I was watching television today and there was this ad with the slogan you have [tag]48 hours to live[/tag].  I thought what would I do if I only had that long to live.  Would I think that I had made the best of my time?  Would I say there had been regrets.  Of course.  Ultimately I thought about it and came up with some ideas that I thought would be some things I would do with two days to live.

1. Make sure I had peace with my family 

The first thing I thought of was to make sure that my [tag]family[/tag] were at peace with me.   If I had done anything to offend them I would make peace.  It stands to reason that the people who will be speaking at your funeral will be the ones that remember you best.  I don’t think it’s right to croak and leave a bad taste in the mouths of those that love you the most.  I can say that however, you most certainly may never get this chance.

2. Make sure I squared myself with my enemies

There are people who think you are wonderful then there are those who think you aren’t.  I believe those that hate us often show up faults because they look hard and know  where we are the weakest.  However, do you really want to go to the grave with people hating you.  I would write a list of people that had wronged me and get square with them.

3.  Find those I had wronged and seek forgiveness

I would find those who I have wronged and I would make sure they accepted my [tag]forgiveness[/tag].   When I spoke with them I would make sure that they understood they didn’t have to forgive me but if they did it would make me feel better!  If they didn’t there is really nothing I can do about it.  All I can do is accept it and hope that over time they come to forgive me.

4. I would spend out my last hours with my immediate family 

I would spend the last days I had with my immediate family just enjoying my family.  I wouldn’t do anything particularly with them but I would make sure that I spent time with them so they knew that I would rather spend time with them than on some wild bender!  Not that I have the money for that, even though it’s more than a little tempting!

When I thought about this I began to wonder why I wasn’t doing it now.  Why not do these things now and make things right.  I intend to live a long life as much as I am able to control it.  You must always live like you really mean it.  You must live like you have no time left.  Essentially you don’t have anytime left.  Each day that goes by you are getting older and you dying a little more.   Why not start by doing these things today.

Note I have discontinued this listing. Please contact me if you have any questions.

This is another short story. Yes, another failed entry to a competition as well. This one is based on the real events of the second world war as told to me by my late grandfather. The main part of the story was an actual event that was recounted to me about two weeks before his death. By my own personal standards this is fairly amatuerish writing and this is truly one of the first I ever wrote from the heart. I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. Click the link below to read.

I also remember

I hope you enjoy it!

You have a group and/or crowd of people who listen to what you say. You may not be a grand level influencer but you have some influence. Here are seven reasons you are an [tag]influencer[/tag].

1. You can tell somebody something and they will believe you

I have dealt with this topic before. It’s a fact as far as I believe in facts. You can tell somebody something and they will believe you. There is a persistent rumour going around that [tag]Facebook[/tag] was made by the CIA to spy on people. I was told this by a senior lecturer so I believe it. He is a very smart man and I respect him. He could be mistaken but the level of trust I have in this individual suggests otherwise.

2. They will tell someone and they will believe them

I have very annoying relatives. A lot of the time I get the whole, ‘when are you buying a house’ mishmash from them. In recent times I was asked, ’so what are you going to do?’ I said, ‘I have something up my sleeve.’ This was not good because I was basically making it up. Yet, they believed me and persisted wanting to know what it was. Eventually, it was nothing. Yet for a while I had a captive audience. Another time I was put into the back of a police car out the front of my old house. The neighbour who knew my mother in law told her that I had been arrested. The day prior to that a rumour had circulated that we had financial problems. The rumour and the observed event compiled to create the new ‘reality’ that I was being arrested for robbery! I was just helping a friend who was busted for driving without a license. Yet, for a day or two I was a hardened criminal.

3. You are as good as your word

This is really related to integrity but if you have made predictions in the past and they become true you will eventually become a person of authority. If my students really new my past they wouldn’t take me seriously. Really, I mean who would work at a [tag]University[/tag] when you could get a better paying job? Your word and what you say is so important that it build images of who you are in the minds of other people. Use your words carefully to paint the right kind of picture and you will have people believing everything you say.

4. Your actions speak loud

What you do is seen by people. No, not the people in the white coats. Real people. You may only be seen by five people or six people … BUT think of the network potential for that group. I know of some people selling pills door to door making money just through the people they have come to know. There are lots of ethical considerations here as well so watch out. What you do often influences people more than you realise.

5. Who you know defines you

If you have friends that associate with people you would like to influence these people define you. Your friends are influenced by you and you are influenced by them. I have friends that I have received job offers through and I have done similar things for other people that I know. Networking is really what makes the world go round. I think the majority of us what things to automatically appear each time. In reality they don’t. [tag]Networking[/tag] is a group of people you have influence over.

6. You influence people you don’t know

If you swore or gave the finger to someone, were rude or whatever you have influenced them. Oh sure, people will be nice to your face but let me surface that hidden assumption for you: it’ s not what they say it’s what they ACTUALLY believe that matters. People say the nastiest things behind each others back. No doubt even if you were Mother Theresa they would do it. Really it’s none of your business so why worry about it. Nevertheless, you are an influencer to people you don’t know so maintain consistency in everything you do. If you are you all the time and you are a full-time moron … then that’s what people will say about you. If you do the right thing the majority of the time … chances are they will leave you alone.  That said, being too normal also makes you a target.

7. You influence people by accident

I once read a study in a hospital where nurses were found to be causing major strategic problems and it wasn’t their fault. It was all because they weren’t signing papers or doing something that nobody from the strategic layer had told them to do. They were influencing the system. You influence the system on a day to day basis whether you recognise it or don’t. You influence it, shape it, guide it and are a apart of it. You can stop and do the fight club thing if you want but ultimately [tag]the system[/tag] is influenced by you in some small way. For this reason, we make decisions all the time that influence others. Maybe subversively or whatever… it’s still true nonetheless.

Keep in mind that you are an influencer, you have a group of people you influence and who will listen and pay attention to you.  Think about this in your own life.  Who influences you?

Yes that’s right.  I have added the articles section back.  I took it down and put the ‘articles’ section back up again.   These articles are recycled ‘longer’ blog posts that are my most requested material to date.  Yes, one person requested an article so I put it back up and then thought, ‘where there is one there is many,’ so alas it has returned.   This means my commitment to creativity project will find a home there as well from time to time.  Stay tuned for that post shortly.  All the best.  Luke.

There is a growing amount of [tag]rhetoric[/tag] in scientific circles about the nature of [tag]belief[/tag] and scientific endeavour. I was exploring digg the other day and I came across this article. In it the author discusses the wisdom of crowds phenomena and evolution. What struck me when I reflected on the article was how a lot of scientific literature and things like this article still fail to grasp the concept of belief. Belief is a powerful concept and one that is largely overlooked.

So what is evidence

Evidence can be described as a empirically verifiable facts in scientific terms. Something that we have come to accept ‘as is’ through a rigorous testing process. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert gave us the idea that we believe first and then go about constructing doubt. More to the point, we do not analyse first, we believe then we analyse. In an earlier article I spoke about the conjecturing process whereby I felt that we follow what Sherlock Holmes does. We reason through the facts and come to a meaningful conclusion, somehow, magically apart from belief. How can this happen? We look at the facts first? I don’t think we do. I think we work of assumptions, hunches and so on and then go to the tools to prove our point. What if the tools are just ways of confirming what we believe instead of actually verifying things? Has happened plenty of times before hasn’t it?

Facts may or may not be real facts they are tainted by what we believe and value we add to them. I can attribute causality to anything if I want and it will make no difference to you or anyone because to me that’s evidence. I can set up a hypothesis test and so on, it will only prove what I want it to. When you say that ’cause and effect’ is, you will not be persuaded otherwise. Why? Because you believe it.

Are [tag]scientists[/tag] immune from this? I don’t think so. If they were immune from it then what they said would be perfect knowledge. The testing procedures we use to work things out are models. They are not reality. We use them to support (with evidence) our version of events. A belief is therefore built into the thing we are constructing because it’s built on the premise of something we think might be related. When the news caster tells us something that happened, ‘A man was shot in the head,’ that’s a fact he was. But then, ‘police suspect the wife.’ They ’suspect’ the wife? That is simply another way of saying we believe the wife is the killer but we lack enough evidence to prove the case. In such a case the belief spurns on the search for evidence not vice versa. The belief in evolution spurns on the search for it’s existence and validity. If this weren’t the case then why do we even bother?

Beliefs: the driving force

Why do we vote the way we do? Beliefs! Why do we believe? There is something deeper in what Dan Gilbert has found and I think we need to pay more attention to the ways in which we believe. In particular why is the human mind predisposed to belief? Why is it the case that we hear things and believe them? Why do we read a book like the origin of the species or the bible and think yes that’s it. That is a thought that has plagued me for years.

When I was a child my father used to tell me all kinds of stories. Stuff about the easter bunny and the like which I know now to be a load of crap (or do I?). At the time however I believed them and acted as if they were so. Until one day I realised that they weren’t. These beliefs limited me in how I understood things because a window was formed for me to look through. In became a way of seeing. When the tooth fairy shoved a dollar coin underneath my pillow in exchange for my tooth do the ‘evidence’ of the missing tooth confirmed what I believed. The tooth fairy existed.

The tooth fairy however does not exist. Even though I believed it first I went about confirming my doubts as I got older and yes I can say with a certain degree of confidence that I am sure she or he doesn’t exist. I can believe it if I want to and live the rest of my life with my belief as the evidence for the tooth fairy’s existence. Will I be a happier person for believing it? I don’t need evidence to believe, my faith is the evidence. Until I go searching for a new belief to replace the old one I have all the evidence I need. Think about your life…how many things do you believe and it’s enough?

Belief is evidence?

Say I take away belief from evidence and the evidence ’speaks for itself’. If this were the case then what would the evidence say? It wouldn’t say anything because what makes evidence ‘conclusive’ is the fact that we believe it. The two go hand in hand. Any evidence is useless without somebody to understand it and put it into context. The same set of facts shown to different people will yield a different point of view. Yet in some cases the evidence itself will create beliefs that later are changed in light of new evidence. So evidence without belief cannot exist.

Here we come to my final point in this post. Belief comes first in everything we do. We learn to construct our doubts later as we grow older. Yet, what we believe about religion, science, the death penalty, abortion, rape, murder and so on comes from what we think the evidence is saying to us because of our beliefs. There is no test that proves anything outside of someone believing it. We believe in the process of scientific testing so we hold it up as being relevant as leading to the ‘truth’… until a better test comes along. It’s a way of seeing that’s useful for now but it’s built on the foundation of beliefs about things and what we have come to expect from the scientific process. There is more faith involved in such things than those in the middle of it would care to admit.

In closing this post I would like you to picture with me what you think a [tag]pink elephant[/tag] looks like. Can you see it?  If you can then we have shared something.  We both have seen a pink elephant.   What I think people do not understand is that beliefs are like a blank piece of paper.  They are largely impressed on us or written by us.  Either way there is no escaping them.  We all think, feel and act on the things we believe.  Whether it be science or solipsism, they are ‘actual’ and drive us to act. Beliefs are real.  They are causally effective.  What do you believe?

A while ago I was involved in a [tag]small business[/tag] that made software.  Each year we would have to fork over a massive amount of money in licensing arrangements to Microsoft in order to keep being able to legally make software.   After doing this out of my own pocket for several years I reached a point where it became obvious to me that if I spent in anymore money on making software that wasn’t paying for itself yet, then I would probably have to declare bankruptcy.  I was struck with a dilemma.  Do I continue in business and dig myself into even more debt or do I put my own financial considerations first?  The dilemma was a moral one.

I spent two months seriously thinking about what to do.  I tried everything I could think of to make the product sell more but people just weren’t buying it.  One sleepless night after the other I kept wrestling this through… what do I do?  Eventually as I thought painfully through my options I was left with an ultimatum by my business partner at the time.  Pay up your part of the share or get out.   Considering I was facing personal bankruptcy I chose the latter and not the former.  One of the statements made to me by my partner at the time was, ‘we always be friends but this is about business.’   I think I would have almost preferred bankruptcy though I am very thankful that it didn’t happen.   What I want to think about in this post, through these personal events, is why do we seperate personal values from business?

The split between emotion and greed

When you get right down to the meaning of the statement, ‘it’s not [tag]business[/tag] it’s personal,’ you come to a contradiction in terms.  Business is built on the backbone of personal things.  Initially, it starts with a personal desire.  You then gain support through people who pay for (support) your goods or services.  You are then a success.  Simple isn’t it?  However, notice the most famous examples in recent times in entrepreneurship.  Richard Branson is all heart to the audience and he uses this to great effect.  Car companies are now becoming green and so on.  This is not a mere marketing ploy these things are personal.  I think the majority of business first thinking is flawed because it is simply a neat way to box things into a corner where the emotions of life are cut off.  That, last time I checked, is borderline personality disorder.   I am one of those people who believes that you cannot take your [tag]heart[/tag] out of what you do.

If you split business and emotion you are seriously misguided in your understanding of how human beings operate.  Why?  If you cannot personally connect with people you will not be very popular in the coming ten years.  What differentiates loyalty in this current generations of web nomads is not the desire for personal success and wealth but what makes them feel satisfied.   I was sitting in my office the other day listening to some people bickering (as usual) about their grades.  One of them said that they couldn’t understand what the problem was with their assignment they had met the criteria and done this and that.  Then the conversation turned ugly.  One of them called the lecturer a nasty name and a fellow student another!  I was in my office, admittedly surprised and at somewhat amused by it.    It occured to me however that the calling of the name was an outpouring of emotion. He was hurt by the grade he had received.  I should have walked out of the office and said, ‘it’s not business it’s personal.’  Would he have felt justified by that do you think?  No.  He FELT wronged.

My story

While I felt terribly wronged by what happened to me in business, it is my fault.  Business operates under certain rules, obligations and concepts that are accepted practices.  That said, when the ultimatum was given to me I felt betrayed.  I had spent four years designing the product, marketing it (including once almost scoring a distribution deal), getting free offline media exposure at least three times.   All of which was a terribly hard for me to do because I am not really inclined to attention (moderate introvert on the Myer-Briggs typology).  I went through it though in the hope that my efforts would pay off.  They did, I scored a position in the local paper, Marie-Claire magazine and in various places online.   I spent hours asking people about the design of the product and brainstorming ideas with my partner.  Ultimately though all of that work, effort and planning came to nothing.  Why?  People didn’t want to buy it.

As the months wore on to years I became more and more in debt to this program that people didn’t want to buy.  Sure, I could have done more and I have learned a lot more about marketing since then.   I will say this though, money gets money and attention gets attention.  There is a common, all to misunderstood, idea that all you have to do to have success is think the right way or do this or do that to get in.  Let me warn you as a twice failed business person: don’t believe the hype.  I had more success with Guerrilla Marketing methods than with many of the so-called new ideas in the early part of this century.  Concepts like ‘viral marketing’ really only work for people who have a product people want to talk about.  It only works when you have access to the ’sneezers’ and they are willing to endorse what you have done.  I am sorry but most of what you read online about marketing a business doesn’t apply if you have a product that will never get the level of saturation required.  Read the Guerilla Marketing stuff, it’s a lot more helpful than the crap being dished out by popular marketing myth makers of the day.

When I was told cough up or get out I could see this was a business decision.   The line it’s not personal it’s business was thrown at me and since then I have reflected on the dichotomy it causes in people.  It’s like when people try to strip the emotion out of religious debates.  You just don’t get it.  Faith and personal beliefs are felt.  It’s like saying to a leper, ‘Hey put aside your leprosy and look at it objectively.’ Tell me how to remove my emotions.  Tell me how not to fell the sting of failure.   Business is personal.  In my situation though there really wasn’t much that could be done.  I had borrowed to capacity and I had to leave.  There was no choice for me.  I could have sought venture capital but I had lost faith in the product and in my partner.   Especially when I had seeded in a great deal of my own money to begin with.

The problem with creating silly paradigms

To say it’s not personal it’s business, means that you have no heart.   I am the first to admit business decisions are often the hardest to make and they do involve people.  But there is a false paradigm that comes with business that I want to address in this post.  You can’t separate your heart from what you do.  If you do have that ability then you must be a borderline sociopath.  I am not talking about receiving constructive criticism because that only improves what you do.  There is no better way to test your ideas than to show them to your enemy.  The devil’s advocate is a strong ally in business.  I am saying that business decisions often involved choosing money over people matters.  Business is often portrayed as being all about the dollar at the expense of people.  What then is social entrepreneurship?   Money and wealth are good things.    Disaster couldn’t be avoided in my situation because it was too late for me.  I had to make a choice.  I didn’t want to get divorced so I picked what I picked and I am content with that decision.   In the time since leaving the business I have reflected on that, the choice of words, and realised that this is a big problem.  We really need to bring some heart back to business.  The two are not mutually exclusive.  They are just “not talking” at the moment!

When we create ideas to believe in our [tag]subconscious mind[/tag] supports us 100% of the way but our heart (or inward person) will give us tell tale signs that we have made the wrong choice.   An idea the world and especially the university system believe in is the separation of emotion and mind.  This is a huge mistake.  We have educated the mind but altogether pushed aside the role emotions play in such things.  What a tragic mistake.  By doing this we have taken the heart and soul out of business in favour of decisions that are in essence evil.  We have let greed dominate our thinking instead of making responsible moral choices.   If you ever get the chance to see a movie called the Parable of the Sadhu you really should watch it.  It explains the story of a man who was trekking through the Himalayas with a colleague.  Along his path he met a Sadhu from the local village.  She had wondered onto the mountain become dehydrated and lost.   The mountaineer made the choice to leave the Sadhu with another group and move forward to the summit.  After returning to America the events troubled him and made him think he made the wrong choice in choosing his own objectives over the need presented to him as the Sadhu.   What I learned from watching it was that people often say they would do the right thing but often make the business choice first.

The road forward

It’s very easy to sit here in my little rental listening to the wind blowing through the besser brick structure of my run down house and say these things.  I mean why do I really care?  I care because I see, day after day, shallow people who have plans for success coming into my courses and leaving again.   Things aren’t getting better. I have been stepped on, stabbed in the back and for what?  For a few thousand dollars?  I mean c’mon.  The road forward is for us who desire to be leaders in the entrepreneurial sphere to begin to bring back discussions on ethics and the role of values in business decisions.  Especially in the technical sector where all we do is get larger, wider and less coherent.   In particular, we need to make a place for emotions and understand the role they play in decision making.  You can’t turn them off.  You can’t say, ‘well I will put these aside for now.’  Again, if you can do that they you are sociopath and you need treatment.   The road forward in business is to learn from our past ethics stuff ups and begin to make better decisions that are informed about emotions and their role in the workplace.   Even the stuff I had to read for my research on emotional engagement is about making people becoming emotionally hooked into their work so they will become more productive!  That’s brainwashing!

So what have I learned from my failure?  Lots of things.  Two major things… how to market something successfully and how not to.  More than that I have learned that business is good and I love it but it has no heart at the moment.  I blame myself for failing in business and I do not point the finger at my partner.  He did what he had to do.  I have overcome my feelings of hurt and betrayal which really were uncalled for.   I have learned this: it’s not ‘business’ it’s ‘personal’.  The heart and the mind cannot be separated to suit what we think business should be.   Every time I read it’s not personal, it’s business.  I think of how shallow people like that are.  How selfish they are and how they really don’t know how human beings work.  These are just images we have floating around in our heads.  Who said business had to be tough? Donald Trump? That’s just the way HE chooses to do it.   You may think, ‘well he gets results.’  So what?  Where’s the heart?  I know people who have spent their lives putting on the ‘tough guy’ image and they are alone, miserable and indifferent.  Is that what you think success is?  Just having money?  You are much poorer than you realise if you think that.

In closing I would like to say that I consider myself as an entrepreneur.  Even though I am employed as a academic I am still at heart and will always be an entrepreneur.  I just so happen to be one who leans to the right side of the brain.  I am emotional you might say.  That said, I am not a basket case neither am I suicidal.  I recognise the place and needs people have and choose to put them first where I can, instead of chasing the almighty dollar.  I just wish I could find people who were like me so they world could become a better place.

I have launched a forum to discuss the broad topics of the website.  You can add your own topics and discuss the content of the website their with other people.   As I just launched it there are no posts in their as yet so you can be the first to check it out and get involved.  If I have learned nothing else from using a wiki at work it’s that people need a space to communicate and share ideas.   Social networks form when people begin to fellowship around similar interests.    I did this once when I was running a first year course by calling it, ‘tell us what you really think.’  Can I tell you that I had a tremendous response.  The course went from being the worst perceived to being one of the best.  I thank you in advance for you contribution!