Very often as martial artists, we’ll try to force our way through a technique that is failing without going back through the chain of events to figure out where the first obvious mistake is, then taking one step back more to see the precursor events that generated the mistake. If we can do that, if we can find the pre-error conditions that create the error, all the subsequent mistakes, all the frustration, all the brute force can be done away with.

Marketing, believe it or not, is no different. One of the dangers of being focused solely on a metric like qualified leads (which is a vital, vital metric) is that we see the end result but no information about the process that generated the result. Things like web site traffic, visits to a landing page, Twitter followers, etc. are not revenue generation metrics, but are still important to the extent that they’re diagnostic metrics that illuminate where we have made mistakes.

If, for example, we look at web site traffic as a diagnostic rather than a goal, we can see the impact of social media. If we make a serious mistake with our social media efforts, we may never see it in the social context itself, but we will see it as our first obvious mistake in our web traffic statistics as a drop in traffic from social sites.

If we look at event tracking statistics like Google’s trackEvent calls on web site objects like buttons, we may see obvious changes in the number of clicks on a button that indicates a mistake has happened in the design of that page, and if we change the design, we should see the effects in the subsequent step, clicks on the button.

Like martial artists, marketers who don’t know how to diagnose their techniques resort to brute force with mixed results at best. If your solution to every marketing problem is “throw more traffic at it!” or “spend more money on ads!” or “do more SEO!” without an understanding of what’s broken in your processes and where, you’ll just waste time, energy, and resources without fixing the fundamental issues.

Whether you’re a marketer or martial artist, map out your processes and try to figure out where your first mistakes occur. Then take one step back. Start as early on in your technique as possible, and you may find that instead of having to fix all your mistakes all over the place, addressing an early-on, root cause problem may fix a bunch of things downstream and save you immense time and frustration.

Oh, and if you’re in the Winchendon, MA area, go visit the Winchendon Martial Arts Center. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better martial arts school anywhere in north central Massachusetts.

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Even more control can be exerted by controlling what your nonverbal language says. Watch how different people do seemingly mundane actions – opening doors (do they hold doors for others? if so, how?), shaking hands, sitting down in chairs. Does their body language convey a sense of control over themselves? Elegance? Casual ease? All of these little things matter as a collective way to measure what kind of person someone is.

What are you conveying in your own language, in your own style? Have a friend follow you around for a little while, especially at a conference or event, and just keep a video camera recording you. Record the little stuff, too, like getting up to get a cup of coffee or checking your email.

Watch the footage of yourself and ask yourself what habits you have that aren’t conveying the kind of impression you want to convey. Ask yourself if the habits you have are reinforcing in others a perception that you no longer want attached to yourself. Are you careless in your body language? Sloppy? Timid? What don’t you want to be any more?

Next, try this experiment: determine what impressions you want to make on other people. If you want to be perceived as a competent, effective policeman, find as much material to study like video footage and on-the-street observation as you can to isolate the behaviors that those you perceive as effective perform. If you want to be perceived as a successful public speaker, what cues and behavioral traits do you see and can you model?

Extend it a step further and look at how your successful role model operates in an online capacity. If you’re going for the respected dignitary or celebrity, what do the folks you deem successful say and do online? If you’re going for the rock musician persona, drunk tweeting is not only appropriate but expected – consider doing so even if you’re stone cold sober, for example. How often do the people you believe to be successful blog, for example? What do they blog about? What do their profiles say about themselves online?

Take your new modeled behaviors out for a test drive. It can be incredibly difficult to effect change when those who know you best are accustomed to (and therefore locking you into) certain behaviors. Go to a conference or meetup where the majority of people have no idea who you are, and test out the traits you’re modeling. Start up a different online account and model some behaviors. See what a new you might look, feel, and act like. The opportunities to interact with people you don’t know and change who you are as a result are more limitless than ever.

The ultimate mind control trick is on you – and that’s a good thing. We as human beings respond to feedback loops. The more the people around us tell us we’re worthless, the more we begin to behave and believe that we’re worthless. The more that people around us tell us that we’re a rockstar, the more we begin to behave and believe that we’re a rockstar. You aren’t told by the company you keep – you become the company you keep. Changing the perceptions of those around you of the kind of person you are changes how they treat you, which in turn changes your perception of yourself.

Decide who you want to be. Decide who you know, who you have access to, that’s successful (in whatever success means to you), determine what behaviors they have that contribute to the perceptions of their success, and try them out for yourself.

Try it!

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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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Here are some examples:

- Virtue
- Spirit
- Valor
- Moral

Virtue’s turned into a kind of sissy word. Spirit’s avoided by an awful lot of people except in the contexts of church, school sports, and cloth armor for healers in World of Warcraft. Valor is so out of date that a decent number of people don’t even know what it means (beyond Emblems of Valor for iLevel 213 gear in Warcraft). Moral is either used as a societal bludgeon by some nutcases or an anathema of personal freedom by other nutcases.

Ever wonder why words like these get devalued or pushed to the fringes? My current thinking on it deals with mirrors. How we communicate and the words we choose are mirrors of what’s going on inside. When we recoil from using some words on a societal level, on a cultural level, it might be because we don’t particularly like looking in that mirror and seeing that those words don’t apply to us much any more. Some words we desperately want to forget, like certain racial slurs. Other words, which are nominally “good” words but don’t match the reality of our society and ourselves, we just stop using instead.

For example, we don’t use virtue much in daily language because frankly and bluntly, we’re not an especially virtuous society, and thus the absence of that value is reflected in the absence of the word from the language. If you consider the classical four virtues (cardinal virtues) that stretch back to Plato:

- Prudence – able to judge between actions with regard to appropriate actions at a given time
- Justice – proper moderation between the self-interest and the rights and needs of others
- Restraint or Temperance – practicing self-control, abstention, and moderation
- Courage or Fortitude – forbearance, endurance, and ability to confront fear and uncertainty, or intimidation

Then we’re not doing an especially good job of any of them, and thus the word that encompasses them falls away. One stroll around your local shopping mall and you’ll easily pick out the values that are starkly absent in our society.

Am I advocating for anything in particular? Not necessarily, though certainly more virtue would be nice. No, what I want you to take away and think about is this short list of questions:

What words have you let lapse out of your vocabulary, and what impact does that have on you?
How do you perceive yourself if those words no longer fit comfortable in your day to day language?
What words do you use most frequently instead, and do they match the ideal of who you want to be?

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Go read this story on CNN about a two and a half hour rape of a 15 year old at a San Francisco high school function as nearly two dozen people stood around did nothing, or worse, joined in. No one called 911. No one got help. Very reminiscent of the Kitty Genovese case and the bystander effect.

How do you stop something like this?

How do you counteract something like this?

How do you prevent something like this from ever happening in the first place?

Philip Zimbardo, of the Stanford Prison Experiment, has an elegant solution. The problem is the diffusion of responsibility. When a group of people are involved, no one person feels responsible. Only someone who steps forward, someone willing to take risks of social and physical violence, someone willing to bear the burden of breaking a conforming mindset can stop this.

In short, a hero.

Watch this TED talk featuring this discussion:

Dr. Zimbardo’s idea of hero courses is a good one, but probably won’t come to a school, church, or workplace near you any time soon. So how do you get started on this today? His idea of heroic imagination has deep, deep roots, stretching back over thousands of years, across multiple continents. At Stephen K. Hayes’ Evocation seminar, one of the exercises done by participants was a detailed exploration of what our inner superhero looks like, sounds like, and acts like. While it’s impossible to recreate even a fraction of that seminar in the bits and bytes of a blog post, I’ll leave you with a question you can ponder, one that will get you that first step down the path towards finding your own superhero.

Instead of thinking about superhero powers, think about superhero actions.

If you had all the superhero powers you wanted and needed, what would you as a hero stand for, and what in all of the world would you first fight against?

That single question will tell you not the kind of superhero that exists in your daydreams, but the one that exists inside of you right now.

What do you stand for?
What do you stand against?

Think about that as you ponder the San Francisco rape, the Kitty Genovese bystander effect, and Dr. Zimbardo’s lecture. That will be the first step towards awakening your superhero and the superheroes of all those around you.

Do it soon. Do it now. Right now, more than ever, our world needs as many heroes as it can get – including you.

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You’re probably right. After all, we’re so bloody busy these days that we’ll walk right by genius and not even notice (go read the story and come back here. I’ll wait). We’ll pass by stunning natural beauty and not even blink an eye. Julien obliquely pointed this out the other week, but didn’t talk about how you can fix it, how you can fix yourself (which is irony given the retreat he did at a Zen temple).

Here’s how you fix it. It’s simple, but not easy.

Remind yourself.

You were perhaps expecting something more? Think about that word, just that word for a second. Remind. Re + mind. As in to put back into your mind. This is how you avoid missing your entire life. This is how you avoid seeing everything go by and waking up at the age of 40/50/60/70/80/the day before you die, wondering what happened and why you feel so damn empty inside.

Remind yourself.

Okay, how? Here’s how. This part is easy if you can remember to do it.

At selected intervals throughout the day, sit up straight, take a deep breath, and promise yourself that no matter what you’re about to experience, you’ll find something to enjoy in it. About to sit down to eat? Take that deep breath and promise that you’ll enjoy at least the first bite (slowly!), even if you’re in a hurry to eat the rest of your meal. About to go outside? Take a deep breath and promise to find and look at for at least a moment one beautiful thing. Easy to do these days with fall foliage. About to come home from work? Take a deep breath and promise to enjoy at least the first moment when you walk in the door, knowing you’re home – even if everything afterwards isn’t as perfect as you’d like.

Here’s the hard part: remind yourself. Remember to do this. I like to set an alarm on my calendar (which promptly buzzes and rings every device around me). Set up a schedule on your Google calendar or PDA or Outlook or whatever it takes to prompt you a few times a day to do this. You can do it before meals, or every hour on the hour, whatever your technology supports. Remember, this isn’t a big deal or investment of time, literally and figuratively just a minute to catch your breath from the rat race and appreciate something – anything – that you can.

Your mind gets used to habits very quickly. Why not make a habit of finding something beautiful in your life all the time? This is how you start – by reminding yourself to do so frequently.

In the next blog post, we’ll talk a bit more about other ways to really improve your ability to get more out of your life. Stick around.

Credit: ideas from this blog post are derived from exercises by Stephen K. Hayes.

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It’s nearly impossible for me to describe exactly what Evocation was or what happened in a general sense because Evocation was an intensely personal exploration of understanding our self-imposed limits and how to shatter the barriers of what’s holding us back from achieving true success in the world. Evocation was a completely different seminar for each person who attended because every person in the room faced different, unique challenges in their lives. The areas of exploration and growth that I needed to explore, the questions I needed answers to were very different than the ones of the person sitting next to me.

Evocation was exactly as it sounds – a seminar that evoked reactions, thoughts, and insights about our problems with our own minds, memories, emotions, and experiences acting as both student and teacher, both problem and solution. It was an esoteric seminar in the most powerful sense of the word esoteric – all the good stuff was all direct experience rather than textbook learning, which is another reason why it’s so hard to describe.

Here’s an example of esoteric. Let’s take something that a lot of people haven’t eaten: a lychee nut. If you’ve had lychees, all I have to do is say the word and it evokes the taste, scent, and experience of eating one. If you’ve never had a lychee, no amount of verbiage in this post will ever come close to granting you the whole, authentic experience of biting into one. The only way you can truly understand a lychee nut is to have the direct experience. I can tell you perhaps a local store near you that sells them, or another name under which it might be sold, but in the end, the experience of biting into one and the wonderful taste it imparts (if it’s fresh and ripe) is something you can only experience.

In fact, the more I might try to blog about a lychee, the less likely you might be to try it. I might stumble upon an explanation of a lychee that’s good enough for the casually curious, and once you’ve got that explanation, you’ll pass it by. Your mind will say, well, we have a general idea of what it’s probably like (even though you have no idea whatsoever), so it’s not worth running out to the store to get one.

So rather than write about Evocation any more or how life changing an experience it was for me – heck, I came away with an entirely new sense of identity and self, a better, more powerful version of the me that got on a plane in Boston last week – I’ll only suggest that the next time Stephen K. Hayes offers a seminar like Evocation in the future, screw Blogworld (or whatever else is happening then) and go to Dayton to train with him. The experience will be unlike anything else you’ve ever done, and the tools you’ll get to make your life better, make your business more successful, and make you happier as a human being will be worth it.

You will emerge with an astonishingly clear vision of who you are supposed to be in this life, the true, authentic, heroic self that is inside of you right now, silently screaming to be free.

I’ll close for now by extending my sincerest thanks to my teachers, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center, and Stephen K. Hayes, for an incredible Evocation experience that was infinitely more valuable than anything I might have won in Vegas, and a hearty “see you next time!” to my fellow Evocation participants.

There will be much more to come in the days ahead as the lessons of Evocation settle into my mind and begin to produce the results I want to create. I hope you’ll stick around as we explore together what’s possible.

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The kamidana traditionally has a few common items in it – a shimenawa rope, designating it as a sacred place, above or nearby. There’s a kagami mirror, signifying that the true source of your power comes from you, if you can only see clearly enough to recognize it, a set of sakaki greens, typically pine or other evergreen cuttings, symbolizing life and growth, tomyo candles that hold purifying fire and light your way, osonaemono offerings of rice, water, and salt (offering food for the ancient spirits, symbolizing giving respect to all who have come before you), and a kagaribitate watch fire stand, symbolic of standing guard against evil.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, the idea of a spiritual seat, or a place of power, is something that a lot of us don’t have any more. Many have places of power like the church on Sunday morning, the temple on Friday night, the dojo, but rarely do we have a place of power near to us, and for those that travel a lot for business, what places of power you do have (like home) you’re away from an awful lot of the time.

Give some consideration to creating a kamidana for yourself in your own home, and a portable one for on the road. In either, think about the things that you derive power and strength from. The classical Shinto kamidana might resonate with you, but chances are if you’re not of Japanese heritage or an avid practitioner of classical Japanese martial arts, it’ll probably be a curiosity more than anything else. Look instead at your own sources of power, your own culture, personal history, and traditions for these things:

- What designates a sacred place for you? It might be a symbol, like a crucifix or the Star of David, or something as simple as a favorite colored cloth.
- What designates self reflection for you? A small hand mirror might be appropriate, or a crystal.
- What designates growth for you? A freshly cut flower? A few green leaves? A small potted plant? Heck, even a tank of sea monkeys if that’s what means growth to you.
- What designates all that is light, bright, and right in your world? If you’re a parent, perhaps it’s a photo of your child or a favorite drawing they’ve made for you. If you’re a pet lover, maybe it’s your pet’s photo. Whatever you love and whatever you fight for in the world, this is it.
- What designates a connection to meaningful parts of your past? A locket from your grandmother, maybe, or an aged family photo, perhaps. Find something in your past that is symbolic of your roots’ strength.
- What designates watchfulness against negative habits, energy, people, and events? Maybe it’s an icon of a saint in your tradition or another holy figure. Maybe it’s a favorite quote on a small card, or a picture of a hero that you associate strongly with.

Take the time to set up a spiritual shelf, a little place of your own power, something that is in a protected little space somewhere in your home or office. It doesn’t have to be big or obvious – you can even keep it in a desk drawer if need be, but make it a place that you use to remind you of what you stand for, what your true power is, and what you want to achieve in the world. Use it daily, even for just a few moments, to focus your mind and take a few deep breaths, reconnecting.

If you travel a lot, take a small cloth with you and items that designate each of the meanings, and in your hotel room, set up this little place with your stuff that again reminds you of what’s important to you. In those lonely moments when you miss home and all that it symbolizes, looking at your own symbols of what you’re doing the travel for will help you forge on and refresh the connections you have to your own power.

Try it and see how it works for you!

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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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What if, though, you don’t have a choice? What if it’s a red ocean and by circumstance or necessity you don’t have the luxury of moving to a blue ocean? How do you win when the odds are stacked against you in every way possible? Here’s a few thoughts from ninjutsu.

1. No perimeter is 100% secure. When it comes to finding your way into a C level office to have an opinion heard or finding your way to a job interview, there are gatekeepers, keymasters, etc. No perimeter is fully secure. There is almost always a way in.

Some thoughts: neutralize the gatekeeper, or even better, co-opt the gatekeeper. Find a way to ally yourself with a gatekeeper and then you’ve got your own personal concierge. If the gatekeeper is also an advisor, so much the better. Find the weak spot on the perimeter and press until you’re through.

2. Cultivate assets early and often. This is an old, old ninja strategy called katsura otoko, where you put an agent into an enemy territory long before – as in years or decades before – you need them. Disguised as a member of the community, they secretly gather information and recruit new allies to your army, but they’re rarely pressed into service until a critical moment.

You know all those junior people at corporations, the interns, the entry level folks? Find the promising ones in your own company or your competitor’s company and give them a hand. Mentor them. Help them out where you can in subtle ways. As time passes, you’ll not only gain their trust but you’ll also rise in power in the company along with them. In a few years, that entry level assistant may be EVP, and your friendship and efforts will have gotten you farther inside than you could possibly have otherwise done.

3. Look for crisis to be helpful. In old ninjutsu, the joei no jutsu strategy was to send in your infiltration teams to an area under severe crisis, like when an army was about to invade. The local warlord, desperate to conscript as many troops as possible, grabbed everyone they could with minimal or no background checks. What would be cautious recruitment in peacetime became haphazard carelessness in wartime. As a result, ninja agents got swept up into the enemy ranks and were positioned to gather information or conduct sabotage.

Every company facing a crisis of some kind looks for as many resources as possible, from hiring new employees to pulling in outside consultants. In a PR crisis, any friendly voice is welcomed. These are the times when you deploy your forces, volunteering, advocating, and being present and available to help. Putting yourself on someone’s radar in good times can be tough, as they have no need for you. Putting yourself on a VP’s radar in a time of crisis can secure your position of influence rapidly.

None of these strategies are exclusive to a red ocean environment, but they work well in nearly any environment due to human nature. If you as someone who is underrepresented want to break down barriers without burning bridges, consider looking at these and many other infiltration and subversion methods to sneak your way past glass ceilings and locked doors to the prize that you covet. If you as a small business want to win against much larger competitors and difficult conditions, these strategies have been proven time and again in the highest stakes contests of all on the battlefield.

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@ambercadabra: Ah, o’Hare on a Monday AM. So many friendly people. Ahem.
@cspenn: Watch footfalls. It’s an easy way to pass time in crowds.

What did this mean?

Footfalls are, simply put, how people walk. Some people walk as if they’re gliding across the floor with grace; others look like they’ve just newly risen from the grave as zombies. All of the walks and footfalls are unique and are signatures of our past and present. Watching footfalls in a public space gives you great insight into the people around you.

What’s interesting about the footfall from a ninjutsu perspective comes from a lesson in the middle level material of the Koto family tradition. There’s a moment in someone’s walk, after their foot has been placed or committed but before their weight has been transferred, during which you can strike them with relatively little force and knock them back or on their butt. Strike them sufficiently hard enough at that moment and you might even put their lights out, because the body is wholly expecting the footfall to be completed as several million previous ones were – with transfer of weight and progress forward.

When something interrupts that deeply ingrained habit, the body has almost no idea what to do, and it’s in that moment of confusion through what should have been an orderly, predictable transition, that the ninja technique displays its power. You’re not going head to head with the person’s strength (after their weight has transferred) and you’re not attacking from too far away (before they’ve stepped) because they’ll react and adjust. Only in that moment of transition do you get an opportunity to truly take advantage of someone’s habit and knock them into next week.

We as a society, as a culture, as a world of business are going through a similar transition and disruption now, especially in media. Our media footfalls are used to the broadcast model, where media broadcasts the message and the consumer receives it passively, then goes out and buys things they don’t need. The transition and disruption of new media has thrown a ninja strike into traditional media’s footfall, and it’s falling on its butt as we take advantage of its confusion.

The lesson moving forward is simple (but not easy): as new media becomes mainstream, as new becomes mundane and habits form, look for the footfalls. Watch to see what traditions and rituals appear, watch their timing like you watch people in the airport, and you’ll know when to disrupt them, when their moment of transition becomes your moment of opportunity. More important, as you keep an eye towards the future, look for services, technologies, and ideas that will be the ninja strike to other present day footfalls in your industry or niche. Learn the ideas and you’ll have carte blanche to take over that niche while everyone else is catching their balance.

Keep your eyes open and your feet on the ground!

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chrisbrogan: 10,000 hours of practice: the magic number of skill mastery. – Gladwell.
cspenn: Gladwell failed to answer how to overcome advantages that other outliers have. Only major flaw in that book.
chrisbrogan: meaning, in a pool of many 10k folks, what causes one person to rise?
cspenn: more like his hockey example – if you were NOT born in the 3 golden months, how can you still excel?
chrisbrogan: I thought he posited that you can’t.

You can.

The art of the ninja is more about perseverance and psychology than throwing stars and swords. Ultimately, the ninja faced Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers to an opposite extreme: they were outnumbered, outfunded, outgunned, and outdone in nearly every way. They faced an unforgiving wilderness, a hostile government, treachery at every turn, and no room for error. By any rational standards, they should have been instantly wiped out, quickly condemned to the dustbin of history as a mere footnote.

Yet amidst all this, they still had to win, against impossible odds. How do you win against the outliers, against people who have all the advantages of resources, time, energy, manpower, and culture?

One of the “hidden secrets” of ninja sword fighting that we’ve been exploring recently in the Boston Martial Arts Friday black belt classes is that the outcome of certain sword kata (patterns) is more dependent on mastery of yourself and your emotions than on what your attacker does. Certainly, you don’t take lightly someone in front of you with a four foot razor blade. You pay attention to them. You guard against them. But your success doesn’t hinge on just them.

The “secret” to “winning” in these routines is more about finding the weaknesses inside of yourself that are holding you back or causing you to make stupid mistakes, and minimizing their impact. I can’t speak for my classmates, but overcoming the desire to “win” (even though it’s just a practice exercise with nothing to “win”, not even a cookie) is one of my biggest weaknesses that I’m working on. If I can get past that, if I can just be there without trying to force an outcome, if I can get out of my own way, I am successful more often than not.

Sun Tzu, the war strategist, is often quoted:

One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles.
One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.
One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle.

Most people, most businesses, most everyone falls in the third category. We don’t really know ourselves. We don’t really know what we’re up against, and frankly, it’s amazing we succeed at all. Make inroads even just a little at knowing yourself or knowing what you’re up against, and your chances of success go up.

The ninja won against all odds because they didn’t face perfect opponents. Certainly, they faced incredible odds, but by dedicating enormous time and energy towards knowing themselves and their own weaknesses, and doing their best to mitigate those weaknesses, they were able to win against enemies who statistically should have beaten them to a pulp 100% of the time – but didn’t.

Here’s the second-greatest “secret” of all: it’s easier to know yourself than it is to know the unknown future ahead of you. If you’re going to invest a ton of time and energy trying to even the odds, your best bet is to start with yourself. Yourself, your team, your organization or company, the things that you have control over and that you can study in great depth.

How do you do that? I leave that to my seniors, my betters, and recommend you pick up a copy of How To Own The World, by Stephen K. Hayes. An-Shu Hayes does a far better job laying out a practical means of figuring out what’s holding you back than I ever could. If you want to win more, go grab his book, read it, and practice the lessons in it.

(yes, there is a greatest secret of all, too. not for now.)

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For example, in a particular martial arts kata (routine or exercise) I remember stumbling over one movement time and again, and my teacher helped me to get past that because he’d made those exact mistakes when he went through the exercise. Now, as an apprentice instructor at the Boston Martial Arts Center, I see my juniors going through that exercise… and making those same mistakes, which I then help them to get past, relying on my teacher’s advice to me.

What does any of this have to do with social media? Here’s what: unlike martial arts, where you have to rely on slightly fuzzy (or very fuzzy, depending on how many times you’ve been hit in the head) memories of what someone has gone through, in social media you have a gigantic written record in our blog histories. Justin Levy made this point at SMJ Boston, and it can’t be underscored enough.

Want to know how folks like Chris Brogan or CC Chapman got to where they are today? Want to achieve things similar to what they’ve done? Look back in their blog histories. Look what they did to get things rolling – like Chris Brogan’s Grasshopper New Media (does anyone remember that?) or CC’s Random Foo productions. Look back at the original PodCamp from 3 years ago (seems longer than that, doesn’t it?) and see how that got started.

(Food for thought: if you live on Twitter, this historical record is much, much harder to come by. Keep your blog alive too.)

The end goal of a sensei in the martial arts is for a student to surpass their teacher so that they can explore, learn, and grow together as colleagues rather than in a rigid hierarchy of student and teacher forever. Once you get to a certain level of expertise, each begins to learn new insights and share them with the other so that both can flourish. Each has something to teach the other and to learn from the other.

As you develop your social media skills, as you look back at the written record of where we’ve all been and where things are going, remember to catalog your own insights so that when your juniors are coming up through the social media ranks, you can share with them all you’ve learned as well.

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I of course couldn’t let the pirates win out over at Chris Brogan’s blog, so without further ado, a followup commentary on the beauty of pirate ships: one shot.

The ninja clans of old were fundamentally a mix of esoteric practitioners of mind sciences mixed with samurai who were on the losing sides of battles and didn’t feel like killing themselves for their overlord’s strategic screw-ups. Many were just young kids – Daisuke Nishina, the founder of the Togakure Ryu lineage, started out life as a ninja at the ripe old age of 16, having been enlisted in an army that lost to a neighboring overlord.

As such, ninja battle strategies focused a lot on influence, stopping problems before they became problems (because you didn’t have the resources to wage all-out war), stealth, espionage, influence and persuasion from afar, using force multipliers, and above all else, an emphasis on the practical. Much of this is still transmitted in the essence of the ninja martial arts taught today by students of Hatsumi sensei’s Bujinkan method, especially those who are students of Stephen K. Hayes.

One of the timeless lessons learned very early on is this:

You will probably only get one shot.

Whatever your strategy is, whatever your goal or game plan is, the world is changing too fast. It’s a moving target. You can’t waver or hesitate, because in the time it takes you to make a decision and stick to it, you’ll get run over by your competition in business, and you’ll lose your life in battle.

Think about it for a second. If you’re facing someone else, both of you have three foot razor blades, and both of you want to go home. In all likelihood, one of you probably won’t. If you’re especially unlucky, neither will. You have just one shot, because in sword fighting, there’s not a whole lot of parrying or dueling. A sword fight between skilled swordsmen lasts a fraction of a second.

So commit. Pick one of the strategies that Chris mentioned, or one of the many other plans or strategies you’ve got out there, set out your battle plan, and then do it. Don’t walk into your office or your boss’ office in a week with completely different plans or whatever the fad of the day is, because that’s the equivalent of trying to change up as your opponent’s blade is headed for your neck. Waver, hesitate, question yourself, fail to commit, and your opponent wins, in swordfighting and in business.

Trivia: did you know there actually were ninja pirates? It’s true.

Shameless plug. If you’re in the Boston area, and want to try your hand at learning actual ninjutsu, visit:

The Boston Martial Arts Center
The Winchendon Martial Arts Center

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Friday nights at the Boston Martial Arts Center are always interesting. It’s the night that black belts get to train and focus on material relevant to them (one of the few nights/evenings exclusively dedicated to advanced training).

This past Friday, we were looking at various choke techniques to put someone’s lights out if need be. I thought I’d point out that this is advanced training so that no one gets the mistaken idea that if you’re interested in trying out martial arts, this sort of stuff won’t happen to you on the first day you show up. Ten years after the first day, maybe, but certainly not day one!

What’s interesting about choke techniques is that when you’re on the receiving end, they bring astonishing clarity to your mind. Everything and anything else going on in your head immediately ceases to be important when you’re running out of air or on the verge of passing out. Even food and water are irrelevant because your body knows it’s in trouble if something doesn’t change real soon. The economy? Not even on the radar. Troubles at home or work? Not important.

Nothing matters because your body senses it’s in mortal danger.

Believe it or not, this is a good thing. This sort of training creates some intense presence of mind, because you can’t be thinking or worrying about anything else. Nothing else matters. It immediately narrows your focus down to the most important things in the world to you – the air supply to your lungs and the blood supply to your brain.

Sometimes it takes a shock like a well-applied choke to put the rest of life in perspective. The economy is a legitimate concern. So is the climate crisis, war, poverty, disease, etc. However, training like this helps you re-prioritize because you can’t afford to focus on anything else. You have to solve the most immediate problem first.

I’m not suggesting that you go out and have someone throttle you if you feel like you’re out of focus, but to the extent that you can have experiences which help you snap out of unfocused anxiety mindsets, you’ll be able to achieve greater clarity.

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Over the weekend, I had the opportunity and privilege to attend New England Warrior Camp (NEWC) 2008, the 11th year of the event. For those not involved in the martial arts, NEWC is a 3 day, 2 night seminar that gets together practitioners of the Bujinkan ninjutsu family for an intense amount of training. This year’s theme was Togakure Ryu ninjutsu, one of the ninja methods for self-protection.

There’s so much to be said about camp that can’t really be put into words. It’s literally training of every kind for 48 hours, sundown Friday to sundown Sunday. You wake up in the morning on Saturday and Sunday and do some fairly intensive fitness methods, from stealth running through a forest (stumbling and falling will really hurt) to hiking up Nobscot Mountain and seeing the Atlantic from 30 miles away. Training is conducted by the master instructors in the New England area, and you’re guaranteed to walk away both full of information and badly confused.

A lot of the training is what Stephen K. Hayes calls “investment training” – stuff that you learn in a very short amount of time, but then literally take years to work on and process, until much later down the path, you finally “get” what that training was about so long ago. This entire camp was a lot of investment training, working on ideas from the Togakure family method of keeping your community safe from harm.

One of the highlights of the weekend was the opportunity to do some tameshigiri, or live sword cutting. Master instructor and swordsmith Matt Venier gave us the opportunity to use live, sharp swords on bundled bamboo mats, which traditionally were used to simulate cutting against an opponent. They’re a diagnostic tool to indicate your level of precision with a sword – a clean cut with no curves or seriously ragged edges is the sign of a minimally competent swordsman. An explosion of bamboo bits all over the floor indicates that lots more practice is needed.

I’m proud to say that I’m minimally competent and have the picture to prove it, though as with everything, lots more practice is needed on my part.

After 11 years of attending these camps, after 15 years of training in this particular method of martial arts, I’m still excited and happy to be practicing, still learning, still finding all sorts of things that I can add to make myself a better practitioner. It’s equally inspiring to look at my teachers and see what’s possible, what lies ahead on the path, and know that with practice, I’ll get there, too.

Many thanks to everyone who made this camp excellent, but most especially camp organizer Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center for creating and organizing the camp year after year. As a fellow organizer of conferences and events, I know just how much stress and duress a community-focused event can be, and I admire him for being able to pull off better and better camps every year. I hope that PodCamp, the event I created with Chris Brogan, will be able to celebrate its 11th birthday.

For those of you considering taking up the martial arts – any martial art – give it a try. Give yourself a month and see how it fits you. Martial arts training isn’t for everyone, but if you never set foot on the path, you’ll definitely never know for sure. And hey, if you’re in the Boston area, there’s always the Boston Martial Arts Center, too, where I train.

11 years on the path and still going…

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Fall is coming around again, and as it does, the echoes of autumns past come with it. Nostalgia for times past are inevitable as the growing season ends and we buckle down for winter’s arrival; Halloween in older traditions is said to be the day when the veil between living and dead is the thinnest. This brings to mind an expression one of my teachers, Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center, talks about at the beginning of every autumn’s New England Warrior Camp.

If you look only at the calendar, time looks like a loop. It’s September again, it’s your birthday again, it’s this or that again. History repeats itself, and except for maybe feeling a little bit older when you blow out the candles, time doesn’t feel different.

If you look away from the calendar as a loop and see a day as a notch on a wheel, then you can look past the cyclical repetition that permeates our days (“Monday again?”) to a more broad perspective. Like the wheel of a wagon on a trail, the same day, week, month, or year mark comes around again and again, but we forget to look at the progress the wheel makes on the road behind and in front of it. We forget to take a moment to see how far we’ve come in one turn of the wheel, and to look ahead for what adventures await us on the path in front of us.

Take a moment right now to reflect on your journey so far. How far have you traveled and how much have you achieved in the last year? How much different is your life in one turning of the wheel?

Stephen K. Hayes has an especially powerful insight into the familiar Zen painting of a brushed circle. From a limited perspective, it’s just a circle, signifying completion and no end or beginning, but if you delve into it, you see that it’s a spiral being observed from the top down. The brush is illustrating your ascent up the spiral towards achievement, and though it may look like a circle, it’s so much more if you have the broadness of mind to see past the surface.

Life is all too easy to let slip away in meetings, appointments, and routines, only to wake up one day and realize the wagon wheel is at the end of its journey. Know now that though the wheel returns to the same notch every so often, it only travels on any given part of your life’s trail once. Be sure to enjoy the trip before it’s over.

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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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In December 2007, I had the privilege and honor of being invited to participate in a search effort for Manessa Donovan, a 15 year old niece of Christopher Wilson, the host of Answers for Freelancers. Manessa went missing just before Thanksgiving, and regular search efforts were not generating results. Chris reached out to his network, and within 5 days had found her.

My part in this epic was small. Almost all of the credit for finding Manessa goes to Chris Wilson, who answered call after call, email after email, and endured torrents of junk and spiteful comments from petty people with nothing better to do than to slag on others.

What happened in my part of Manessa’s recovery was based on an old ninjutsu strategy called joei no jutsu. Chris knew that Manessa had a MySpace account and kept in touch with a lot of her friends there. While other search efforts were underway, I took it upon myself to create a separate MySpace profile just for this campaign, with as many photos and other information on it that I could find from Manessa’s profile, as well as the information Chris had compiled about the people she was with.

The next step, after creating that profile and ensuring the information was clear, with a sense of urgency and obvious call to action, was to start grabbing Manessa’s network. I invited every one of her friends that she was connected to, which was about 300 or so, to the profile.

Chris knew the rough geographic area that Manessa was in, so I recruited folks in her age range in those zip codes as well. Whether or not the people knew her, they had clear images and information if they ran into her in a fast food place or other public location.

The third category I recruited was the media – there were a decent number of media personalities and media outlets in the general geographic region where Manessa was reported to be.

The final category I recruited was anyone who self-identified as a member of law enforcement in the geographic region, sort of an informal, unofficial Amber Alert.

All of this took about 3 hours to do, from start to finish.

Almost immediately, within hours of setting up the profile, information began to flow it rapidly. At this point, I disconnected from the accounts and turned over all the login credentials to Chris so he could manage it directly.

Joei no jutsu is a ninjutsu strategy for managing a network in a time of war. The premise is that during a time of crisis, the enemy will recruit just about any able-bodied person into its armies because they’re short, and in doing so, they relax background checks and other procedures that they’d normally use to find infiltrators.

Ordinarily, on any social network, trying to “infiltrate” a network is difficult because outsiders are not necessarily welcome to a person’s social circle. Joei no jutsu in the age of MySpace means setting up a credible, truthful, informative, and urgent campaign, and then messaging other existing networks rapidly. People are more likely to respond, especially in a missing persons case like this, if you present a clear, unquestionable case. This tendency let me get connected rapidly with folks, get the message out, and encourage network members to spread the word to THEIR friends.

If you’re a parent of a child who participates on social networks like MySpace, you owe it to yourself and your child to learn how to use these networks and how to leverage them in a time of need.

Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff coined the slogan “For every light that shines, a shadow falls” as part of his audio drama, Shadow Falls. The reverse is true and worth thinking about. For every shadow, there must be light, else it’d be pure darkness.

This past year was a tumultuous year. Next year promises even more change, some chaos, and economic harbingers that are less than comforting. That said, the coming year can also be the very best year you’ve ever had. We’ve talked about it recently on an episode of Marketing Over Coffee, and I’ve talked about other advance preparations on the Financial Aid Podcast.

Ultimately, when times are bad, when things get ugly, you have three basic choices:

1. Do nothing and hope that the river of life doesn’t send you over a waterfall.

2. Deny that anything’s wrong in the hope that your delusions will become truth.

3. Take positive action to prepare others and yourself for trouble and find ways to leverage the troubling times.

I’m shooting for camp 3. I’ve outlined the dangers ahead – with $3 trillion – $5 trillion possibly at severe risk (bear in mind we are an economy of roughly $14 trillion), you have to prepare for rough times. Cash is king, debt is your enemy, liquidity is an advantage, tied-up assets are not. Mobility is important, as is network reach. Always have a backup plan.

You can also be a source of inspiration and power in your community, whether offline or online.

Now is the time to step up your community involvement if possible. Get out there, be visible, be involved. Have involvement with as many people as possible – as Mitch Joel says, DO talk to strangers, because the ninja method advocates having as many people in your network as possible so you can get different perspectives, have your ear to the ground, and see things coming from very far away.

Be on top of changes – know what’s changing, know who brings the harbingers of change. Subscribe to lots of blogs and read the best quality ones voraciously, because when winds shift, you want to be in front of the change, catching the wind and sailing past danger.

Grow and develop your sphere of personal power. In your community of friends, do you know what their superpowers are? How can they complement you, and more importantly, how can you complement them?

The ninja of old were renowned for their seemingly supernatural powers, chief among them the ability to foretell the future. Most of that wasn’t supernatural – it was having a strong network. You have access to a network that the ninja grandmasters of old would have traded their right arms for – a global, decentralized, instant information network. What does it tell you – and if it isn’t telling you what you need to know to avoid danger and embrace prosperity, how can you change your network to fulfill that function?

For every shadow there must be light.

Are you ready to shine?

Side bar: The Chinese word for crisis, weiji, does not mean “danger and opportunity”. Kennedy screwed that one up, that cliche about the word for crisis meaning danger and opportunity. Weiji means danger and a crucial point. It’s more like the point at which you’re in a barrel approaching the waterfall’s edge. You’re just about to go over. You don’t think about trying to go fishing for opportunity – your goal is not to die.

Suppose you were to exile someone from the new media community? What would that look like?

• Immediate deletion from your address book
• Immediate deletion from every form of contact you have with them – defriend them on Facebook, stop following on Twitter, remove Google Alerts about them
• Add their email addresses to your spam blacklist, sift through your Wordpress/Typepad comments and flag all their comments as spam
• Remove or rewrite any links you’ve given them on your blogs to someone else or digital oblivion
• Fire off a note to anyone you’ve connected them with on LinkedIn or similar reputation/trust services, telling the connection that the person has been exiled from your community and you can no longer vouch for them or consider them trustworthy
• Delete their name and any relevant content from your blogs, sites, and social networks, unsubscribe from their materials and presentations
• Block them on your instant messenger services by using the block or abuse feature
• Most important of all, team up with the rest of your personal network and ask others to exile the person as well

Exile from the digital community might or might not have an impact on the person’s life, but some measures (flagging things they do as spam, for example) might have tangible effects. Obviously, digital exile would be reserved only for the most serious violations of community standards, just as it was in pre-modern times. You’re essentially declaring the subject a non-person.

Food for thought.

Chi
Jnana Paramita
Realization

As part of my every thought, word, and action, I am inspired by the heroic ideal of spiritual intelligence. I pursue highest knowledge!

The last aspect of the superhero is perhaps the most important, because it makes all the other powers make sense. The power of realization is the power of leaving behind everything that isn’t true, everything that clouds your vision and makes you doubt yourself, your powers, and your ability to make positive change in the world. The power of realization is the garden hose that washes the mud off the windows and lets us see things clearly.

I reflect often on the motto given to Superman’s ultimate quest – a never ending battle for truth and justice. (the American way came later) If all the other powers describe things you’ll need on your heroic quest, the power of realization reveals to you where you’re going – or where you need to go, as well as what holds you back or threatens to steer you off course.

Imagine what a reality of all truth, nothing false would be like. Your GPS would get you to your destination every time. The news would be timely, relevant, and completely accurate. Your thoughts, words, and actions would be in complete sync with reality – and how effortless life would be.

Commit today and every day towards taking steps to achieve a life of all truth, nothing false, beyond the pull of distraction and confusion, knowing exactly where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. Bring all your powers, skills, and friends to your aid as your heroic quest begins.

Thought: Where are you going? Where do you know, deep down inside your heart, that you need to go? Are they different?

Word: Examine what you’ve said about your life. How can you use more accurate, more clear words to describe where you need to go?

Action: Assemble your ten powers of a superhero and put them ALL into action today.

Endnote: The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo.

- Stephen K. Hayes

Michelle Wolverton pointed out one of many articles about degenerating race relations in America today. Along with severe economic shocks, it’s looking like things are somewhat grim for America entering election year 2008. Foreclosures of homes skyrocketing, tainted imports, collapsing pension funds, pick your poison. What does it all mean?

A piece of wisdom from one of my teachers’ teachers, Stephen K. Hayes, started off this blog post. Simply translated, when the general population of a country is struggling to just get by, living paycheck to paycheck and making no progress, dealing with spikes in crime and a feeling of general malaise, it’s much harder for them to revolt or even realize what’s happening in the true power centers of a nation. Sate their minds with pointless entertainment, get them to care about things that are completely irrelevant (celebrity news comes to mind), and with the skill of a sleight of hand illusionist, you as someone in power get to do pretty much whatever you want to do, because no one’s paying attention. Chaos at the bottom means order at the top.

Reverse the situation. When the people of a nation unify, when the people of a nation have their basic needs met and have access to good information, at the very least they’ll push for progressive change and for overall improvements in their society’s health, wealth, and condition. The downside is that it’s much harder for a few select individuals to consolidate power and wealth in an open, democratic society because the general population will call bullshit on them, and possibly run them out of town. Order at the bottom means chaos at the top.

When you step back and take a look at the many influences acting on society at large, ask yourself which strategy is being pursued by the people of your nation and by its leaders and influencers. Who’s running the show, and who’s benefitting from it?

As part of my every thought, word, and action, I am inspired by the heroic ideal of spiritual power. I allow nothing to stop me!

If effort is the engine of your superhero work, and vow is your intent to get where you’re going, power is the gas. Power is the yellow sun orbiting the earth that gives Superman his abilities, the radioactive spider, the genetic mutations or the adamantium claws. Power is what puts electricity in the computer.

How does a superhero of the modern era build power? Power starts with passion – a passion, a burning desire to accomplish, to investigate, to explore, to improve. No matter what your choice of focus in life, power is what motivates you and keeps you going long after the hobbyist or dabbler quits, long after even the veterans would give up. Passion leads to power, and one of the superhero’s greatest secrets is to find fellow members of the league of superheroes who are equally passionate about their powers. Like may attract like, but like definitely powers like. Even on a mundane level, we understand this – working out at the gym is easier with a buddy than alone.

Commit today and every day to building your personal power, your spiritual power in your thoughts, words, and actions.

Thought: Pause for a moment. Put aside your to-do lists, your must-not-forgets, and your obligations for just a few seconds, and remind yourself of your passion. Reinvigorate yourself by reminding yourself why you do what you do out of love and excitement.

Word: Take a moment today and every day to talk to someone about your passions, about your discoveries and theirs, and share in the excitement of being fellow explorers on the path.

Action: Take a hard look at your schedule and clear a block of time every day, even if for only 15 minutes, when you can indulge your passions. Mark that time as busy, out of the office, non-negotiable, turn off all forms of communications, lock the door, and dive into what your heart demands of you.

Endnote: The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo.

Gan
Pranidhana Paramita
Vow

As part of my every thought, word, and action, I am inspired by the heroic ideal of focusing unstoppable intent. I direct my aim!

The world, full of distractions, conspires to take you off course, as mentioned in the powers of effort and meditation. Most of the time, those efforts are mass communications tactics such as ads. Sometimes, however, we face more than generic, broad distraction – we face legitimate opposition. Maybe a supervillain manifests themselves in our life, actively working against us. Maybe circumstances give us a concrete opponent to fight as opposed to a diffuse enemy.

The superhero power of vow is a companion to effort – not only do you get things done, but you defuse, disarm, or destroy all obstacles in your path, defeating the efforts of anyone or anything to derail you. Your commitment to upholding the things you believe in – your discipline (power #2) cannot be shaken, no matter how hard enemies try.

Commit today and every day to working for what you believe in the face of adversity with your thoughts, words, and actions.

Thought: Take a moment today to examine your internal enemies, familiar villains like guilt, doubt, and procrastination. How can you knock them out of the fight?

Word: Take a moment today to clean up communications. Delete Internet bookmarks of web sites that are persistent negative influences, and un-friend those online contacts whose diaries are never-ending rivers of pessimism and woe.

Action: Set up your life to make invasion by enemies difficult. A to-do list punishes procrastination. Affirming art, photos, and posters can debilitate doubt. Positive, inspiring music can flood guilt away. Close virtual and real office doors when you need to reaffirm your mission without interference.

Endnote: The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo.

Catch you on the other side!

Hoben
Upaya Paramita
Skillful Means

As part of my every thought, word, and action, I am inspired by the heroic ideal of finding the best way for success. I effectively encourage results!

“Just do it” is great – momentum more often than not will generate results over inaction, but if effort is the engine, skill is the steering wheel. With your superhero new media powers, you have the ability, the power to make great changes and accomplish great things, but being able to use those powers to accomplish the most with the least effort is the mark of a veteran hero.

How can you accomplish things most efficiently and effectively? We talked earlier about obtaining win-win situations, but how? A superhero power in its own right is knowing humanity. Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes quotes an old expression, “I know what is going to happen because I know humanity, and I know humanity because I have studied myself.” Learn how you react in situations so that you can anticipate and defuse problems before they even begin.

Commit today and every day to using your thoughts, words, and actions to make your life and the lives around you run smoothly with careful planning and skillful understanding of yours and others’ only too human habits.

Thought: Take a moment today to examine a habit of yours that you know holds you back. Instead of feeling badly about it, what one thing can you do today to change course towards productive ends?

Word: Take a moment today to rewrite something you’ve written in the past and consider what changes and edits you’re making to improve the piece. Make note of them so that you write with them in mind on future first drafts.

Action: Take a moment today to optimize your workplace. Remove old trash, refile things, and clean up so that your ability to accomplish is unhindered by incidental distraction.

Endnote: The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo.

Hannya
Prajna Paramita
Transcendent Wisdom

As part of my every thought, word, and action, I am inspired by the heroic ideal of knowing highest truth. I keep sight of the big picture!

Have you ever gotten so caught up in the details of an argument that you forgot completely what you were arguing about in the first place? Have you ever had the experience of looking back at an argument days or weeks later and even laughing about it with the person you were arguing with?

The superhero power of “transcendent wisdom” sounds kind of funny, but it’s very authentic. Have you ever sat through a traffic jam and just as you got through the bottleneck, looked backwards to see the huge line of cars and thought, “Wow, I sat through all of that?” Transcendent wisdom is the power of being able to “look back” right now – to know that whatever situation you’re facing, not only will it pass, but it will probably be funny or at least a great story to tell in the times to come.

Commit today and every day to take a step back from the entanglements of details to gain a greater appreciation for just how far you’ve come, and inspire your thoughts, words, and actions to power through whatever temporary frustrations and setbacks you might face, knowing you’ll be able to look back with appreciation later.

Thought: Take a moment today to imagine how this day will look in the future, and what you want to be able to remember about how special it was.

Word: In a conversation or blog post, consider how your words will read or be remembered in the future, and communicate skillfully to create great memories for the future.

Action: Examine your to-do list today and accomplish one thing on the list that you will be able to point to in the future as a significant deed.

Endnote: The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo.

Zenjo
Dhyana Paramita
Meditation

As part of my every thought, word, and action, I am inspired by the heroic ideal of concentrated awareness. I am in the moment here and now!

Our society conspires against you every moment of every day to take you off course, away from your goals and dreams. Marketers flood you with advertisements, politicians mouth empty promises, and cutting through the fog of noise requires heroic effort unto itself. Every superhero has their retreat, their hidden sanctuary or fortress of solitude where they can go to reflect, recharge, and refocus. The real secret is that your personal fortress of solitude can go wherever you go, because it’s always inside you.

Meditation means more than just sitting down and breathing, although that’s as good a place to start as any. Find what works for you, whether it’s Zen-style seated meditation, playing the piano for an hour, going for a long walk, or whatever it is you need to do to clear your head of distraction.

Commit today and every day to finding something to tune into that is positive, inspiring, and uplifting, then tie that to a special word, gesture, or mental keyword that you can recall at a moment’s notice every time you engage in your meditation-style activity.

Thought: find a memory, dream, or time in your life when you felt as close to perfectly calm and content as you can remember during every meditation-style activity.

Word: with the memory in mind, assign a special word to it that you don’t use conversationally, perhaps in another language. Say it out loud during your meditation-style activity.

Deed: create and assign a special gesture to your memory of contented calmness that you don’t use in daily life, such as dusting off imaginary dirt from your shirt, and make that gesture during your meditation-style activity. When life gets hectic, take a moment to say your special words and perform your special gesture to refocus your mind.

Endnote: The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo.

Shojin
Virya Paramita
Effort

As part of my every thought, word, and action, I am inspired by the heroic ideal of courageous, diligent effort. I work to make things happen!

The ability to make things happen, to get motivated to jump in and get the job done, the reputation of the person who always generates the results – these are superhero powers in their own right. Having someone who can create results is good – being the person who can create results is great.

Positive momentum starts with the famous sneaker slogan – just do it. There’s an expression attributed to Voltaire – best is often the enemy of good (enough). Once you get rolling, it’s much easier to build momentum, so the very best time to do something is right now. Be the superhero who leaps into action (thoughtfully, of course) and leads from the front.

Responsibility as a word has been tarnished by people unwilling or unable to act – it’s not an obligation, but the ability to respond, to act, to move forward when no one else is willing to step up.

Commit today and every day to taking responsibility for your life and deciding where you will take your life, rather than where life will take you, in your thoughts, words, and actions.

Thought: Take a moment today to create a to do list, but rather than prioritize solely in terms of importance, focus on what you can get done today.

Word: Is there someone you’ve been meaning to call or write? Stop reading this blog post and go do it NOW.

Action: What have you been putting off that you know you must accomplish? Do it now, do it today, and get it done.

Endnote: The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo.

Ninniku
Kshanti Paramita
Patience

As part of my every thought, word, and action, I am inspired by the heroic ideal of tolerant patience. I do not take opposition personally!

The musician Munk has a striking lyric in one of his songs – for every light that shines, a shadow falls. The world is full of people who aren’t ready to be heroes yet, and may actually resent the idea that others are trying to go past our human frailties towards a life of meaning.

As you awaken your superhero powers, there will be people who will think differently, speak harshly, and perhaps even act contrary to your and their own best interests. What may appear at first to be an enemy may simply be a call for help twisted beyond recognition. Rather than engage them in battle, just remember that every storm must pass. True, there are times when you will need to take a stand against legitimate supervillains, but those are few and far between.

Commit today and every day to being mentally bulletproof by enduring and patiently waiting out battles that you don’t have to fight with focused thoughts, words, and actions.

Thought: Take a moment today and every day when you feel an instinct to lash back at someone to ask yourself: is this a battle I need to fight, or can I just wait this out?

Word: In a conversation today and every day, when you feel the need to react to someone else’s words, ask yourself how you can ignore, redirect, or even create confusion in the conversation rather than deliver a heated reply.

Action: As you move through your daily life today and every day, practice taking a deep, satisfying, long breath with your eyes closed or partially shaded when you feel the physical effects of stress beginning to take hold of you.

Endnote: The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo.

Jo Kai
Shila Paramita
Discipline

As part of my every thought, word, and action, I am inspired by the heroic ideal of ethical discipline. I live my principles!

Ever wonder why Superman doesn’t just do whatever he wants? After all, he’s invulnerable to just about everything, can fly, shoot fire from his eyes and countless other powers. Why doesn’t he just conquer the world?

It comes down to principles. The character of Superman has principles that are as invulnerable as he is. You have them, too, superhero. You have things you believe in, you know right from wrong, and more importantly, you know when you cross that line, when you stray off the path.

Likewise, you know what a fantastic feeling it is when you and what you believe in are perfectly aligned. Those are the days when everything just works, when you feel like you can accomplish anything, inspire anyone, and are on top of the world.

Commit today and every day to live your beliefs with a focused thought, word, and action.

Thought: Take a moment today and every day to find a principle, ethic, or belief in yourself that, privately, you know needs firming up, and find an emotionally satisfying reason to uphold that belief.

Word: In a conversation you have today and every day, find a moment to reaffirm with a friend or to the world the things you believe in – not to evangelize, but to remind yourself of what’s important to you.

Action: During an activity today and every day in which you know you compromise your beliefs – maybe it’s a cigarette you sneak at lunch – recharge your belief that you are WORTH your commitments to yourself, and shut down the little voice that wants you to compromise.

Endnote: The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo.

Fu Sei
Dana Paramita
Generosity

As part of my every thought, word, and action, I am inspired by the heroic ideal of generously caring for others. I want to make the world a better place!

The foundation of your superhero powers rests on your desire to make the world around you, from distant cities to your neighborhood, a better place. Even something as simple as picking up a piece of litter makes a change for the better.

Even more powerfully, you can turn what are normally human weaknesses into strengths. Selfishness can be twisted into enlightened self interest, where you work for solutions that benefit you AND benefit the people you work with. Find ways to help everyone win, and in doing so you’ll gain the benefits for yourself as well. The more you can give, the more you can share, the more you’ll earn and grow. Some people call this the Golden Rule, others call it Giver’s Game, but at each opportunity to score a win for both the home team and the visiting team, do so.

Commit today and every day to make the world a better place with a focused thought, word, and action.

Thought: In a situation today and every day when you’re inclined to view a situation as win/lose, find a way to twist the situation to everyone’s advantage.

Word: In a conversation you have today and every day, find a moment to turn harsh words into constructive ones, free of venom but helpful.

Action: In a place today and every day, find a moment to clean up a piece of litter, turn off a leaky faucet, or another small but meaningful gesture that helps make the world a better place immediately.

Endnote: The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo.

We live in an age starved for heroes. The resurgence of hero movies, hero TV shows, hero stories, and the willingness by the media to label anyone with an ounce of initiative a hero shows how badly we need to find heroes in our society.

But… what if you could have more? What if, instead of fictional characters in tights and capes on a screen, you could find a hero inside yourself? What if you could LIVE the powers of a superhero, brought to life inside your own heart and mind? Would you?

I’m going to publish a series of 10 blog posts on the topic – the 10 qualities of a superhero. The powers themselves are translated by Senior Master Instructor Stephen K. Hayes from the Enlightened Warrior Gyoja Practitioner Recitation Handbook, published by the Kinryuzan Golden Dragon Mountain Kasumi-An Dojo. These have very, very old roots, and the commentary on them is mine alone.

The ten qualities of a superhero aren’t a means to obtain superpowers, because you already have those. Today, from a device the size of a candy bar, you have access to the bulk of humanity’s knowledge. Today, from a telephone in a pocket, you can instantly communicate with the other side of the planet. Today, from any broadband computer with a Web browser, you can see and affect events in far away lands. The abilities technology gives us would have been labeled magical a hundred years ago, and sorcery three hundred years ago. You already have the powers; the qualities of a superhero are to help guide you and put them to use.

Shikin haramitsu daikomyo. Every day could be the day when it all comes together, when everything WORKS, and we begin to bring our potential to life. Get ready to awaken your superhero.

My first read on Q is this – good. Good that it happened, good that the payload was relatively innocuous (so far), good that it demonstrated a flaw in social networking without obliterating the network in the process. I’d still change your password if you’re a current or former Q user on any email account you’ve used it with.

Just how bad could the Q Trust Virus (trustvirus? is that even a word?) have been? Consider this: how many times have you synced your online web mail’s account information with an address book or other utility? I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that if you’re in the social space, you’ve used a tool like Plaxo or LinkedIn or another sync tool that promises to bring together all your data, and you’ve done so.

I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts right now that in your address book on XYZ service as well as on your personal computer, you not only have friends’ email addresses, but their real names, physical world addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, and more.

Imagine a Q-style TrustVirus (it’s officially a word now) that aggregates all of that, but doesn’t tell you, nor does it mass email all of your friends. Instead, it stores it in one large data warehouse, and cross-references people in your network with the same people in other networks, until it develops a comprehensive profile of an individual based on fragments gathered from that individual’s many friends. CC Chapman may not have my birthdate in his address book, but Chris Brogan might. Steve Garfield may know my cell phone number, and Michelle Wolverton might know my work address. Put the sum of my friends’ knowledge about me together, and you’d have enough for a profile of reasonable accuracy.

What to do with such a profile? Well, selling it to an identity theft ring would probably be lucrative and almost impossible to trace. Selling it to marketing data firms, selling it to just about anyone who wants top-notch, qualified personal profiles (three letter government agencies?) would be profitable.

Think about it – not only would a trustvirus gather a lot of information quickly, but it would be highly accurate most of the time, because you’re hijacking trust relationships across networks. Bryan Person trusts me enough to tell me his birthday, and I have no incentive to put inaccurate data in my address book. I trust Anji Bee with my mailing address, and chances are very good she’ll record it accurately. A trustvirus knows this and therefore the data it collects will be highly trustworthy.

What’s the lesson in all this? Think carefully about the information you put online. Think carefully about what you share with whom, even close friends, because they are human and therefore susceptible to trustvirus hijacking. Encourage your friends, if you’re of a sufficiently paranoid mindset, to not record sensitive data that could be used for identity theft (name, SSN, and date of birth is the magic trifecta that unlocks most doors) and be very careful about how you store data about them.

The easiest benchmark of all is to ask yourself this: what don’t you want the world to know about you – and who else knows about it?

Beware the trustvirus.

Second Life. Was there Second Life at the seminar? No. Second Life is a technology that came along about 600 years after the period we were studying, but Second Life provides something to many people that has not been previously available – the ability to visualize and see visualized other people’s internal mind images on a grand scale. During the guided meditation, we were asked to construct some mental images in our heads about the topics at hand, and I found myself creating imagery with greater ease than ever before, and much of it looked like stuff you’d see in world. Second Life has given me more mental flexibility to do that kind of internal vision work than I thought possible, and that was really eye opening.

Super powers. So many of the “deities” in Buddhism have ascribed attributes. This one on the mandala is the power of healing, this one over here is the power of compassion. In the Buddhist tradition, these things are archetypes – ideals, essences, distillations of the quality, as opposed to being an external entity. You wouldn’t ever go to a church to worship, say, Yoda or Superman, but you might in a time of crisis envision yourself having Yoda’s wisdom or Superman’s strength. The same is true of the Buddhist superheroes painted on these iconic images. One of the takeaways from the weekend for me was not just learning about a particular superhero power or quality, but making use of it, bringing it out of your head and into the world so you can generate results with it.

Think about it this way – how selfish would it be, if you had X-Ray vision or could fly or bullets couldn’t harm you, to simply live a quiet life and not make use of those powers for good? We talked a lot this weekend about the state of the world, about how fast the world is changing, and not necessarily for the better. We in new media have super powers. We can talk to thousands, millions of people with the push of a button. We can gain “telephathic” insights into our friends’ inner thoughts with an RSS reader, know where they are via Twitter and other location-aware devices. We can see life through their eyes via Flickr, YouTube, Blip.tv, and more. In olden times, the ability to see from afar was called remote viewing, or clairvoyance. Now it’s called UStream.tv. The ability to foresee the future like a Jedi or Sith seemed magical 30 years ago when George Lucas put Star Wars on the big screen. Today, you only need aggregate multiple data sources, and patterns emerge that might as well be a map.

YOU are the superhero, or have the potential to be and the tools to do it with, right now. You don’t have to become a black belt in a martial art, or spend decades meditating in a cave somewhere. Just turn on your computer, connect to the Internet, and you have tapped into your power source. You have activated your superpowers. You can save lives with your powers, you can make the world a better place, or you can advance its destruction. Choose wisely.

Human technology. The Internet is the great leveler. It’s the great equalizer, if we let it be. The power of the Internet has made some careers and lives and broken others. Most importantly, it allows us to connect to each other, to organize, to share, to grow, and to be greater than the individual. The power of our network is spectacular when you step back, when you stop letting life’s mundane chores and daily grind blind you to your powers. The same technologies are available to everyone who connects (for the most part). Jewish? RSS works for you. Muslim? RSS works for you, too. American? A blog post by an American has the same technological foundation, broadly speaking, as a blog post by a Russian, Australian, or Kenyan. The Internet isn’t a group’s technology, it’s human technology. It’s all of ours.

One thing that has always stood out to me was an experience I had in 1993, at a Billy Joel concert. The energy of that concert was unbelievable, at Nassau Colliseum, not far from where Joel grew up. At the end of the night, he sang his signature piece, Piano Man, for a crowd of 30,000, and nearly everyone in the audience sang along. 30,000 people unified their thoughts, words, and actions together to sing this one song and the energy and power of that moment was awe-inspiring. I thought to myself afterwards, imagine the potential that humanity has if we could unify like that for longer, on a bigger scale. What would we be capable of?

The same thought repeats in my head now. What could we do together – what heights could we achieve, if we stop thinking of ourselves as small little individuals in a hostile world, and take charge of our experiences of life? What could we BE if we are all together working for good, fully awakened to our powers, fully able to tap into them?

Dunbar’s surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline’s sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.

What does this mean for PodCamp NYC? Dunbar’s theories tend to suggest that people will self-reorganize around 150 connections, either dropping some, reprioritizing, or in some cases, like in communes, simply splitting off to a new commune or colony.

This is what I believe will happen at PodCamp NYC, and in virtually every large UnConference. People will simply divide up into optimal group sizes for the application at hand – it may not be Dunbar’s number, which is more of a theoretical maximum limit. I believe that people will naturally self-group, and in those groups you’ll have lots of opportunities for conversation.

What DOES need to happen is to ensure that groups are as diverse as possible – no college student group over here, no Fortune 500 executive group over there. The individual sessions, I believe, will help with that, as there will be lots of interest from all the demographics in different topics. It’s up to session speakers and ambassadors to encourage as many connections as possible, and to keep mixing things up, so that groups, while they will form, will be an enjoyable experience for all.

Above all else, if everyone keeps in mind the central ideas of PodCamp – learn, share, grow, contribute – then everyone will walk away richer for the experience. Even though the audience size will in aggregate be large, I think keeping these tenets in mind will help encourage the grassroots experience.

See you at PodCamp.

A couple of excerpts:

I’m perpetually aware that I’m in debt, and therefore, it colors my mood quite drastically. At this stage, it’s impossible to tell if I’m frequently depressed because I’m in debt, or if I’m in debt because I’m frequently depressed.

Like attracts like. So, by that rationale — explains The Secret — the way out of debt, depression, boredom or other general dissatisfaction with life is simply to think positive. After all, if we’re endlessly focused on our debt — or that project that’s never done, or that relationship that’s forever on the rocks — all we’re doing is reinforcing our current negative emotions about the situation, and therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised when we encounter more of the same. Subconsciously, “we asked for it.” New Age or Common Sense? Part of me rejects this theory outright. Why? Because, at its base, it seems too easy. Granted, maintaining a positive frame of mind during the most trying of circumstances is anything BUT easy, but if attracting wealth, health and contentment into your life is as easy as wishing for it and then steadfastly sticking to that mindframe… Does anyone else see where my doubts are justified?

And yet… in the bigger picture, it does also seem to make absolute common sense. Let’s say there’s a guy at a party. He’s got great energy, he’s kind, he’s attentive, he listens when you speak and he remembers people’s names. He’s a charmer, but his charm is natural, not falsified: he’s having a good life. No worries. No stress. He’s not bringing you down. Who wouldn’t want to be around that guy? And, because that guy can essentially have his pick of people to associate with — after all, he’s a hot social commodity — wouldn’t he also want to be around people whose association provides him with what he needs? So he surrounds himself with positive people, fellow listeners, people who take action.

My teacher’s teacher in the martial arts, Stephen K. Hayes, has a very well thought out and documented approach to dealing with this kind of situation. Justin’s right to say that positive thinking, while a good first step, is not enough. It’s a start, but it requires more than just thinking happy thoughts and trying to be cheerful, because ultimately, on the inside, if you’re not taking action to address the issues, the cheerfulness is a facade that’s easily penetrated.

The rough plan goes like this. What do you want to achieve? What’s your goal, and how do you measure that goal? For example, if you want to have more money, how much more and by when? Set a goal that’s concrete – “I will have $500,000 net after tax income by December 31, 2008″ – so that the goal is achievable and can be broken into milestones.

Ask yourself this – what things externally might stand in your way or slow you down from achieving your goals? Maybe it’s a lack of resources – if your goal is to produce a great internet TV series, maybe the old clunker PC you have isn’t enough. If your goal is to earn more money, maybe your boss isn’t willing to give you a raise or change your compensation to a performance-based plan.

Next – what things do you need to do externally to achieve those goals? It could be building your personal network or getting a raise at work. If your goal is a happier relationship, it could be programming reminders for anniversaries and other occasions into your calendar so that you don’t ever forget them. What are the workarounds for the external blocks?

After you know what you need to do and what things could stand in your way externally, you have to tackle the internal. What things internally could stop you from achieving your goals? Maybe you procrastinate. Maybe you feel selfish or shy or unworthy of success. Whatever things inside you that stand in your way, catalog them.

What things can you do, what steps can you take, to achieve your goals? If you’re a procrastinator, how can you alter your habits to change into a do-er? If you’re neglectful in a relationship or careless, what things can you do to be more mindful?

Once you know what stands in your way internally and externally, and you’ve got lists of things you can take action on to overcome obstacles and move towards your goal, put together a master plan. Maybe even get out a calendar and start marking down milestones. If your goal is increased income, have dates along the way that will help measure the achievements you want to make, the contacts you need to have, and so forth. If your goal is more productivity at work, mark down on the calendar when things need to be done and give yourself some extra time up front so that you can achieve ahead of schedule.

Then do it.

Achieving your goals – whether it’s to afford a $1.50 cup of coffee or to have a happy marriage, or whatever the case – can be done as long as another human being has done it. At the end of the day, we all have the same human potential for greatness. Stephen K. Hayes said it best: “An average plan vigorously executed is far better than a brilliant plan on which nothing is done. For you to achieve any kind of success, execution is everything. Resolve to do something every single day that moves you toward your goal.”

And Justin, next time you’re in town, the first cup of coffee’s on me.

What is Twitter? Ultimately, Twitter is length limited asynchronous multicast IM. Some people have referred to it as web-based chat. You have instantaneous communication to a group of people in a short form message. As I like to do these days, what things looking back can be used to look forwards?

Twitter reminds me most of another medium where message length was important, where brevity was at a premium. Far back, before the days of IM, before the days of the publicly accessible Internet, there was the telegram. Western Union, known to most younger generations as that money transfer service, was one of the largest telegraphy companies of its day.

What can you do in 140 characters or less? Well, Jack Hodgson and I exchanged weather reports yesterday. If you know anything about aviation, there’s a data format called METAR that compresses weather conditions and a forecast into a very tight sequence of characters. Here, for example, is a weather for Boston, MA.

KBOS 021454Z 09022G27KT 3SM -RA BR OVC008 03/03 A2976 RMK AO2 PK WND 09031/1430 TWR VIS 4 PRESFR SLP078 P0018 60048 T00330033 56050

Decoded, it reads:

Location………..: KBOS
Day of month…….: 02
Time……………: 14:54 UTC
Wind……………: true direction = 090 degrees; speed = 22 knots with gusts of 27 knots
Weather…………: light rain
Weather…………: mist
Cloud coverage…..: overcast (8 oktas) at 800 feet above aerodrome level
Temperature……..: 03 degrees Celsius
Dewpoint………..: 03 degrees Celsius

Another gentleman named Derek Rose found a telegram in his attic, a message that was encoded and only 133 characters long, from his grandfather to his grandmother, but couldn’t read it.

OEANRSDRETCUGVTEKYXDFSBDEWWYTHAHH
EHNEOEOEINMREULNSDRLVHLDMDAEYWIHE
EBYHWUBCVAAUDDMIRTWLIEAOMEEOETRSA
DAEERREOINSEAERRYSRIAOHOANUACIATIU

The story of it, and what the messages say, is a fascinating read.

140 characters may not seem like a lot, but you can compress an awful lot into 140 characters. Even if you can’t write anything out fully, you can use a cipher to “compress” your messages, as travelers did at the turn of the last century to save money on telegrams (since you paid by the word). An example cited on Retrogram is:

Minder Retrim

Which when run against the cipher book expanded to:

Has the SS Massachusetts arrived, or have you heard of her being spoken? We feel uneasy at absence of news of her. Have other ships from same quarter arrived yet?

On ko chi shin. Study something old to learn something new. Telegrams and telegraphy were used for decades to transmit information in a tightly compressed format. Twitter can leverage many of the ideas from the 20th century into the 21st. Sports scores, stock market updates, encrypted codes displayed in the open – anything that was done back then with a telegraph you can Twitter today.

Twitter away! Your thoughts in the comments here and at C.C.’s blog post if you please.

I was reading in Essence of Ninjutsu by Headmaster Masaaki Hatsumi about a period of time in Japan called the Sengoku Jidai – the Warring States period – when a translation caught my eye. Hatsumi sensei had translated noren as goodwill. If you’re not familiar with what a noren is, it’s the cloth banner that hangs either in the doorway of the restaurant, or more commonly in the west, in the doorway separating the restaurant and kitchen, of Japanese restaurants. In Japan, noren hang in the doors of many traditional businesses and merchant shops. Most noren contain the name of the business, as well as a very short description of what is being offered, and little more.

noren were originally designed to keep dust and dirt out of shops. As technology improved, they became decorative. They were, and still are to some degree, the brand of a business, the reputation. So valuable is this symbol of goodwill and reputation that in some instances, if a business is sold, the noren is sold as a separate line item that must be paid for.

noren even have cultural idioms about them. noren can be referred to as being old or a bit dirty to indicate that the business has longevity and reliability. To say that a noren is damaged or torn is to indicate that the business’ reputation has suffered.

Noren-wake translates as “dividing the noren” – when an apprentice graduated from a master’s tutelage and was judged sufficiently skilled enough to carry on the reputation of the master without tarnishing or sullying it, they would symbolically divide the noren, allowing the former apprentice to use the master’s noren on his own shop. In a society that prizes reputation and honor, being allowed to use a master’s noren is the highest of honors, and a master’s successor would do their utmost to uphold the reputation of the noren.

What does this have to do with marketing today? The concept of noren broadens and expands upon the idea of brand in a conversational medium. Brand is about much more than a logo or a slogan, more than letterhead or a domain name. Brand is goodwill. Brand is reputation – and the actions you take as a marketer will increase, decrease, or leave unchanged the goodwill you have in your marketplace.

Consider this: as channels continue to fragment, we end up reverting to small community models of organization. Our social networks are digital communities, and the places we collectively visit online are our digital marketplaces where we trade our goods and services, engage in conversation, interact, gain new ideas, and ultimately return home with more value than we arrived with. If the digital marketplace is real, then the digital noren – your reputation and name itself – is equally real and needs careful consideration.

Who in your organization knows the most about what your noren says to your customers? Who in your organization knows what your employees and subsidiaries are doing in your name – Noren-wake is real. Every time a customer service representative picks up the phone, they are dividing your noren and speaking in your name.

What does your noren say?