive side (for which modern society life has no room and generally sees as a threat or, a best, a waste of time). By wearing the symbols and tattoos of ancient tribes we are reacting (mostly unconsciously) against the gradual loss of our cultural identities – whether Celtic, Chinese or American Indian. At the same time, perhaps, we are declaring our kinship with the new global internet community tribe.

What’s 42 pages long, deals with a subject that is as central to Internet Marketing as it is underestimated by the majority of Web users, and has just been released online?
- My brand new Beginner’s Guide: THE WEB 2.0-RSS EXPRESS.
Recently the world of the Social Networks has been intriguing me more and more. I am fascinated by the way the trend of the past decades, which was causing Internet users to be increasingly isolated, has sort of generated its own solution to the problem by remotely uniting all these isolated individuals and bringing them together into one global, classless and raceless family. In the same context the business world is now having to pull up its sleeves (no-one can see your expensive suit online anyway) and get down to the ‘hard work’ of communication on an individual level.
And the great thing about the ‘Web 2.0-RSS Express’ is that anyone can ride it.
Oh, and by the way, this is a FREE e-book!
To find out more about it click here.

The other day I was complaining to a friend about the fact that I’m a slow writer. In fact, I’m slow generally - slow to think, slow to act, slow to create (but also slow to destroy, to judge, etc.). That’s all very well, but I also have a tendency to take on a whole lot of projects at the same time; add these two characteristics together and you get the “there aren’t enough hours in the day” syndrome.

Anyway, this friend promptly stopped me in mid-rant and put me to shame by telling me about the book he was reading. It’s not a new book; I won’t pretend I’ve already read it (I’m a slow reader and I live in Italy… ok, weak excuses) but it’s the next on my list: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon). Though many people will probably have heard of the story, especially now after the recent release of the film, for those who haven’t here it is in a nutshell:
This is the true story of the late French journalist and Elle Magazine director Jean-Dominique Bauby who, following a massive stroke, awakes from coma to find himself with a rare condition known as ‘Locked-in Syndrome’. He is totally paralysed except for his mind, which is as active and alive as ever, and his left eye. Though robbed of verbal communication and the use of his hands, he nevertheless devises an incredible system of communication using the only part of him that still moves: his eyelid.
With the aid of an amanuensis who constantly reads out the letters of the alphabet and writes down each letter that Bauby indicates by blinking his eye, the journalist gradually, slowly and painstakingly ‘dictates’ his book. It takes him two years and around 200,000 blinks to finish. Two days after the book was published he died unexpectedly of heart failure.

And here was I complaining about not having the time/energy/ability to do all the things I’ve planned. Creative people often seem to have this tendency to lock themselves up inside a diving bell of complaining and self-criticism, while watching in a sort of perverted self-pity as the butterfly of their imagination struggles in vain to be free. But it’s just an excuse… we know where the door is, and it’s not really locked at all.

“I decided to stop pitying myself. Other than my eye, two things aren’t paralyzed, my imagination and my memory”. Jean-Dominique Bauby

A couple of months ago the Cluetrain Manifesto could have been the title of a Harry Potter book for all I knew. Since then I have discovered (well, I’ve always thought so but then I’m idealistic) not only that marketing can and should be based on the original idea of exchange between individuals but that today, thanks to Web 2.0 and the social networks, this is actually happening.
So simple it’s scary.
This video sums it up perfectly (my apologies to all those of you reading this who have known these things for years - bear with us latecomers! :-)).

I think I’ve got it. After some more in-depth studying the clearest and most thorough tutorial I have found is by Teli Adlam at Optiniche. The pinging problem I had was when the person’s trackback url is hyperlinked and I clicked on it it just opened the same page. As Teli Adlam explains, all I had to do was right-click on the link and copy the url. From now on it should be plain sailing!