Conservation of Energy

In physics, the law of energy conservation states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant. It can’t be created or destroyed; rather, it transforms from one form to another. Our understanding of the universe relies on this principle.

It often (not always) applies to people and relationships, too.

If you escalate (cut off in traffic, angry at the gate agent, frustrated at your boss), you’ve just added (negative) energy to a conversation.

If you escalate (enthusiasm, a hug, encouraging words), you’ve just added (positive) energy to a conversation.

Once the energy is added, it has to go somewhere. Often, the person you’re engaging with throws it right back, or even increases it. The problem with taking offense is that it’s really hard to figure out what to do with it after you’re done using it. Better to just leave it on the table and walk away. Umbrage untaken quietly disappears. A talented, mature person might take your negative energy and de-escalate it, or even swallow it and permit the conversation to calm down or end. But don’t count on it.

You can ‘win’ a conversation by overwhelming your opponent with energy they can’t handle. But of course, they’re not your opponent and you don’t really win. Being aware of the energy you add or take from interactions is a sophisticated technique that radically changes the outcomes of the conversations that fill your day. Add the good stuff, absorb the bad stuff and focus on the outcomes, not the bravado. Winning isn’t the point.

The Critic and the Poop

We’ve all been criticized at times. Sometimes brutally or without thought. The intent may or may not be to help. Keep in mind that there will always be someone around to tell you that what you’re doing isn’t good enough. Feel free to listen to and act on the facts, but you’d do well to filter out the emotional baggage the sender may be trying to bestow upon you.

That’s part of the struggle of choosing your own path. Of course, nobody ever erected a statue for a critic. On the other hand, statues are the ones that get pooped on by passing birds. There is no way to avoid this if you want to get anywhere or do anything great.

It washes off.

Organization’s Effects

If you take a group of people, a subgroup of the larger population, and expose them to focused messages again and again, you will start to change their point of view. If you augment those messages with exposure to other members of the group, the messages will begin to have ever more impact.

We generally tend to align ourselves with those we’re around. We don’t fully understand why. There is a lot of psychology we know, and then other stuff we can’t explain. Yawning, for instance, can be statistically shown to be contagious. It has been studied for years, yet we don’t know why it happens.

Once a group starts to become aligned, and starts acting like a tribe, the messages of the tribe will become self-reinforcing. When someone is born into that tribe, there is a very high probability she will never know the difference. It is simply her common sense about the way the world works.

Programmed.

Impressions are (nearly) Permenant

“But what will I tell my people?”

Once someone makes a decision about something subjective, it’s almost impossible to persuade them that they were wrong. Not just because it’s difficult to really be ‘wrong’ about subjective things, or sometimes to even quantify them, but because you’re no longer asking them to remake the first decision, you’re asking them to admit an error, which is a whole other thing.

Compounding this, we often make it awkward for someone who is trying to come around to be embraced, largely because they are hurt that they were rejected in the first place.

The opportunity is to encourage them to look at new information and make a new decision. Give them the story they need to rationalize the change. “Well, I know I said X, but that was before she/he/they listened to me and changed…”

Step two is to celebrate the newcomer, not to dredge up their past positions and wave them in their face.

Why We Need Show Business

Some time ago I had an occasion to visit a practice session with the Indiana University basketball team. It had a very unusual element I had never seen or heard about before. They were working on the usual things: mostly executing their designed plays. The defensive team had twice as many players on the court, all of whom had on boxing gloves and were punching the offensive players in their bodies and arms. Not roundabout punches, but hard enough to knock them off balance.

In life most of the war is in our own minds. The chasm between what we know we can and can’t do is occupied by a battle with perception of ourselves. Everyone who makes it to the other side looks back and tells us it’s mostly mental. If you believe, and really try as if you’ve burned your ships, you can do it.

So what does this boxing-ball match really do? It doesn’t teach a basketball skill we would normally associate with the game. Basketball is supposedly a non-contact sport. Ha, ha, the joke is on you if you believe that! There is lots of contact in basketball, but any kind of punching is out of the question, or is at least called a foul. Some teams do play a very physical brand of ball, with a lot of various kinds of contact. Invariably, if your team is not ready for this, it will throw your game off. You won’t be able to get to spots on the court you want, you won’t be able to be in balance like you are used to, etc. It gets in your head, and soon nothing is working. You lose, even though your team may be better. It’s almost all mental.

So you practice with boxing gloves to learn to handle these physical teams. Totally makes sense. But here is the non-obvious part. This is a sales job. The boxing gloves game isn’t that much like a real game. Conventional wisdom would tell you to line up a physical team to play in the way it will actually happen on the court? First, it’s not that easy to make such a team. The opponents you will face already have the best players who can do this. Second…you need to practice under worse conditions, so that actual game conditions are more tolerable. But do you need boxing gloves to do this? What is the point of big, red, boxing gloves? Here is the kicker, the third and big reason for it: by having played under these worse conditions in a very demonstrative, show business way that’s visually memorable, you have actually become sold yourself that you can work through it and handle it. The purpose is not so much to give you the skill and toughness, but to help you believe you have it. You have the visual mnemonic of all of those guys in red gloves punching you, and you learning to deal with it. You have become sold.

What have you sold yourself on in life? That’s the key to unlocking doors.What are you drifting towards as a result of accepting the sales job that has been done to you, whether by yourself or others?

Reminds me of a great line from an interesting movie about sales.

“There is no such thing as a no-sale call. A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can’t. Either way, a sale is made; the only question is who is gonna close? You or him?” – Jim Young (Ben Affleck), Boiler Room

The real “him” is your alter ego. That quiet voice of doubt that comes from your lizard brain wanting to keep risk low, and keep things comfortable. Sounds good enough, but as I have written before, comfort in the now belies the bigger discomfort of the future if you don’t act.

There aren’t many more ways I can think of to say it. Take the shot. You can probably get somewhere good, and you have rebounders around you in case you miss.

 

 

 

 

The Marketing Drug

Every time I see my dentist he tries to sell me stuff. Various services they provide that will in some way (they claim) improve my life by addressing some shortcoming or concern taking place in my mouth. I never knew my mouth had so many problems!

I’m all for selling people on things that can help them take care, even if they are merely for pleasure or aesthetics (vanity), but like everything else, there can be a tipping point where we sometimes take it too far, or are too manipulative.

It reminds me of how food is marketed. The marketing has become so powerful that some of the people being hurt actually are eager for it to continue. This creates a cultural feedback loop, where some aspire to have these respected marketing jobs, to do more marketing of similar items. It creates a society where the owners and leaders of these companies are celebrated as risk-taking, brave businesspeople, not as the modern robber barons that they’ve become.

The cultural feedback loop can’t be denied. The NAACP, which represents a population that is disproportionately impacted by the health costs these products create is actually allied with marketers in the fight to sell ever more and bigger portions to its constituents.

The crime continues because the money taken by corporations that change our culture is used to fund campaigns that conflate the essential concept of ‘freedom’ with the not-clearly-articulated ‘right’ to respond to marketing and consume stuff in quantities that would have been considered literally insane just three generations ago. And we like it.

[I’ll write the previous paragraph’s point again here to be clear: we’ve decided that consumers ought to have the right be manipulated by marketers. So manipulated that we sacrifice our long-term health in the face of its power.]

We ban accounting that misleads, and we don’t let engineers build bridges that endanger travelers. We monitor effluent for chemicals that can kill us as well. There’s no reason in the world that market-share-fueled marketing ought to be celebrated merely because we enjoy the short-term effects it creates in the moment. Every profession we respect has limits created and enforced by society. These rules make it more likely we don’t race to the bottom as we cut those corners or maximize our profits.

The question is this: are you responsible for the power in your hands? If so, then we need to own the results of our work. If not, someone else needs to step in before it’s too late. No sustainable system can grant power without responsibility.

Just because marketing works doesn’t mean we have an obligation to do it. And if we’re too greedy to stop on our own, then yes, we should be stopped.

And don’t even get me started on the marketing of drugs. The pharmaceutical complex is as out of control as anything humanity has ever witnessed. It’s capitalism, and the battle is to win. At all costs.

 

Canned

When our desire and need for simplicity and efficiency replaces authentic human interaction we betray ourselves. Of course nobody is fooled. That’s not even the question. The perfunctory gestures of a polite society help connote a mood of civility. But in order to work, we must care enough to make them authentically.

Of course, it is far better for both parties to engage genuinely. Without that it all races to the zero of noise in the background that, given how busy we all are, isn’t only not needed, but actually becomes a nuisance. And transitions to a burden: “do I have to acknowledge these people?” Maybe you could write a subroutine for it. Let the computers talk to each other!

It’s no wonder we feel more alone than ever, even though we have far more input than ever.