How much do you value freedom?
Freedom and convenience directly oppose each other. Let’s take two extremes of this in a cup of coffee. If you wanted ultimate, total freedom, you’d grow your own coffee tree, harvest the cherries, dry them, roast them, grind them, brew them with water you sourced from your own aquifer, and have a cup of coffee that was completely and totally yours. You would be completely free from corporate meddling of any kind.
The other extreme is to pop a single cup serving into your fully automated coffee maker, press the start button, and have a cup of coffee in about 60 seconds. You have no control over the source of the beans, the quality of the water, or any part of the final product, but you have the ultimate in convenience, at the expense of a near-total loss of your freedom.
Think about this: how much freedom do you willingly trade for convenience? How much freedom do you unwittingly trade because you don’t know how to gain more of it?
Marketers have a strong incentive to get you to forfeit your freedom: the less freedom you have, the harder it is to leave their product or service. If you grow accustomed to a certain brand of coffee machine, you’re less likely to switch than if you get accustomed to buying a certain kind of bean. The cost of change gets higher as freedom diminishes and convenience increases – something that marketers covet. To the average marketing department, customer loyalty bought with lock-in has the same bottom line results as customer loyalty bought with a great product.
Try this: instead of buying commercial brands of coffee (or those single serving pods/cups/packs), how would your understanding of coffee change if you researched and bought particular types of beans and ground them at home? You’d sure notice a difference in taste and quality. Would an increase in quality and flavor be worth the extra time and investment to you?
Sometimes it’s not – but going through the exercise helps you understand when you’re making a conscious trade of freedom for convenience. Only after doing it yourself can you fully appreciate and acknowledge the freedom you willingly forfeit for never having to do it yourself. It helps you appreciate better all that you do have, all that you take for granted otherwise.
Sometimes it’s really worth it – you realize that you’ve been vastly overpaying for something relatively simple. If you love the porterhouse cut of steak, once you’ve mastered the basics you realize that restaurants are by and large vastly overcharging for a fairly ordinary cut of meat. You can get the same culinary experience out of the broiler in your oven for $20 that you can for $120 a plate at a steakhouse. In cases like this, you’ve been forfeiting freedom for convenience at a very high price.
After you finish reading this article, take a few minutes to examine something in your life that you enjoy for its convenience and see what it would take to gain a bit more freedom. Maybe you’ll pick the coffee example and try buying and grinding your own beans for a week. Maybe you’ll pick a favorite restaurant and see what it takes to replicate your favorite dish. Whatever it is, see what the cost of a little more freedom is, and if it’s not unacceptably high (making your own iPad, for example), try it for a week.
Side thought: take your favorite political party and examine their marketing practices. Are they working towards your freedom or trying to lock you in to a dogmatic viewpoint and sense of identity that ensures customer loyalty even with a substandard product?
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Informational snacking might kill you (or your career)
In the world of nutrition, what does a diet of constant snacking get you? How healthy is the end result of little snacks all the time, especially when the snacks are of dubious quality?
One of the most popular formats for writing content nowadays is the “snack-sized” content. 5 tips for this, 8 ideas for that, all in as few words as possible because attention spans are supposedly shorter. Twitter, of course, is the ultimate informational snacking tool, with everything compressed to 140 characters (a bit like those profoundly unhealthy 100 calorie snack packs).
These informational snacks are as profitable for content creators as the physical goods are for food manufacturers – and the health effects are about the same. Create less content, package it well, and sell it at a premium price in the attention economy. Coast on brand and reputation. Pack less nutrition, less quality, and less value in them, and as long as you’re selling what people think they want, you’ll do fine.
Want to see the difference? Take a look at your favorite bloggers of today and dig around in their archives. Look back before they were Internet famous and see if their content has changed. I’d bet you in a random sampling of 10 popular bloggers that you’d see some who have stayed the course of serving full, nutritious meals and others who have switched to snack packs almost exclusively.
How do you avoid falling into a snacking only mentality? As a content consumer, take some time (especially over the next month or so as you have some down time to celebrate holidays) to prioritize content creators based on the value they give you. Share and retweet the really good stuff liberally, because attention is the currency of the information economy. Just as it’s vital to support food manufacturers that are aligned with your values with your wallet, so it’s important to support content creators aligned with your values with your attention. The informational equivalent of a doctor telling you to stop snacking and eat properly or you’ll die of a heart attack is an employer who says that your knowledge isn’t valuable any more and lets you go.
As a content creator, acknowledge that while snack packs are great marketing and powerful short-term profit boosts, ultimately you need to provide longer-term benefit to your audience or they’ll mentally starve – or shop somewhere else. Every time you step up to your content creation toolkit, ask if you have the time and the will to create something of value, and if you don’t, step away and come back later when you do. You can absolutely create healthy 100 calorie snacks and you can absolutely create healthy informational snacks, but as with all things, quality takes time and effort.
Ultimately, you have to decide how much informational nutrition you need in your life. If you’re content to live on snacks, that’s fine – but don’t expect to be able to outperform a digital marathon runner. In an economy where job creation is still lackluster at best, you might find that an all snack diet lets everyone else beat you to the finish line.
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Travel detoxification
After a spate of travel on the road, there’s a few things I do to help reset, reboot, and purge the ills of travel from my system. As with any and all things health related, what works for one person may not for someone else and may cause serious harm to yet another, so use common sense and consult a qualified medical practitioner before doing something drastic.
1. The moment I get home, I drink as much water as I can. Travel tends to dehydrate more than normal, especially if you’re in the air transit system where liquids are banned at certain points. I try to keep this level of intake for at least a day.
2. As soon as I get home, I down a chewable kids’ gummy multivitamin. The reason I pick a chewable here is that nearly everything in the chewable vitamins is water soluble, otherwise you’d have kids who accidentally eaten a few handfuls going to the ER for overdoses of iron. Having a chewable means getting stuff that flushes out if there’s too much in the system already.
3. Saltwater bath. Throw a few cups of raw salt (you can buy it in 50 pound bulk bags, and it doesn’t have to be food grade since you’re not eating it) into a bath and stir until dissolved. You know the salt that goes into water softeners and is used for deicing? That’s pretty much the same stuff as in a small jar of exotic sea salt that you find in health and beauty shops for absurd markups. I like saltwater baths just to clean up and naturally disinfect after travel. Germs tend not to like salt water, especially in higher concentrations of salt. (that’s why the ocean doesn’t fester and mold, by the way)
4. Standard vitamin and water before bed. I find that I wake up feeling better if I do this. Whether it has any basis in real science, I’ll leave up to the scientists, but I’ve found that it works for me. Play with the time of day you take a multivitamin and see if it makes a difference for you.
5. Decent night’s sleep. Nothing wipes you out faster during travel than lack of sleep or irregular sleep, which is almost guaranteed. Nothing gets you reset faster than a night in your own bed.
6. Reduced caffeine intake for a few days afterwards. When I travel, I know for sure I overdo it on caffeine. Driving, flying, working in unfamiliar places – all of that taxes me and in the short term I compensate on the road with coffee. When I get home, I dial it back to a cup of coffee a day for a few days just to help things calm down.
What travel detoxification and reboot tips do you have to share?
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#the5 for the week ending November 26, 2010
- #the5: The @seomoz litmus test for evaluating an SEO professional: http://ar.gy/4t3
- #the5: Stunningly inaccurate comparison data for competitive intelligence, says @seomoz: http://ar.gy/4kk
- #the5: Stephen K. Hayes on building compassion: http://ar.gy/4nI
- #the5: Psychology Today suggests you reconsider Doing More With Less for employers: http://ar.gy/4nH
- #the5: One of mine, what World of Warcraft can teach us about the knowledge economy: http://ar.gy/4kn #WoW
- #the5: One of mine, celebrate your victories! http://ar.gy/4t4
- #the5: One of mine on marketing with kaizen: http://ar.gy/4nK
- #the5: Mashable highlights the Angry Birds Peace Treaty video: http://ar.gy/4kj
- #the5: Learn how the Law of Common Fate can change your email marketing effectiveness: http://ar.gy/4km
- #the5: Facebook now accounts for 25% of web page views in US says @mashable: http://ar.gy/4nG
- #the5: Awesome! @seomoz shows you how to build a Google Analytics segmentation for social media: http://ar.gy/4nJ
- #the5: A nice @mashable primer on social media for event promotion: http://ar.gy/4kl
- #the5: @shannonpaul on the ethics of disclosing competitor relationships: http://ar.gy/4t1
- #the5: @petershankman on Klout and psychology: http://ar.gy/4sx
- #the5: @mitchjoel on the new rules of email: http://ar.gy/4t2
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The action of giving thanks
We make reality in our world in three ways: thought, word, and action.
It’s good to think about gratitude, to think about all we have that we might otherwise not. The grateful mind helps shape our view of the world and deepens our appreciation of everything that we have.
It’s good to speak of gratitude, to give voice to the gratitude in our heads. Our words can inspire gratitude in others, a way to brighten the lives around us and remind our collective selves of what we have.
But this is where we often stop. We say our thanks around the dinner table on a certain day of the year, we eat the roasted beast, and call it a day.
Is that thanks enough?
The last piece of the magic puzzle is to take action, to express gratitude through action. If we acknowledge that the society around us, for good or ill, has created the series of actions and sequences that has given rise to the fortune we have (meager or vast), then if we can find a way to contribute back to it, that is acting with gratitude.
Maybe it’s a donation of your time, volunteering towards a worthy cause. Maybe it’s a financial or material donation, giving to others as you’ve been given. Even a small amount, a tiny spark, is enough to start a fire under the right conditions. Maybe it’s the adoption of an animal or the delivery of a dinner to someone who can’t provide for themselves.
Whatever the form is, action completes the process of bringing what’s inside of you out into the world. Action takes intention and spoken commitment and brings it to fruition as something tangible, something that will change your world.
After you express the thought of thanks, after you speak the words of thanks, find a way to commit to the action of thanks and in doing so, give someone else a reason to be thankful as well.
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