Dunno why, but I find myself thinking about where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Wherever it is I’m going, it seems I’m going there really fast. I’ve had a bit of time ‘off’ over the summer and am starting to get back into things with speaking engagements in Perth, Sydney, Brisbane and London. I’m speaking to groups of people about how they can use the internet to promote:
a concept
a business
a product
a service
a person
Promotion is one thing – but I’m also going talking to them all about how the internet is an amazing human communication tool. Humans have always communicated - the internet just sped it up, leveraged it, and made it possible to connect with millions of people almost instantly.
It’s like the Jetsons – but better because it’s real.
All this talk of the ‘interweb’ and ’software thingys’ seems a long way from where I came from. My first memories are of my childhood in an outback town in country NSW. A little place called Deniliquin. Population 6000 when I lived there. Think I’ll take the kids there one day.
(How does a boy from the country with a very modest upbringing end up doing what I’m doing now? There’s a story in that, but I’ll leave it for another time. Meanwhile, check out my country home town.)
Coming up sometime this year I will release a book I’ve been sitting on for a while now called P2A: Possibility to Actuality – otherwise known in my house as how to make stuff happen.
Some people believe success is only for those with natural talent. Other people believe success is to be found in tricky psychological techniques, or even potions and pills. In this post I’m not going to go into what I believe success is due to (that’s for later), other than to say that when it comes to achieving things I have typically succeeded by ‘forcing the issue’.
Forcing the Issue
Now, some don’t like ‘force’. They prefer gentler, less confronting terms like ‘being fluid’ or ‘being in flow’. Personally, I don’t object to the sense of power in the word ‘force’, however I still see it the same as ‘being like water’. Yes water can flow gently around obstacles, but water can also be forceful. Loud. Persistent. Relentless. Insistent. Powerful.
By ‘forcing the issue’ I refer to insisting on success. Insisting that a certain thing be completed. Insisting that a certain level of skill be attained. Never giving up. Using everything I have within me to bend and shape the world around me. By forcing the issue I refer to dreaming big and beyond your limitations. Not settling for less than you know you are capable of and actually dreaming of more than that.
Forcing the issue is asserting your ‘will’.
Now, talking of ‘will’, an adviser of mine sent me this Will Smith video the other day and thought I’d share it with you. I’m pretty sure you’ll like it. I’d love to read your comments, so make sure and leave some!
Last year, I met the renowned social media expert and profit engineer, David Bullock. I was sitting at a sushi bar in a hotel in Orlando, Florida where I was attending one of the best internet marketing event EVER, and he showed up looking for food and and drink. He was a keynote [...]
One of the ‘talked-about’ books of last year was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Here’s my take on it.
Gladwell is well-known for popularizing the research of others – you could say he is a marketer of facts that would otherwise stay hidden in scientific or psychological papers. The focus of Outliers is that small group [...]
I love the internet. It gives people opportunities that just a few years ago didn’t exist. I think one of the key things the internet has done is to squeeze out the so-called ‘middle-man’ – and publishers are definitely in that category.
Publishers were intermediaries – they stood between authors and readers and their power could [...]
In early 2008 I began to write a book about anxiety. I mapped it all out on a large white board that I could add ideas to whenever they popped into my head. It was a big task. The map got quite out of hand.
And then I did what I always do with a new [...]
