Here’s why your personal brand sucks. Here’s why you’re trying to be a clone of Chris Brogan or CC Chapman or Whitney Hoffman and failing miserably at it. It’s not because you’re stupid (well, most of you aren’t, except for the folks who repeatedly get phished on Twitter for clicking on “LOL iz this u” links – yeah, you’re stupid), it’s not because you’re boring (again, most of you aren’t, but if your Twitterstream is filled only with “New Blog Post: …” – yeah, you’re boring), it’s because you’ve failed to distill your essential quality.

Your essential quality is something that transcends any particular job, technology, platform, or idea. Your business card may say that you’re a database engineer or a sales associate or the Vice President of Strategy and Innovation, but that’s not what’s essential about you. What’s essential about you is a quality, a trait, a method of working in the world that is unique to you and very difficult to even put into words, much less copy.

Your essential quality will take you years, possibly a good chunk of your life, to even realize. Once you know it, though, once you find it and cultivate it, you rise rapidly above your peers. You rocket past them because you know this strength of yours and can focus what you do in your life to feed it and deliver results that no one else can deliver.

It’s taken me close to two decades to figure out my own. Put into words succinctly, I’m really good at playing with blocks. I used to call it derivative thinking, but that’s largely meaningless outside my skull. What I mean by playing with blocks is that I can see all these different pieces of systems and put them together in new and different ways. This lets me do things like make odd Twitter videos combining tools and techniques together. This lets me be a competent martial arts practitioner, breaking free of only pre-arranged routines to use the tools in whatever fits the moment. This lets me talk to people of wildly different professions and trades and find ways to make whatever I have work with their businesses, and vice versa.

What you’re good at, what your essential quality is, what makes you who you are isn’t something anyone else can tell you. Others can’t see inside your head, just the results that you produce – and how you got to those results is different from your perspective than anyone else’s. Defining and refining your essential quality takes a lot of introspection and a lot of self-honesty, because as you investigate yourself more and more, you realize all the things that you’re not good at, some of which may have defined your very identity in the past.

You’ll have to let go of an awful lot that you think is you. For years, I thought I was a damn good technology professional. I’m not. I’m a certain kind of thinker whose essential quality happens to work well with technology. In the past half decade or so, I’ve thought I was a marketer, and heck, other people think so and even made me a professor of marketing. I’m not. My essential quality works well in marketing, too. In another decade, who knows what I’ll be doing, but it will have that essential quality at its core.

The one suggestion I can offer if you have the guts, the bravery, to set out on that journey is to find a creative outlet for expression of some kind. Photography, art, music, dance, playing World of Warcraft, writing, speaking, martial arts, anything that lets you express yourself will do, because it will help you to pull out of yourself the various ways you express your essential quality. The process of figuring out what I’m good at took years. Most of it came from practicing the martial arts, because the method in which I train is ideally optimized for this kind of thinking, which means I get to practice the pure form of how I think on a regular basis in a way that delivers instant, unmistakeable feedback. Your method of figuring out what you’re good at will differ, but I recommend it be something expressive so that you can see your essential quality in action.

Once you figure out your essential quality, your personal brand will take care of itself. You won’t even need to name it or publicize it on your blog or Facebook page, because you’ll be so damn good at being yourself that your name will become your brand. Folks might not even be able to put into words why it is they like you or want to work with you. They’ll just know that they do, that they want to be around you, that they want to work with you, hire you, marry you, etc.

You will transcend personal branding itself, and ultimately live the life you were meant to live: yours.

Good luck on your journey. It’s long, but the destination is worth the journey.

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Ever listened to someone recount a tale of legitimate good work and say that it wasn’t a big deal?

Don’t ever do this to yourself. Why?

Part of our personal power is our ability to draw upon not just the knowledge but the emotion and energy of past successes to generate future success. Tap into all that was, all that you’ve done, all that you’ve achieved in order to firm your resolve against future obstacles. You know in your mind, in your heart, in your spirit that you do have what it takes to win in tough situations, that you can pull victory from the jaws of defeat.

Unless.

Unless you diminish and demean your past successes with diminishing words under the excuse of modesty. Unless you undermine your own past power by calling it nothing, by calling it a little thing, by saying that what you have done wasn’t a big deal. The words you use to describe what you’ve achieved color how you perceive those achievements. If you were trying to set up your life for failure, for frustration, for mediocrity, this is exactly the approach you’d take – amplify your failures and diminish your successes in your own mind, through your own words, and failure is guaranteed.

Modesty has its place, to be sure. One of the traits of the folks in my life who I consider to be very successful, very powerful people is that they happily acknowledge and celebrate their successes, modestly outwardly but strongly inwardly. When praised, very often their response is simply sincere thanks. When I receive praise, I copy my role models and simply express thanks and gratitude externally.

Internally is a different story. I reaffirm successes, relish the feeling of winning, and use it to steel myself against future battles. “I think I can” becomes “I know I can, because I have and I celebrate those past victories as the key to even more victory in the future!”

The habit of celebrating your successes becomes even more important when you face enemies who will seek to make you doubt yourself. If you live in the habit of saying that a success was nothing, an enemy need only encourage and amplify those words to steamroll you. They face a much tougher battle when you bear the shield of confidence built from past success (and celebration of it) and their efforts simply bounce off you. These enemies need not just be in the boardroom or on the golf course – they can be your own internal demons as well. Celebrate your successes and every additional success diminishes their sway over you.

Make sure you celebrate your successes, lest you rob yourself of the power you will need to drive even more success ahead.

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Don’t just be thankful for the things you have in your life that you appreciate.

That’s good and a good start, but if you want to take it to a different level, ask yourself this:

How can I create or foster more of what I’m thankful for in the world?

• If you’re thankful for family and friends, how can you help reinforce strong family and good friends in the world for others?
• If you’re thankful for health, how can you bring a healing presence to those around you?
• If you’re thankful for wealth, how can you help others achieve what you’ve done?

In short, what do you stand for? What do you want to see more of? How can you create more of that in the world, in your community, in your life?

As you do your prayers, meditations, gatherings, and offerings over the holiday (or any day, really), think about that cornucopia on the table. From nothingness appears a Pilgrim’s Bounty of what’s needed to bring life, health, and prosperity to your life.

Ask how you can create more of that for yourself and everyone you care about and the universe (or *.deity if that’s your belief system) may just agree to a win-win situation in which everyone gets more of what they want and need in your life.

Happy Pilgrim’s Bounty!

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I had the pleasure and privilege to present at the Web 2.0 Open conference in New York City recently on the topic of Doing More With Less, a topic near and dear to everyone. The session itself is based on so much of what I’ve learned from Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center and his teacher, Stephen K. Hayes. Here’s the funny part about the session – I can’t replicate any significant part of it here on the blog.

The content is entirely provided by you, the audience. I’m more or less just a tour guide. No slides, no PowerPoint, not even a real presentation, just a guided experience in which you and your fellow audience members discover new things about yourselves.

I called the session the most technologically advanced session of the entire conference, and in a way, it’s true. The human technology was what we explored. I made the analogy that gear and tech will only get you so far. Hand a rank amateur a $50 point and shoot camera or a $2,000 DSLR and you’ll get about the same number of lens cap photos. The gear and tech can improve bad photos potentially to mediocre, but that’s about it.

Conversely, a truly skilled photographer? Give them either camera and they’ll create amazing works of art that nearly ignore the limitations of gear. Don’t believe me? Check out the cameraphone category on Flickr to see some amazing works.

In the session, we investigated four areas of doing more with less:

1. Redefining less. With friends, we examined what less was with our training partners, and then looking at less from a different perspective to gain some mental freedom from a poor resources mindset.

2. Finding authentic self. With friends, we examined things that have always been a part of our lives and how we can align ourselves and our careers, lives, and businesses with our inherent strengths to do more, plus looked at the difference between our current selves and our superhero selves.

3. Reclaiming responsibility. With friends, we examined aspects of our life that appear as luck, good or bad, and how we can change our perceptions from luck to being in charge of our lives.

4. Empowering our minds. We examined in a distilled fashion the idea of using your iPod to control your emotional state.

It’s nearly impossible to convey online any significant part of the experience, so if you weren’t able to make it, I hope you can attend a future version of this, or attend the seminars and workshops given by my teachers. If you were there, I look forward to reading your feedback in the comments.

You can also pick up some of the source material from Stephen K. Hayes as well.

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What made it a great show? The same thing that Jerry Seinfeld was known for on stage as a standup comic, and the same thing that can take ordinary social media efforts and make them shine: universals.

What’s a universal? It’s something that an awful lot of people share. Seinfeld and George Carlin were both masters of pointing out the universals in our lives. Seinfeld had a routine about the secret lives of socks that neatly explained the inexplicable, like the lone sock in a laundry basket (its partner escaped) or on a sidewalk (an escapee that failed) in compelling stories that made a peculiar sort of sense. George Carlin made a living pointing out our inability to use the English language, especially when it came to things like airplane safety protocols (“What does it mean to pre-board? Do you get on before you get on?”) and political correctness.

These are universals. These are comedic references to daily life, outside of corporate babble, outside of hollow, shallow press releases. Universal experiences are experiences that many, if not all of us, have shared. They’re the weak social glue that give us common ground to start conversations.

Ever wonder why so many conversations start with the weather or sports? They’re our universals, things that are interesting enough to talk about but still safe, still common, shared experiences. Try starting a conversation with politics, sex, or religion and you’re just as likely to deeply offend the person you’re talking to as you are to engage them.

So what does this mean for your social media efforts? Take a look at what you’ve produced so far. Go on, look at your history. Look at what’s in your Twitter stream. Look at what’s on your blog. Look at your wall on Facebook. If your social media channels like this:

New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
Buy our $#!&!
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
Have you bought our $#!& yet?
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
A press release about our $#!&: xxx
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx
Did you know we’re an industry leader in this $#!&?
New blog post about our $#!&: xxx

…then frankly, you fail at being human. You fail at creating any kind of universal that someone else can latch on to in order to start a conversation. As a result, your social media efforts will be relegated to mediocrity at best and perpetual ignorage at worst.

Try being human. It’s okay to talk about the game last night even on your corporate account as long as you use common sense and decent language. It’s okay to talk about the restaurant you ate at or the coworker next to you who has different music tastes (again, using good common sense and tact), because it conveys to the people you’re trying to reach that you’re human.

Here’s a parallel, a universal. Ever been to a bar and seen that guy? Yeah, you know the guy. He wears a cologne called Desperation and everyone in the bar mysteriously creates about five feet of space around him and avoids eye contact at all costs.

That’s your social media efforts if what you produce looks like the example above. You’re that guy.

So how do you stop being that guy? Look for universals if you have no idea what to say. Listen to other people. Actually make an attempt to discuss something other than what you’re trying to sell. Go back and watch Seinfeld re-runs or catch his standup routines. Go listen to George Carlin, Sam Kinnison, Chris Rock, and the legion of other comedians who have made careers out of universals (and the most successful comedians do, because niche comedy only goes so far). Then bring a little of that back into your social media efforts.

I look forward to a hearty laugh reading your newly universal social media.

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One of the biggest mistakes marketers make – myself included – is the error of putting a buffet in front of someone who wants a snack. The sheer amount of choice can be staggering, but more importantly, every offering is diminished, no matter how good it is. Every offering is diminished because that finite amount of time and attention is divided among the number of offerings.

That’s why sites like Woot.com, for example, are incredibly popular. Instead of asking consumers for their attention at a million different products at once, Woot slaps one product up and says, here, pay attention to this only. It’s the equivalent of a museum curator locking the rest of the museum up and placing one masterpiece on a podium in the lobby with a spotlight on it only.

Marketers face this problem writ incredibly large in the digital age, when media is so available and abundant that the consumer’s attention is always being split. There’s the DVR in the living room, the iPod on your hip, the smart phone in your pocket, the endless depths of the Web on a browser near you, social media conversations flying by, books both analog and digital piled up on the nightstand – media everywhere, all begging for a slice of your attention. How, as a marketer, can you present what you’ve got in such a way that you beat museum syndrome? How, as a marketer, can you create that masterpiece experience for your product or service?

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal as I get ready to revamp the FAFSA application guide site I run, FAFSAonline.com. This topic, more than any other in the world of financial aid, is bewildering to consumers and especially to those who don’t have a good head for numbers. More students lose financial aid each year from issues and errors on the FAFSA than pretty much anything else except not bothering to apply for scholarships. So my challenge in the next few months as I get ready for the 2010 FAFSA season to start is to figure out how to beat museum syndrome in the world of financial aid.

Why? Here’s what’s at stake: if I can beat museum syndrome on this topic, it may mean that thousands of kids will go to college that in previous years would have been defeated by the FAFSA process. Big stakes, big chance to make a difference.

How will we make this happen? I’m looking around constantly for more examples of ways people have beaten museum syndrome. Woot.com is one. Another that’s been working is the way I have the homepage of the Financial Aid Podcast set up, with a single video that introduces the user to the site, focusing attention and eyeballs on the visually compelling cue of a video.

What ways are you beating museum syndrome in your marketing?

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The thing is, you very much can do so, you very much can create the mental and emotional states you want to experience. Your body and mind are designed to do exactly that, because at our most primitive levels, we’ve evolved to remember strong memories and feelings as a key to survival.

Look at your own history of strongly anchored memories, from basic things like the taste of an apple to incredibly complex things like the first person you kissed. You have tons of memories, good and bad, that you’ll never be able to get rid of. You have tons more memories waiting to be triggered at the drop of a hat – the right song in a public venue or the right scent of perfume, and you’re instantly somewhere and somewhen else. Ask any couple that’s been together for a while if they have a song that they strongly associate with, and you’ll get an enthusiastic yes far more often than not.

What emotional states do you want to invoke? Confidence? Serenity? Awesome?

The trick to refreshing and triggering the emotional states you want to experience is to know what your triggers are for memories you do have, and set new triggers when you want to anchor down a state for later recall. For memories you already have, few are more powerful than music, which is where the post about using your iPod for mental protection came from. Go read it and try it if you haven’t. Go dig up the powerful, positive states you want to recall out of your past. If high school or college was a positive experience for you, go dig out those yearbooks that are inevitably collecting dust on a bookshelf and take a quick jog down memory lane to extract the memory triggers that still have strength and impact.

If you know in advance that you’ll be encountering an experience that you’ll want to remember, like my friend’s lakeshore drive, then decide in advance how you’ll anchor that experience for later recall. Perhaps you’ve got some special hand gesture that has significance to you – many devout folks who pray with clasped hands find that just the act of physically doing so refreshes their mental and emotional state. Maybe it’s a special outfit you wear or a special routine that you create, a special habit that you can invoke – whatever works best for you.

There’s ample precedent for all of this. If you look at some of the images from Buddhism and from ninjutsu in which various hand postures are shown, you’ll see that they are less about portraying practices to the uninitiated and more about prompting practitioners who’ve gone through training to refresh their memories and experiences. Having a picture or statue in your home of Fudo Myo-o, Jesus Christ, the Dalai Lama, St. Mary, etc. isn’t so much a thing to pray to or worship as it is a daily, constant reminder of a mental and emotional state you’re seeking to invoke in yourself. (though of course many people do use them as foci for worship as well)

You don’t need to use religious materials, either, especially if they don’t connect with you. Plenty of people have powerful state changes when they pop in their favorite movie. Plenty of people have powerful emotions when they fire up Team Fortress 2 or Sim City or World of Warcraft. Plenty of people have associations that are just as strong around Yoda, Tirion Fordring, Superman, Indiana Jones, Batman, the Terminator, and Rocky Balboa. Use the tools and content that speak the most to you of the emotional and mental states you want to generate.

For “bottling” the feelings and states you want to recall, the trick is to be consistent. If you go for lakeshore drives as your way of refreshing yourself, then set a routine, a hand posture, a habit, whatever, so that similar experiences and emotional states are anchored with the same habit. If you love watching Rocky jog up the steps of the art museum, set those physical habit reminders for that feeling. Whatever creates the way you want to be, set your reminders, your anchors. Then, later on, when you need to invoke that same mental and emotional memory, the habits and physical gestures brings back what you’ve stored.

Give it a try and see how “mind-setting” works for you!

Photo credit: Mark Blevis

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Piracy is a market signal.

Piracy indicates that something is sufficiently valuable enough that it’s worth stealing. It’s worth making an illegal copy and spreading without compensating the creator.

Do you want the most accurate, unbiased, unmanipulated measure of how popular and valuable something is? Go hit up a site like The Pirate Bay or Demonoid or any of the other file sharing services and see if someone is stealing it.

Right now, taking a quick peek, about 150 people are illegally sharing Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. Another hundred or so are illegally sharing Outliers. Seth Godin’s somewhat less popular, with about 30 people sharing Purple Cow and Permission Marketing. A dozen are legally sharing Seth’s eBooks, which are free on his web site as well.

Matthew Ebel, independent musician, noted that recently there have been inquiries on Yahoo Answers about people trying to illegally share his music. By the way, Matthew, your 2005 album Beer and Coffee is being shared by at least two people illegally on Bit Torrent, just so you know. Go post a comment in that thread on the Pirate Bay.

Unlike commercial markets where marketers spend time, energy, and money to get you to buy things, no commercial marketer actively goes out and tells people to steal their products and not pay them. That’s completely irrational.

Give away for non-monetary currency, sure, through inbound links or reputation, through legitimate venues like your web site or iTunes, but no one wants to confer any level of legitimacy on pirate markets. Thus, when you see something in a pirate market that is actively being traded (meaning someone right now is seeding or leeching, uploading or downloading), it’s a good indicator to me that there’s value being exchanged, even if the creator isn’t getting compensated.

By the way, the distinction about active trading is important – you can upload your eBooks for free in pirate markets as well, but no one can force traders to download it or share it. If it’s in active trade, someone thinks they’re enough value there.

Believe it or not, in some ways, this is a good thing. This is an indicator that people care enough about what you have for sale that they’re willing to steal it, to share it illegally. Granted, especially for an independent musician, there’s a very real consequence of people not paying for your stuff (food and rent don’t get paid with hugs), but at least it’s a market signal that your stuff has enough value to warrant stealing in the first place.

So as a content creator, is your stuff worth stealing? Is anyone stealing it right now?

If not, it might be a market signal that you need to up your game to steal-worthy!

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A proverb with roots that go back to ancient Egypt, this bit of wisdom takes on a new face and new life in the 21st century. You see, in decades, centuries, and millennia past, you were more or less confined to your class. Born into a lower caste? Born into a blue collar household? You were pretty much guaranteed to stay there for the rest of your life.

In the past, you were told by the company you kept, and in turn influenced by them. Their views of the world, the views of your family, friends, and associates were largely the same, and those set artificial restrictions on what you believed to be possible. Your station in life was more or less hardcoded and immutable. We never ascended to our potential because we were forced by strict boundaries in society to never see, hear, or do anything other than what people of our class and caste were allowed to do.

The disruptive power of the Internet and new media means that barriers previously built to keep classes separated are falling faster than imaginable. Start chatting with someone during an indie musician’s uStream concert and you may find you’re talking to a senior executive at a marketing firm or a kid in his mother’s basement. You may find that when you log into World of Warcraft you’re talking to people who are database engineers, forklift operators, or company presidents.

In the present, because access to people of all walks of life is so much greater, you have profoundly different choices. Instead of associating with people of similar backgrounds and perspectives by forced circumstance, you can choose whoever you want to associate with.

With unlimited choice of who we communicate with in networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a myriad of other choices, we can choose which viewpoints we want to continually receive as input into our lives. We can surround ourselves with naysayers and anklebiters and sure enough, we will fail to achieve, and bitterly so. We can surround ourselves with powerful results generating teachers and supportive friends and sure enough, we will achieve beyond any dreams we might have had.

We can become the company we keep.

Approach your social networks strategically. Look for people who are achieving the kind of results that you want to see in your own life, and reach out to them. Ask if they mentor casually (“would it be okay if I asked you a question or two every now and then?”), and even if they don’t, follow them on Twitter, read their blogs, learn as much as you can from observation about the habits and abilities that make them successful. If they speak publicly, go listen. If they have a book, go read it. Model as much of your own habits and skills on what you can perceive from their successes.

Ask them intelligent questions. Not, “how did you become so successful?”, because that’s a surprisingly stupid question. Look at your own successes in progress and where your roadblocks are and ask them for advice about overcoming a specific roadblock that you think they might have had to overcome in their own journeys.

Reach out and do this as much as time and energy permits, because the more people who are achieving the results that you want that you can invite into your life, the more your own viewpoints about the world and beliefs will change. Your mental boundaries about what’s possible and achievable will flex and grow from the constant successes of those around you.

No, you don’t have to cut off ties to everyone you currently know. That’s crass and foolish. Instead, by inviting more success into your life, your own habits and personality will shift over time. Some folks may stay. Some may go, naturally and of their own accord. That’s okay. Ideally, those around you currently will be so energized and inspired by your pending successes that your achievements will spur them to create a little magic of their own.

There’s a three part creed of accomplishment recited in my martial tradition that applies just as much to overall success in life:

I believe in myself. I am confident. I can accomplish my goals.
I believe in what I study. I am disciplined. I am ready to learn and advance.
I believe in my teachers. I show respect to all who help me progress.

That last part is the key that so many people lack, and shouldn’t in this age of hyper-connectedness, when you can reach out and have real conversations with incredibly successful people in 140 characters or a blog post.

Take a fresh new look at your social networks. Take a fresh new look at your own life, the life that you want, and who is already getting the results you want, and go learn their secrets!

We become the company we keep.
We achieve what we believe.

Go!

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@cspenn time is all about perception anyway – we’re going nuts & getting cranky at microwaves because they are too slow, it’s madness

There’s a particular state of mind that you can cultivate that can open a lot of doors and relax your mind, but our continued focus on instant – better, faster, richer, stronger, right NOW – prevents us from ever touching it. It’s a concept that evolved out of our warrior and spiritual traditions that’s been adopted by practitioners of every discipline.

In Zen Buddhism, it’s a state called zanshin, or ever present mindfulness. Athletes call it being in the zone. Whatever you call it, it’s the state when you’re doing something where the boundary between you – the person doing – and the thing you’re doing fades away.

You’ve had this experience many times in your life, whether you know it or not. You’ve experienced it watching a particularly compelling movie, when you the viewer and the movie are one – you cry with the characters on screen, and your mind for that movie is in the movie. You’ve experienced it as a tradesman, when the activity – sawing wood, hammering nails, catching fish, and you are one, and everything you do feels effortless, free from stress, and pleasant, even if it’s physically difficult labor. You’ve experienced it as an athlete when all your concerns fade away and the swim, run, or ski slope and you are indistinguishable and you feel like the wind itself.

One of the great esoteric secrets of Zen – meaning it’s in plain sight but you can’t see it until you’ve had the experience – is that this zanshin state of mind is available all the time, every day, every moment. Everything you do has the potential to deliver you into that state of mind. For most of us, myself included, it takes some time to get into that state. We’re not super engrossed in the movie at the opening credits. We’re not soaring along the race track as soon as we lace up our shoes. It takes a little time to find that state and get into it, but when we do it feels terrific.

This is where we make the case for not instant. For the hordes of us that are not Zen masters, we need the time it takes to boil potatoes or knead dough or take photos or tend garden to get into that state. If we reduce everything in life to a few pushes of buttons, we lose those opportunities to practice mindfulness, to practice what it means to be in the moment. Instant, super fast, super convenient has its place, to be sure, but so does the long way, because we all need that time to get into our frame of mind where we can shut out everything else and let ourselves be free.

The second part of this is that any activity that’s sufficiently repetitive gives you the opportunity to develop this state of mind. Going for a walk, baking bread, lifting weights, cooking soup, playing with your kids, watching movies – so long as you have ample time to find your mind.

The final secret in all of this is that not instant stuff gives you a chance to recharge after a particularly draining experience. As a professional public speaker, I find that I expend a lot of mental and emotional energy when I speak, which is good for the people who enjoy hearing what I have to say. In the day or so after doing a particularly energetic presentation, I take the time to do more of the not instant activities to help my body and mind rest, reset, and recharge. If you’ve got something in your life that periodically draws intense bursts of energy from you, doing some not instant stuff will help you recalibrate and get back on track.

Here’s to things taking their due time.

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Is it the light blue of an early morning sky? The light blue of a flower? The light blue from a popular corporate logo? All of these are contained in light blue, but none conveys the same light blue I’m probably thinking of.

It’s not that we’re unsure of how a design makes us feel. Quite the contrary, we know precisely and firmly how a design makes us feel. What’s imprecise are the words we use to describe it, and so we often end up with web site designs that leave us unfulfilled, like how you feel a half hour after a fast food meal. You know you ate, but it just doesn’t feel satisfying.

So how do you fix this?

Anyone who’s ever been fitted for any kind of corrective lenses – contacts, glasses, OMGlazerbeamsinureyes, etc. knows the process for assessing your vision. You sit in front of a fairly large pair of goggles and the opthamologist flips various lenses in front of your eyes as you look at the wall chart. Throughout the process he asks you which is better, 1 or 2, over and over again in rapid-fire sequence. (at least, my doctor only asked which was better, 1 or 2)

The eye doctor doesn’t ask you about the qualities of what you’re seeing – no questions about color reproduction or grain, sharpness or focus. He just asks which is better, 1 or 2, because very often a layman’s description would only muddy the waters. The speed at which he proceeds ensures that you don’t try to get verbal about what’s fundamentally a non-verbal issue.

The very binary question of which is better without any lengthy verbal judgements means that we don’t have to force words to describe what we’re seeing. We only need to pass judgement about general positivity or negativity. Yes, 1 is better. No, 2 is worse. The speed means we resort to trusting non-verbal, instinctive decisions, rather than laboring about how to describe something.

The next time you’re working on a web site, advertising creative, design or set of designs, try the eye doctor test. Print out the designs or stick them on Powerpoint slides, and show them to people rapidly. Which is better, 1 or 2? Don’t ask for anything that requires verbal analysis, just quick calls. Discourage discussion for this specific test (there will be plenty of time for deliberation later). Just cycle through your designs. Which is better, 1 or 2? For added sobering results, throw in designs from competitors and see how yours stack up in a rapid, first impression test.

You might be surprised at how easily people make good judgements in the blink of an eye.

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How many messages in your inbox are just languishing there?

Some of them are landmines. After all, yesterday was April Fool’s Day, but you might not get to those April 1 blog posts in your RSS reader for a while – how embarrassing would it be in a week to start tweeting, blogging, or podcasting about something that folks knew was a joke 6 days earlier?

April 2 is the best day of the year to simply click Mark All As Read or Archive or whatever mechanism you use for a clean start. Lots of people do this on January 1, but re-blogging a post from December 31 isn’t as big a deal as re-blogging a prank as a serious article on April 2.

So click that Mark All As Read button, force yourself to go to Inbox Zero today, and make sure that April Fool’s Jokes stay contained to April 1. Celebrate a clean new inbox on April 2!

Happy International Mark All As Read Day!

A lot of your personality is revealed when you take up arms against someone else, whether in self defense or aggression. How you fight, your particular fighting style, reveals your traits – strengths, weaknesses, identity. After all, in a fight, you’re tapping into your most primal traits. Do you flee? Do you stand your ground? Does ego get the better of you? A fight is also incredibly stressful – how you react under intense stress tells a great deal about you.

That said, very few people get into fights frequently, which is a good thing. We like for our friends’ lives to be safe and free of violence.

Enter virtual worlds like World of Warcraft. Here, in a safe environment where players incur no true physical harm or injury, their skills, strategies, and temperaments are tested in ever increasingly difficult forms of virtual combat, from dealing with single encounters to fighting entire armies.

How a person behaves in a virtual fight is, of course, different than a real world fight – the risk to life and limb alters the equation, as it should. That said, you still gain a great deal of insight about how someone behaves under pressure:

- Does their temper get the better of them? Can they be goaded into making unwise choices?
- Does their ego hook them, forcing them into situations that grow ever worse for them the harder they struggle to reconcile desire and reality?
- Do they lack patience, rushing into unknown or known dangers foolishly?
- Do they have maturity, knowing how to lose gracefully and win even more gracefully?

All of this comes out in virtual combat, just as it does in real life combat. So what’s the point? What does this mean for you, especially if you don’t participate in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft?

Simply this – if you’re an employer, one of the most novel ways you could find a new employee would be in a virtual world, in virtual combat. Are you looking for a certain personality fit for your team? Do you want someone a little headstrong but willing to be bold? Does your corporate culture dictate a cool, calm, conservative demeanor, even at the expense of aggressive progress?

Very few things offer insight into your personality like the stress of combat, whether virtual or real. While I wouldn’t suggest that an employee interview involve leveling a character 10 times in Warcraft, I would suggest that if you find people socially in the realms where you play that have the skills you need, consider them as more than just players of a game.

They might be the best addition to your corporate team you’ve ever made.

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1. They have to be achievable.

2. They have to be measurable.

3. They have to be atomic. By this, I mean they have to have pieces and steps. It’s not enough say you want to lose 25 pounds – you want to lose a pound every week, or some granular measurement that tells you whether you’re on track or not.

But here’s the most important tip for new year’s resolutions – you have to be resolute about them, absolutely firm in your convictions about achieving them. Being resolute isn’t easy; it helps greatly to have two emotional driving forces to power it. You have to really, really, really want something that you can define in very concrete, emotional terms, and you have to really, really, really want to get away from something in the same kind of terms. Let’s look at some examples.

Bad resolution:

I want to lose weight this year.

Good resolution:

I want to lose 25 pounds this year.

Great resolution:

I want to lose 25 pounds this year at 3 pounds a month, or roughly one every couple of weeks.

Almost certainly going to happen resolution:

I want to lose 25 pounds this year at 3 pounds a month, or roughly one every couple of weeks so that I stop feeling ashamed of myself first thing in the morning in the mirror and so I can hang out with my athletic friends on Monday nights at the club and attract Samantha’s attention for a date.

See how each resolution gets more and more specific, with more and more concrete ways to measure your success and give you reasons to do it?

Do the same with your resolutions. One thing that seems to help a lot of people is to write a resolution down, perhaps on a sheet of paper or plank of wood, and carry it with you. Make sure your resolution has these emotional ties to it so that it’s there as almost a totem for when you stand the possibility of going seriously off track. If you can carry it around somehow, you should.

I wish you not only a happy new year, but a year filled with achievements and accomplishments. Thanks for being part of my life.

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The water coming out of the sink in my kitchen is Ice Mountain’s source as well – the MWRA municipal source for metrowest Boston, filtered the same as I filter my water at home.

I got a real kick when I saw the marketing on the Ice Mountain web site:

Slick, well made, and the claim that you could have Ice Mountain delivered to your door for just a dollar a day was awesomely funny – when you do the math, 4 bottles of 5 gallons each for $32 works out to $1.60 per gallon. Why? Because that’s my tap water, and the tap water of just about everyone who lives in the metro Boston area.

Figure that you can buy Brita filters on Amazon for $16 or so for 120 gallons of capacity (more, actually, since these filters can easily do 80-100 gallons). That puts your cost per gallon around 13 cents if you go by manufacturer’s filter life ratings. Add in the cost of water – $763 for 61,000 gallons, and you’re at 1.3 cents per gallon.

So do the math. $1.60/gallon for home delivery of the same water you can get out of your Boston-area faucet WITH filtration for 14.3 cents.

Only marketing can make a 10x markup like that work and still get consumers to buy product by the truckload.

Oh, and those individual bottles? If you pay $1 per bottle at 16.9 ounces, you’re talking about paying $3.78 per gallon of the same water – a 26x markup.

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- J. Michael Straczynski

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When I face a lot of email on the desktop client, there are a lot of choices – do I label it? Flag it? File it? Delete it? Archive it? Should I respond to this now? Should I put this on my calendar?

Too much choice can paralyze.

To solve this, I gave myself less choice.

It’s simple. On my phone, I have a GMail client that’s tied to the numeric keypad. I never respond to email on my phone because frankly, that’s a pain in the ass. So with my phone’s limitations – gladly accepted – I have four basic verbs:

7 – Delete
8 – Flag as spam and delete
9 – Archive

and of course, do nothing and leave the message there.

Without an option to reply, without all the other clutter, and just four basic verbs, I can clean up my inbox very quickly and productively. Delete, archive, or leave for the desktop client for things I need to respond to or do. It’s a great first-pass filter that I can use on the road or when waiting in a supermarket line that helps me maximize my time at my desk.

Give yourself less choice and see if it makes you more productive!

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I want to share something with you that might be helpful for protecting you from the worst negative influences in your life – the ones that originate in your own head. See, in ninjutsu, there’s a mental framework we use to describe four classes of responses in the basic self-protection curriculum, based on four archetype elements. There is…

… Earth energy. This is the energy of confidence, standing your ground, neither giving way or seizing gains. You protect as an immoveable barrier to whatever seeks to harm you.

… Water energy. This is the energy of distance and time, the scientist who can coolly and calmly assess a situation, unswayed, and then act accordingly.

… Fire energy. This is the energy of inspiration, creativity, and assertiveness, taking the fight to an attacker before they even get a chance to get going.

… Wind energy. This is the energy of compassion and benevolence, like how you’d handle an aggressively drunk loved one or relative, not harming, but subduing.

Historically, these four qualities have been used in ninjutsu as general maps and guides for effective responses to self protection situations. Sometimes you need to stand your ground, sometimes you need to strategically retreat, sometimes you need to take the fight to the opponent, and sometimes you need to shut things down without doing harm.

These archetypes can be extended to more than just physical confrontation. They’re models and frameworks for handling virtually any kind of daily situation in which you need the hero qualities of confidence, calmness, creativity, or compassion.

You may be saying, okay, that’s all well and good, Chris, but how do I use this?

This is the ninja power move. My teacher’s teacher, Stephen K. Hayes, often speaks on the topics of mantras and motivation, how a mantra not only protects your mind from itself, but also that a mantra is a highly charged, highly powered, highly personal way to instantly change your frame of mind.

There’s something besides esoteric Sanskrit phrases (which work incredibly well) that can do this – the music on your playlist.

Let’s get started. I’ll talk about my personal playlist a bit, but this is something that you’ll have to do for yourself. Your music choices will be totally personalized to you. There are songs from your past that are totally unique from an emotional perspective, whether it’s a song from a first boyfriend or girlfriend date, a song you heard on the radio when someone passed away or when someone was born, a song from a first victory in competition – it’s all from your background. Don’t copy my playlist contents, since I didn’t have your background and experiences.

Start by firing up your music player of choice. I use iTunes, so I’ll make reference to iTunes from here out, but you can do this with any media player.

Set up four playlists. Earth, Water, Fire, Wind. For each of these, I want you to pick three songs from your playlist, of relatively short duration, relatively medium duration, and relatively long duration.

In the Earth playlist, comb through your own experiences, backgrounds, favorites, and preferred tunes from your present and past that emphasize the qualities of unshakeable confidence, mountain-like invincibility, command like a general, and complete lack of worry about whatever opposes you. Personally, I love John Ottman’s Superman Returns, Ronan Hardiman’s Warriors, and Kelly Clarkson’s Break Away. For me, the archetype hero who can’t be shaken is Superman. Yeah, there’s all things Kryptonite, but beyond that, good luck steering him off course.

In the Water playlist, comb through your own experiences, backgrounds, favorites, and preferred tunes from your present and past that emphasize the qualities of ocean-like calm, late evening coolness, a sense of necessary detachment, emotional reboot, the comfort that comes from superior knowledge and experience. You’re the scientist or veteran who knows all the tricks, who can step away from a heated situation and bring insight. Personally, I love the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Imperial March of Emperor Palpatine, so cold and calculating, and the epilogue of Les Miserables.

In the Fire playlist, comb through your own experiences, backgrounds, favorites, and preferred tunes from your present and past that emphasize the qualities of amazing creativity, passionate inspiration, engagement, unstoppable momentum towards your goals, the kind of music that won’t let you sit still, that will kick you in the butt if your momentum flags. Personally, I love Eminem’s Lose Yourself, Journey’s Faithfully, Black Lab’s Mine Again.

In the Wind playlist, comb through your own experiences, backgrounds, favorites, and preferred tunes from your present and past that emphasize the qualities of compassion, of an eager willingness to make a difference, to lend a hand, to reach out and touch the hearts and souls of the people you care about, to make the world a better place, qualities of kindness, love, and service. Personally, I love Matthew Ebel’s I Will Wait For You, Garry Schyman’s Praan, and Kevin Reeves‘ Shine.

Like I said, these songs are highly personal, and likely will have different meanings to you than they do to me. For example, Journey’s Faithfully is the 2008 edition, and it’s on the Fire list not because of the song’s contents, but because of the backstory of Arnel Pineda and his unlikely rise to fame. Hearing him create music and live his passions and dreams is inspirational not because of the music, but because of how I feel when I recall his story. Your own playlist will have radically different contents than mine, and that’s okay.

Once you’ve figured out the three songs for each of the four lists, make sure they sync to whatever devices play your music, and use them specifically for times when you need the qualities of confidence, calmness, creativity, and compassion. If you’re about to head into a meeting with someone who truly needs a kind word, even if they’re a pain in the ass, load your Wind playlist and listen to one, two, or all three songs to change your mood and mind to what you need to be feeling and thinking. If you’re stuck with writer’s block, blast it away with a dose from your Fire playlist. Need a breather from over focus, a heated debate, or frustration? Wash your troubled feelings away with your Water playlist. Need to stand up for yourself when it’d be more convenient to give way? Command yourself with your Earth playlist.

The songs on your playlists can change over time, too, as you have new experiences and new emotions that map to them. Garry Schyman’s Praan is brand new to my personal Wind playlist, but it brings out in me those qualities that I associate with Wind energy very strongly, so in it goes.

Later on, as you gain more mastery of your emotions and mind, these playlists will change roles, but that’s another story entirely. For now, load up your iPod, create your personal mantras of protection and power as playlists, and change your mind when you need it most using the power of your own music.

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Friday is about protection. Protection, in the traditional sense, is the mental state of actively burning away all of the negative influences you’re aware of in your life. Clear your mind if your schedule permits, and grab your media library. Indulge in a short movie clip, song, or personal saying that emphasizes shielding and protecting against harm. Perhaps it’s a science fiction movie or a medieval setting in which an armored knight repels arrows, or the theme song of a superhero for whom bullets bounce off harmlessly.

On Friday, as the week winds down, square away all your work for the week, tying up as many loose ends as you can. Reply to emails that need a reply, then archive them out of sight. If your messaging systems permit, turn on an out of office notification the moment you’re prepared to leave the office, informing those that would contact you during your weekend that you’re simply unavailable. If you work as an independent contractor, establish the expectation that if a client has needs during off hours, they should be prepared to pay a king’s ransom for your time, until your office reopens on Monday.

Set and enforce boundaries rigorously. If you have an office phone or PDA, power it down entirely once you depart the office. Control which media you choose to allow in your life, which ways that news can arrive, as news is rarely good these days. Choose to replace mundane forms of media (thoughtless television, rambling radio, etc.) with the media that continues to inspire you, that builds inside of you a burning passion for accomplishment and meaning.

Review your past week in your mind as you prepare to end your work week. You’ve focused on a fresh start, correct actions, communications, and thoughts, and expressed a willingness to blockade negativity from your life. Now you’re prepared to head into the weekend, into your private time, fresh and energized, knowing that your private time is truly yours and you’re protected from yourself and others who would influence you to outcomes that are not in your best interests.

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Thursday is about mental focus. Correct thought, in the traditional sense, means thinking clearly, unimpeded by runaway distractions of every kind. Clear your mind if your schedule permits, and grab your media library. Indulge in a short movie clip, song, or personal saying that emphasizes clarity of thought. Perhaps you have a detective hero who always sees the solution ahead, or maybe there’s a movie clip that epitomizes insight, an a-ha moment that never fails to inspire you.

On Thursday, look for things in your life that focused thought can solve. Is there a particularly difficult problem that demands your focus? Is there an issue on your mind that requires diamond-like clarity of vision and thought? Work to create a situation for yourself in which you think best.

At a bare minimum, go dark. Turn off phones, instant messengers, email and calendar reminders, close your door, or even leave your office. If you think best while moving, take the time to go for a walk, to get away from the distractions and diversions of your regular places. Head to a quiet coffee shop or a calming park bench. Bring with you a paper notepad and pen to jot down your thoughts as you have them.

Take time throughout the day and night to shield your mind from distracting influences. Leave the television off for the day, shut off your phone when you arrive home, and avoid pointless agitation from things like news programs. Instead, use the day and evening to fill your mind with useful mental materials. Read a thought-provoking book, or go out to dinner and drinks with a friend you always enjoy rigorous, healthy discussion with.

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Wednesday is about communication. Correct communication, in the traditional sense, means speaking with purpose. Clear your mind if your schedule permits, and grab your media library. Indulge in a short movie clip, song, or personal saying that emphasizes ways of communicating effectively, powerfully, and helpfully. Maybe it’s a romantic clip from a favorite movie or a moving speech from an orator. Perhaps it’s part of an audio book or a memorable sermon from your religious service. Pick a communication example that shows communication that makes a difference, that inspires and helps.

On Wednesday, look for things in your life that effective communication can make better. Are there a few emails in your inbox that have been waiting for replies? Hit Reply and boldly solve the problem. Is there a friend or family member you keep meaning to call? Pick up the phone! Is there a meeting you’ve been less than enthusiastic about attending? Go, and go with the intent of contributing as much as possible to it.

Speak willfully and powerful on Wednesday to make the world just a little bit better. Leave a truthful but kind comment on someone’s blog. Write a letter to a political figure promoting a positive change you wish to see become reality in the world. Consider mentoring someone in your workplace or community, helping them become better.

Guard your speech as well. Look for opportunities to reduce the negative things you say and write, and slowly whittle those out of your vocabulary.

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Tuesday is all about action. Correct action, in the traditional sense, means doing things with purpose. Clear your mind if your schedule permits, and grab your media library. Indulge in a short movie clip, song, or personal saying that emphasizes decisive action and reaching out to help someone in need, perhaps your favorite action hero saving the day.

On Tuesday, look for things in your life you can take immediate, effective action on that will improve the quality of your life and help those around you. Is there a chore around the house you’ve been putting off? Get it done! Do you have a task that’s just been idling in your mental queue? Accomplish it! Eliminate the hesitation that holds you back from accomplishment by getting in the habit of doing.

Take willful action on Tuesday to make the world just a little bit better. This is easier than it sounds. Look for a piece of litter and trash it. Find a bottle to recycle. Take a single can of a non-perishable food and leave it at a shelter or food back on your way home from work. Even a little, simple action like this, done consistently, can make the world a better place and help you sleep a little better at night.

Look at your life and look for opportunities to reduce pointless idleness. Is there a habit you have that consumes time without benefit? Aim to eliminate it!

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Monday is the traditional start of the work week. It’s a great day to reboot, a great day to start fresh. If your schedule permits it, start off each Monday with a brief meditation session. Bear in mind meditation doesn’t need to be sitting on a mountaintop, chanting. A meditation session can be anything that wholly focuses your mind. Pick a favorite song, sit up straight, close your eyes, and sing along. (obviously, a positive, inspiring song is the best choice for this)

Once you’ve cleared and focused your mind, take a few actions to reboot. If there’s a short movie clip, song, or personal saying you associate most with a fresh start, make sure you indulge in it. You’re taking a fresh start to the week, free of everything that happened the previous week.

Turn off all your messaging systems – phones, instant messenger, services like Twitter, etc. Head into your inbox. Archive ruthlessly anything that’s left over from the previous week that doesn’t require immediate action. Use a system like Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero first thing in the morning to prioritize and systematize communications you’ve received. Fire up your calendar, book any appointments and meetings you need to book for the week ahead and set your reminders.

Take your fresh start point of view to all the work you face that day. If you’ve got a problem you need to solve, consider starting anew, or at least starting over the part that’s troubling you. Perhaps grab a coworker or friend and collaboratively brainstorm about the problem, as two heads often think better than one.

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There’s a lot of chaos and negativity in the world; a quick glance at the evening news is practically enough to send anyone to the psychiatrist. Negative energy, negative thinking, can sap you of your energy and torpedo your motivation. There is, however, a proven five step method for reducing the influence of negative energy on you. Note that it won’t necessarily change the sources of negativity, but the method will reduce its impact on you, its ability to take your focus off the things that matter most. In this series, we’ll explore the method and how you can make it work for you.

The method is derived from the teachings of Stephen K. Hayes, a master instructor of ninjutsu and founder of the To-Shin Do system of self-protection. For more information, be sure to visit his site.

To use this method, try to focus on one part for each day of the week for a little while – use Step 1 on Mondays, Step 2 on Tuesdays, etc. until being able to perform each step is second nature. Once you can do each step successfully, begin to integrate all 5 steps every day.

Day 1 will begin on Monday!

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Marketer and author Seth Godin is renowned for his short, punchy, effective books about thinking about your business. He’s a bestseller, and his books are widely lauded. Yet inside his books, there’s nothing supremely groundbreaking. You can summarize his last few books in just a two lines:

+ Have a unique and different product worth talking about
+ Tell authentic stories about your stuff

Given this, why do people continue to buy his books like crazy? Seth has mastered a form of writing that only a few other authors have captured, including my teacher’s teacher, Stephen K. Hayes. It’s the okuden, esoteric style of storytelling.

What is esoteric? Esoteric is an experience that originates on the inside. You can tell someone all about the taste of an apple, but if they’ve never eaten one, your words will never approach the real thing. Likewise, the things that arise from inside your own mind are far more powerful than anything external.

When you read a Seth Godin book or attend a Stephen K. Hayes seminar, you’ll find your own mind “wandering” – by design. Both authors will get you thinking about stories of your own, about your own business, about your own training, and as they present ideas you already know, they’re encouraging your mind to actually apply those ideas to your stuff, which is what makes them valuable.

How does Seth do it? Among the many skills, there are three that stand out.

1. Embedded and actual questions. Throughout his text, you’ll find a surprising number of questions that you mentally answer as you read. This fosters engagement in the copy and gets your mind going. Isn’t it funny how well that works?

2. Writing in second person. Grammar school teachers tell you writing in second person is a no-no. Scholarly journals command third person passive voice. Both disengage the reader from the text. Seth writes heavily in second person active voice – just like you are now.

3. Detailed stories. Seth tells a lot of stories in his books, almost-case studies with quirky, human details and a focus on emotion. Doing so gives him access to not only the rational part of your brain, but the emotional part, too, and also encourages your brain to start retelling its own stories to you.

What tricks and skills do YOU use to capture the attention of your audience?

Of course, I’d need to disguise my super-evil application as something cool, something that leverages innate human weaknesses, so that people wouldn’t think twice about installing my application and hitting OK without reading all of the terms of service.

You know, like a Red Sox vs. Yankees application. Or a Patriots vs. Rams application. Or Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves, Ninjas, or Pirates.

Sadly, I’m not a true Dark Sider like that. But I’ll bet you someone else is, and you’ll never know. Actually, you might. Look for news about Facebook applications being sold for massive dollar amounts. Bet your Red Saber that the app itself is secondary to a massive database included with the sale.

How to:

• Go to your group.
• Select Edit Group Members.
• Click Make Admin for your admin team.

One last point – admins are NOT officers. Officers are a purely decorative function.

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“What do you feed your brain with?”

Power comes from within you. True, there’s a lot to be said for things like money and Rolodexes, power lunches, etc. but these are outward symbols of what’s going on inside your mind. The conversation got me to thinking about some of the things I fuel my brain with, and that in turn got me thinking about publishing a list of some of my favorite pieces of brain food. All of the food below is free to access!

1. Mitch Joel at PodCamp Toronto – Building your personal brand. This is a 45 minute video that is worth paying for, but amazingly is free. If you finish watching this and your personal sense of identity is not refined, you need to watch it again.

2. Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce – TED conference. A great session that gets you thinking about choice and happiness.

3. Julien Smith discusses SEO – a great primer and refresher on the basics of search optimization. If you have any desire to understand the real power behind monetization and podcasting, then you need to listen to this episode of Canadian Podcast Buffet.

4. Managing the Gray with C.C. Chapman – a great marketing podcast that will get you thinking about new media.

5. New Comm Road with Bryan Person – a far more tactical perspective of the tools of new media, with techniques and specifics for implementation.

6. Tony Robbins at TED – another great video on what makes human beings tick. Tony’s legendary in the human performance community and his stuff is ALWAYS worth watching.

7. Stephen K. Hayes. Master instructor, master practitioner of ninjutsu, just about everything he does and creates is instantly usable and worthwhile. Some stuff will take a decade or so to marinate. His speech, Faces in the Mandala, is a must-read.

My good friend Chel also reminds us that there’s great music to be had all over the place that is a profound source of inspiration as well. That is an entirely different blog post.

Clairvoyance/Remote Viewing:
- Google Earth
- Google Maps
- YouTube
- UStream.tv
- Flickr

Telepathy/Empathy:
- Blogs
- Twitter
- RSS
- Email
- Server log files

Telekinesis/Psychokinesis:
- EatNow.com
- Webcams
- Stickam
- Buying anything online

Psychometry:
- Google

Precognition:
- Google
- RSS
- Data Aggregators
- SPSS

Astral Projection:
- Second Life

Clairaudience:
- Podcasts

Omnilinguism:
- Google Translate
- Babelfish

Mind Control:
- Online marketing

Encyclopedic Knowledge:
- Internet access

Here’s the funny thing in Second Life. A lot of the conventions of design don’t necessarily apply, or are at least not optimized for the virtual world, but are still necessary. For example, couches and chairs aren’t necessarily required because avatars’ legs don’t get tired like our flesh and bone counterparts. Doors and walls actually impede flight.

So here’s the thought of the moment. Why put these things in? Because they’re First Life cues to help us understand what the space we’re in is supposed to do. For example, in this morning’s chat, we were discussing different spaces in-world, and why some spaces were more conducive to conversation than others. One of the immediate takeaways, architecturally speaking, is that big, open spaces where people can not only fly in, but see from a distance a gathering crowd, makes a difference for sociability. Visual cues from First Life, like sofas, couches, and chairs arranged in a pattern that is representative of what you’d find in a similar First Life space almost hijack our minds into believing that a space is less or more conducive to conversation. Crayon has done this brilliantly in the lobby of their headquarters.

If you’re in-world, what First Life cues combined with Second Life functionality have you created to maximize the familiarity and comfort of your space in-world?