How much money do we spend on blowing up the earth for petroleum? How much of that could we have instead spent on funding bright minds who are willing to find Utopian fuel sources?

How much money do we spend on convincing ourselves that we are more worthy of health insurance than others? How much of that could we have instead spent on developing Utopian medical devices, treatments, and health prevention & protection?

How much money does your business spend on goals that are only half as good as what they could be? Seems to me it’s pretty frivolous to spend money on a worthwhile goal when there’s a more worthwhile goal if you had only looked a bit farther.

I propose we add a new human right: weeding out the bullshit. That goes for my personal life, your business, doubly so for marketers, and triply so for politicians. Or is this worthless? In my opinion, if a goal is possible and better than the current situation then it cannot be worthless. And we owe it to ourselves to pursue that goal as hard & steadfast as possible.

There are two ways to run a business: for people (”satisfy the customers and employees”) or for profit (”satisfy the shareholders”). When pushed to the extreme, these opposing standards are mutually exclusive. At some point, all business owners will have to decide which is more important: people or profit. Truth be told, most businesses make the choice right away without even realizing it: profit.

Don’t believe me? How many independent repairmen do you think wouldn’t charge an extra $50 when they need to put food on the table? How many single parent retail workers wouldn’t lie and say they worked a few extra hours because they can’t afford an asthma inhaler for their kid? Also, Bernie Madoff.

Me, I believe in a customer-driven business. With all the tools we have at our disposal today, it’s a shame not more businesses agree. Profit-driven businesses do work, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. But when someone else comes along with a better story, to the winner go the spoils. Increasingly, we are seeing customer-driven businesses winning more than profit-driven businesses because they tell a story. By telling a story, their customers identify with something real and therefore have a higher rate of evangelism, which means a lower rate of abandonment.

When reform doesn’t work

Type B is the kind of reform we thought we’d get by voting Obama into office. Type A is what Obama (and therefore all of us) ended up with once he got into office. Shucks.

Empirically, self-regulation also does not work. Case in point: the advertising industry. Advertisers will always try to push the rules as far as possible. When Cheerios puts “lowers your cholesterol!” on their boxes it takes months/years for the FDA to catch them, resulting in an endless loop. Advertisers keep saying they’ll reform their ways, but they cheat by only doing the bare minimum rather than doing what is right.

How to start reforming right now

With an economy in the gutter, people’s trust in business shot (nothing new for marketers, who haven’t been trusted for decades), and overall spending down, now is a good time to go back to the drawing board. Now is the time to act. Employees in profit-driven business fear being bold, as the general mindset is that profit = proof; you might get customers talking about you, but you haven’t increased profits, so say goodnight Gracie.

Brave employees don’t agree with the stance their business takes and try bottom-up internal reform. This can work but is nowhere near as powerful as top-down reform, where the execs at the top change their minds on their own. Top-down reform takes bold leadership. If your company needs this reform, you’ll either need A) to reform the people in charge, or B) replace them with people who believe enough in the reform to actually do it. Top-down reform also tends to trickle down the ranks, so independent repairmen and single parent workers don’t feel the need to bend the rules.

If you’re an employee, find other employees looking to make change and talk about it. Strategize the best way to present this information to decision-makers.
If you’re an executive, do your homework. Listen to people like Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Chris Brogan. Then talk to your employees and get their feedback. Research companies that already employ philosophies like this such as Zappos, so you have tangible results to present to your shareholders.
Change is possible, and it starts with you.

How do we know when to take advice?

This is an issue I simply don’t have advice on and would love to get your input. To clarify, I’m interested in getting opinions on the philosophical and moral aspects, not the biological, neuroscience, or psychology aspects.

I guess you could say I’m looking for advice on advice.

October’s Goals

1. Lose these love handles by taking advantage of the 1-month LifeTime membership my parents bought me.
2. DONE – Write on TheTylerHayes weekly.
3. Research at least 10 hours on how charities work.
4. DONE – Go back to the chalkboard on my businesses and figure out what I like/dislike and how I want to redefine them.
5. Figure out realistic referral goals for my businesses and plan on how to achieve those goals.

I didn’t cross off the others because, well, I didn’t complete them. I didn’t complete them because I had way more work than expected in October; like, WAY more work. Which is a good problem to have, though I still would have liked to have lost my love handles (slowly, but surely they’re inching away). But I did make good headway on all of them (except #3, for which I did nothing). I’m not recycling #3 because I plan on writing on the more fundamental issues that underlie it anyway.

November Goals

1. Get to LifeTime 3x a week. (Don’t beat yourself up for not going more often.)
2. Spend 1 hour/day to finish aligning personal brand.
3. Re-align (not just re-design) TheTylerHayes.com to fit new goals from October.
4. Develop transition plan for TheSimpleService.com to TylerTheTechie.com for December.
5. Design and print new business cards. (DON’T overbuy)
6. Design physical social marketing portfolio.
7. Edit together a video reel as a secondary, digital portfolio.
8. Picture frame collateral from July-October events.

That’s certainly enough for one month.

1. Post a list of your career/life related goals for Nov, along with your checked off Oct goals if you’d like, on your own blog.
2. Visit Rebecca’s relevant blog post on Modite and leave a link to your post in the comments (*If you don’t have your own blog, feel free to share your list there in the comments to join in!)
3. Then, check out everyone else’s lists as they leave comments – click their links, visit their blogs, say hello, meet, greet and support each other because that’s what it’s all about!

This is a question that eats at me whenever my brain stops focusing for even a second on the task at hand. It plagues me in the shower, in the car, in meetings, when I’m trying to write a satirical blog post, when I’m drunk, when I’m alone with a girl, everywhere. The near-impossibility of measuring as complex a topic as this certainly doesn’t help either.

Now I understand why they say ignorance is bliss. Our lack of progress of saving the human race is seemingly indefinite, which depresses me and makes me a cynic; which in turn depresses me more because my natural personality might be described as “jolly” or even “bubbly.”

While I’d like to end with a youthful quip like “How lame,” I simply can’t bring myself to do it. This is serious shit. This is the 21st century. We’re allowed to be a little bit smarter than we were in the 20th.

Earlier tonight, I met with a new friend (why do I sound like I’m 5?) for some coffee. You can follow her at @breathindakota – I suggest this to anyone living in the Twin Cities. As enthralling conversations go, we talked about particularly everything one could fathom in just over an hour.

One thing that really struck me was my fascination with cognitive dissonance, which I wrote about last Saturday. I remarked that it’s very interesting to watch someone work their way through cognitive dissonance; but, more importantly, what happens when someone rejects the desired outcome of cognitive dissonance?

Let me clarify: there is no objective desirable outcome. I speak of the subjective. In other words, when someone believes in a fact that is false, and you present them with one that is true, the desirable outcome is for them to resign their former belief and adopt the new, correct one.

For example, what happened when Al Franken “humbled” a Hudson Institute dilettante (watch video below)? Like most pundits, she refused to acknowledge the question being asked, and was stuck on a talking points repeat loop. How sad. Even sadder, all we need to do to see more of this effect is flip over to FOX News, CNN, or MSNBC. Watch any news reporter/pundit/critic on there, they all do the same thing. In other words, they do exactly the opposite of what we desire; rather than become a better person (yes, I’m implying that by believing in true facts rather than false ones, we become better people), they entrench themselves in a belief.

This, of course, often leads to fanaticism. Just ask your grandpa.

No point to this, make of it what you will. I suppose I’m afraid of making a point because I’m a liberal person. And I’ve spent 23 exhausting years of defending my beliefs against those who believe false facts. I’m not saying I’ve got it all right, but I’m getting pretty dang tired of defending myself against raging fanatics who just want to yell, instead of actually researching their beliefs.

Lesson today: cognitive dissonance is a bitch. If you see someone suffering through it, please lend them a helping hand.

So, if you’re going to be at the Citizens League Annual Meeting this Thursday (it’s at Pantages & Seven for goodness sake!), make sure to say HI! I’ll be running the Live@ area in the Best Buy Technology Lounge, as well as leading the execution on some other social strategies – not including mingling with great, civic-minded folks. If you can’t make it, there will be a live video stream of Target’s VP of Government Affairs Nate Garvis’ speech on Naked Civics (what a name, right?). A link will be posted on front page of Citizens League’s website on Thursday.

Consider this self-indulgent promotion a reminder that it’s good to take a break sometimes – although maybe not right in the middle of a series of posts you promised your readers With any luck, I’ll be back tomorrow with more salient rambling.

About Nate’s Naked Civics speech: “In the follow up to his 2007 speech, Nate will show that in today’s world we have unprecedented opportunities to move forward, together, in ways that not only respect our common values and differences, but produce more prosperity as well.” Learn more.

SYNOPSIS: The Far Side Lesson on Being Successful series is a set of 20 easy-to-understand lessons which can be applied across all facets of life: relationships, goal-setting, personal branding, entrepreneurship, civics, human rights, or just lessons on how to live better. Author Gary Larson did not give his permission for anyone to use these comics. On the other hand, probably 80% of PowerPoint slideshows have his comics in them. Enjoy!

Passion isn’t everything. There are plenty of other things you need to be successful. Passion is easily the key component, however, and being successful without passion is unbelievably difficult.

While it may not be everything, it is for certain one thing: sacrifice. If you truly love something you will develop passion for it. They pretty much go hand-in-hand. The problem is when you have passion for more than one thing, not so uncommon.

For example, I love learning and for the most part I love school. But, I also love socializing with people, because that’s another form of learning. I especially love socializing with others in deep, rigorous, intelligent debates about big ideas. So in college, what was I to do? I lost control of this balance and went back & forth because I couldn’t accept the fact that two of my deepest passions were conflicting and I was refusing to sacrifice either. I would spend days not doing homework, and my professors would scorn me. I would spend days doing homework, and my friends would feel sad or offended that I hadn’t so much as called them. Eventually, I accepted that I might not be able to get a 4.0, but I’d settle with a 3.0 as long as I was able to socialize when the occasion presented itself.

My advice to you

Maybe you want to move to another state. Or get a Master’s degree. But something is stopping you. Acknowledge that what is stopping you may not be fear of doing this thing you love, but instead you may want to do something else even more. Because you love it more.

Critics like to claim that sites like Wikipedia are lowering our standards for what passes as viable information. If this is true, why do Access Hollywood and tabloids still exist? Reality TV is cheap, therefore it is becoming more popular. It’s the victor theory: he who wins writes history. Empirically, information providers decided what information would be provided. Now anyone can do this. More information isn’t bad. More useless, repetitive information is.

Obviously, solving information overload isn’t easy. First, we used stories to give weight to information. Then libraries. Then the Internet. Now, social networks like Facebook are supposedly ranking items based on our sharing patterns.

Wait, what? Facebook is solving information overload?

Make no mistake, our next era of great prosper will be related to the invention of getting truly salient, timely information. Even the best Googlers can’t get that information 100% of the time. The early 21st century will be plagued by increasingly increasing amounts of information. But as technology advances, so does human intellect. Little leaps & bounds will be made over the next 10-50 years, until the next Watson & Crick see the big picture and put it all together on one page.

Until then, marketers and salespeople will continue profiting from the fact that we can’t get exactly what we need (not want, since we often misunderstand what we need) exactly when we want it. Our capitalist society literally forces it to be this way. It doesn’t help that we don’t even choose what we need even when it’s right in front of us, due to being conditioned by generations of evil marketers (Seth Godin’s blog post “Poisoning the Well” hits this nail on the head, just read that). Marketers are able to get away with privacy invasion under the guise of trying to help potential customers.

What you can do right now

Learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here’s one GREAT book, a Wikipedia page, and 3 blog posts:

• Bit Literacy, a book by Mark Hurst
• Getting Things Done (Wikipedia)
• The myth of “keeping up”
• The Attention Economy: An Overview
• Info Overload: The Problem

• Both deal with information, not knowledge – and especially not “correctly applied” knowledge as I often put it.
• Being information, they deal with facts, not truth.
• Burden of responsibility lies on the student (you), not the teacher (me).
• Both are states of being.
• You don’t want to be in either state for an extended period of time.
• They’re part of a spectrum: uninformed (no relevant information) -> misinformed (irrelevant information) -> informed (relevant information).

Their differences:

• Placement on the spectrum.

Your takeaway

“Archaeology is the search for fact… not truth. If it’s truth you’re looking for, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.” – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

As Harrison Ford put it, fact is not truth. Truth is a philosophical adventure, even though we declare facts to be either “true” or “false.” You might say this is true to our binary nature. Binary tendencies lead us to delude ourselves into thinking we’re informed when we really aren’t. But it doesn’t matter if you’re misinformed or uninformed, you’re just in a place you don’t want to be. Start doing everything you can to get out.

Becoming informed is a painstaking process at first – a.k.a. cognitive dissonance –  until you reach a state of being progressive. But the payoff is worth it: it’s much easier to stay informed than to constantly be catching up.

How many less arguments, debates, crime, and wars would exist if everyone were informed? This has much more to do with adults than children, so the education system is not to blame. What is the standard for being informed, and who decides?

IMPORTANT: The following video is not meant to bash republicans, democrats, or people in general. It’s just a great example of cognitive dissonance after someone is presented with correct information – which they quickly realize is true – and the ensuing battle of belief reconciliation. You can see just how not fun this is for most people, as well as how decent most humans are.