Getting lucky is often about getting out of your comfort zone and opening yourself up to new and different opportunities. You can get lucky by listening to different people’s points of view and then looking at the situation from their perspective. You can also get lucky by putting yourself in situations and locations that are different from your norm. The internet, along with interactive maps, news from around the world and social networks that can connect you to people in countries across the globe has given us the tools to really jump out of our comfort zones but according to Ethan Zuckerman in the TED Talk below, we’re really missing out on this opportunity as a nation.
The talk is a little long but worth watching when you have the time.
According to Ethan’s talk, in the 1970′s, 35% of the news American’s consumed was international compared to only 12% in the 2000′s. He showed a picture created by Alisa Miller that portrays the world according to the news that we consumed from each country in July of 2009. I was able to get a similar version from February 2007 below. Alisa claims that today, we want to know more about the world than ever before and yet, the media is showing us less and less. In other words, the media is luck blocking us and trying to dumb us down.
The picture sort of reminds me of the old “World According to America Poster”.
With all the tools available online to reach people from around the world, people choose to spend the time with their local friends and other people they meet that share their interests. Even when people use social networks to discuss world news, they mostly discuss it with their friends and people with the same or similar perspective. You don’t see people friending strangers from other countries to hear their perspectives on what happens to be their “local” news. This leads to us discussing our own thoughts and what our media wants us to know. This can be very dangerous as we end up thinking that we are worldly and up to date but really we have no clue about what is really going on in the world around us.
Zuckerman feels that it is unfortunate that more people in North America don’t speak Chinese. After all, it is one of the leading and most important languages in the world. He points out a Chinese organization that devotes their time to translating news and information into Chinese and feels that America should do the same. Ethan is a co-founder of Global Voices, which aims to share news and opinions from locals in nations across the world in many languages.
Lucky people are the ones that take the road less traveled and in a world that we have the tools to reach the corners of the world, we should push through the media’s wall and pave a lucky path. Not many people are doing it so here is your lucky break!
We live in the disposable age.We eat take out, use disposable dishes, and look for a quick and easy fix for everything.The current bestselling books talk about doing less and enjoying more like “The Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss (which I am all for by the way).We are bombarded with mlm (multi-level marketing), network marketing, internet marketing and many other disguises for a way to make a quick buck.It seems like most people have forgotten that the most important ingredient in becoming successful is hard work.
Gary Vaynerchuck: The Hard Worker
Being involved in social media, I am very familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, a wine expert/store owner who has used social media to grow his family business from $4 million per year to a $50 million business.I’m mentioning Gary Vaynerchuk because he is a modern example of a hard worker.He is passionate about what he does and he may be one of the hardest workers out there.
Scalable and not so Scalable Apps
Not long ago, platforms such as the Facebook and iPhone opened up to developers so that anyone can create an application for their platform.Most people saw this as an opportunity to create a scalable app that can continue to make them money while they slept.It was a dream come true for some people.Gary Vaynerchukjumped on the bandwagon and created his own Facebook app but contrary to what everyone else was trying to do, he may have created the absolute least scalable app in Facebook history.His app “Ask Gary” was pretty much just a place for people to ask him questions about wine.Gary answered every single one of the questions himself.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s lack of scalability doesn’t end there.He also answers every single one of thousands of emails he gets every day.To top it off, he personally speaks to almost every customer that comes in to his store.Gary also manages to record Wine Library TV, a regular videocast on wine which happens to be very entertaining.
Gary on Social Media
Gary was recently asked how much time he spends on social media platforms such asFacebook and Twitter to which he responded “about 2.5 hours per day”.Shocked at the answer, Gary explained that it is a CEO’s job to make connections and get business and that he has found Social Media, the best place to make his connections.
Gary’s Research and Development
Looking at Gary and what he has done, you may think that Gary has it made and can start delegating now.He can let other people do his work for him and go relax on a beach, he can definitely afford it now.Gary feels otherwise and for a very good reason.By answering thousands of people’s questions, speaking to customers and doing research online, his mind and gut are a better R&D team than you can ever possibly hire.He can smell new trends and predict what people will want and like.The human mind can accurately crunch more information that any super computer in existence.Gary takes advantage of this and stays years ahead of his competition.
picture taken from news video at http://www.khon2.com/news/local/40518362.html
Last week during my stay in Hawaii, I was interviewed by Brianne Randle of KHON2, an affiliate of Fox News about homelessness in Hawaii and how it affects tourism. Apparently, there have been streams of discussions on expedia.com and tripadvisor.com about the homeless problem in Waikiki, which is discouraging tourism. Brianne pointed to a group of camping tents in an open field along the beach and asked if it bothered me at all and if it affected me as a tourist. I told her that before she told me that it was illegal and that these people were homeless, I was considering camping out for a night myself.
Media Spins the News, “you see it everywhere you go”
I spoke to Brianne on camera for at least five minutes discussing my thoughts on the situation. I explained that the homeless people on Waikiki Beach did not affect me but the only statement that they took out of the discussion was an out of context “you see it everywhere you go”. It made me seem like I was disgusted by the problem, which is very far from the truth. When I made the comment I was not talking about Hawaii, I was talking about the unfortunate reality that there are homeless people everywhere in the world. I also told Brianne that the problem in Hawaii was made worse than it actually was because of the direction of the discussions on the travel site forums which gives the Waikiki Government a tremendous opportunity to join the forums and show all the positives about Waikiki so that it will retain it’s appeal to tourists.
The Media Spins Me Right Round, Like a Record
The reason I bring this up is to show how the media spins their stories to get whatever outcome they want. When Brianne asked me if the homeless problem affects me one way or the other, she may as well have asked “why does the homeless problem affect you as a tourist?” with the note that if it doesn’t bother you, she is not interested.
It’s Easy to Find a Source to Support your Story
For any story, you can always find sources to support any side of an argument. Even if 99% of the world feels one way, you can take the 1% who feels the other way and use them as your sources. You can also take the first 99% of people, cut and paste little pieces of what they say out of context and presto! You have your story supporting your original hypothesis. Every book in Barnes and Noble has a quote from some publication on it making it seem like it is the greatest read since War and Peace. There can’t be that many “best reads of the year”.
Mark Twain was quoted as saying “if you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.” He could not be more on the money.
Social Media is Taking us Back in Time
I love to tell the story of how social media is bringing us back to the days before mass media took over as our primary source of information. In the olden days, if someone wanted to get their story out, they would put together a pamphlet with their story on it and pass it around in the marketplace. Then someone else would come along and give out a pamphlet with their version of the story and maybe even a third or fourth person or more would do the same. People in the marketplace would be able to read multiple sides of the story and come to their own conclusions of what really took place. Along came mass media and started to deliver the “news” but it was from their perspective with their own biases and twists.
Blogs are the New Pamphlets
Today, we have access to thousands of blogs on any subject and no longer have to rely on mass media to “misinform” us. We can now read a few blog posts on any given subject and come to our own conclusions just as people did with pamphlets many years ago. By building up our own personal social networks and filling up our rss readers with what we consider reliable sources, we will become the most informed generation ever.
How do you feel about using mass media vs. social media to get informed? Please leave a comment.
All the way through our schooling we are measuring how smart we are.How well we do on each test, in each subject and most of all compared to the rest of the class and sometimes even the rest of the State, Country or World.After we are done with schooling, many of us are still on the roller coaster ride of wondering how smart we are and how we compare to others.Some people are afraid to speak up because they fear looking stupid.Some people don’t take chances for fear that they will fail.I am telling you today that you have nothing to worry about.
Just the fact that you are reading this post shows, that you have enough initiative to do something with yourself and that you are smarter than a large portion of people out there.I am not saying that reading my blog specifically proves anything, it is reading anything and learning something outside the scope of your “required reading” that means something.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately as I start my own Social Media business, Flid Media .I am confident in my abilities and I know that I am more than qualified to be doing what I am doing.At the same time, Social Media is very new and is changing every day.Every single day I read blogs and articles about new elements of social media that I have never heard of before.Some are just being launched and introduced but others are new perspectives.
There will always be people out there that are better than you or know more than you but that should not deter you from reaching for your dreams.You don’t have to be the best or the smartest out there.You just have to be better and smarter than the people you are doing business with.When I say “better and smarter” I don’t mean in actual intelligence, I mean it in the scope of what you are doing.The most brilliant minds will need help in a field that they have no experience in.You may never be the Michael Jordan out there but the NBA is filled with players who don’t hold a candle to him.Besides, have you seen Michael play baseball?
As I mentioned in the past two posts, go out, learn something and become smarter than the next person.Then you too can become a consultant.
There once was a time where it seemed like there was a finite amount of knowledge out there.The wise men all knew the same things, had the same education and maybe had a little bit of a different expertise.Besides the few regular inventions and innovations, you could probably know everything there was to know by reading an encyclopedia from cover to cover.
Today with the exponential burst of the internet, online video, bogs, and every other type of content that is uploaded faster than the world can process it, nobody can even get close to knowing everything.Seth Godin’s article, “Warning: The internet is almost full” admits that the internet can never really be full but “we can”.There is no way for any person to process more than a tiny fraction of the information that is out there.
You may look at this a missed opportunity because if you just started your blog 5 years earlier, you could have had it made.Now, you have to compete with the millions of other blogs that are crowding up the net.I look at this as a great opportunity and an easy way to get lucky.You no longer have to be gifted with intelligence and an ability to soak up all the information that you read.All you have to do is choose a niche that you are interested in and stick to it.As the niche gets bigger, specialize and keep narrowing down your focus.There aren’t enough people in the world to have a specialist in every single area anymore.The more the internet and general knowledge grows, the more opportunities there are for average people to get ahead.
What are you waiting for?Choose your expertise, start learning and get lucky!
Growing up my father used to tell me that every day was “the first day of the rest of my life”.He would mostly use the expression when I was starting something fresh like the first day of a new school year.The expression always seemed funny but never really had any meaning for me, until today.
As you may know, Friday was my last day at my job in a position that I occupied for the last 3 and a half years.I had a great title and I grew tremendously while I was there but at a certain point, the growth stopped and I felt like I was stuck in some sort of routine instead of being excited about each new project that came along.I had gotten all that I could have from the job and it was time to move on.
This morning, I didn’t have to get out of bed, but without an alarm clock, for the first time in a while, I got up on my own, earlier than usual, jumped out of bed and had more energy than I’ve had since I wrestled in college.I didn’t have to hit the snooze button, rush to the train or sit for an hour and a half on my commute.Instead, I took my son to school, made a real breakfast and helped my wife pack for our big move next Sunday.
All day I was full of excitement for what the future holds because for the first time in years, I felt that I was in charge of my destiny and I am taking control.I broke free of the hold that the corporate world held on me.I feel like the genie in Aladin when he was liberated and was now free to discover the world.
For the next 2 weeks I will be packing, moving, unpacking and settling into my new home in Montreal, Canada.After that I am opening up the virtual doors of Flid Media, a social media consulting company aimed at helping small businesses and non profit organizations use new technology and media to the fullest extent to improve the way they function.Since I will be making my own hours, I will have time to have breakfast with my family take my son to school and not have to rush off to the office hoping that I won’t be late.I will also be working on this blog along with a few other side projects that I’ve been playing around with.I haven’t had much time over the last month to spend on this blog but once I am settled, I plan of giving it the attention that it needs.
Back to the title of this post, I actually felt that today was the first day of the rest of my life because my future is an open book waiting to be written and for the first time in my life, I have the pen and I know how to use it.Everyone can write their own future, it just takes some luck.
I just had a conversation with a friend of mine who has five twitter accounts, one is personal and then four of them are each a stream for different topics.I don’t know what all of them are but the ones that I do know are great ideas.One of them is a pipeline of jobs for a specific niche.It’s great and it is something that the niche needs.He is doing a great service for the people looking for those positions as well as the organizations that he is publicizing.
My take on this was that the beauty of twitter is that it is authentic and completely transparent.It is a live human who is doing all the tweeting and there is no editing.The tweeter writes about his life, his ideas, his passions and people follow him because they are interested in what he has to say, they crave social interaction and they like to be part of other people’s lives.Social media opens up conversations between consumers and actual people in companies rather than just the corporate image that traditional media projected.
@comcastcares is a great example of a real person tweeting about real things in his life and also representing a company by offering instant customer service.More people are changing their view of Comcast each day just because this guy exists.He is a human face for the corporation.
I told my friend that he should use one account for all of his pipelines and people will follow him because of his authenticity.I told him to at least announce that it is him behind each of the accounts to be transparent and people will be able to follow the feeds that they want.Instead, he is using the different accounts to collect feeds and spit them out in one location.It’s a good idea but in the web 2.0 world, is this what we really want or need?
I consider myself somewhat entrepreneurial and I have tons of ideas all the time.I have thought about creating different twitter accounts for different ideas but at the end of the day, I decided that whatever I do on twitter, I want to be completely authentic.If I start a business and want to tweet about that, I’ll do it on my account.If the business grows, I’ll let other people in the company have their own accounts where they can tweet about different aspects of the company and let their personalities shine through.
I’d love to hear what you think about this.Am I right?Am I completely off my rocker?Let me know in the comments and then follow me up @flid2.
As many of you may know, a few weeks ago, Google launched Chrome, their new internet browser.Since this site is all about “getting lucky”, I decided to wait a little while before posting about this major step for Google so that I can apply a lesson to Chrome instead of just announcing the browser and what it can do for you.If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I am big fan of Google and what they are doing for the internet and the end user.
Do We Need Another Browser?
Everyone has been wondering and talking about why Google would come out with a browser especially since they aren’t making any money off of it.Some people say that Google is trying to take over the word, dominate the net and have as much control over what surfers do as possible.Although there is probably some truth to that, I believe that Google is just trying to give the end users what they want.They want to simplify everything and give their users as many free (or advertise based) tools as possible.Current browsers were built based on the internet of the 1990’s where the average website was a document online.Now with web 2.0, sites are going interactive and cannot be viewed through the same lens as we’ve been using all along.The entire browser is open source so anyone can use it to build or improve their own browsers and applications.
What do People Think About Google Chrome?
I happen to love Chrome and have made it my default browser on all of my computers but I have been getting mixed reviews from others in the blogosphere.There are some plug-ins and features that Chrome is missing right now that Firefox has but I’m pretty sure that Google will catch on quickly and surpass the capabilities of the other browsers.The majority of the negative opinions on Chrome that I have heard are from the web designer’s side.Now designers and webmasters have one more browser to optimize their sites for.From the consumer side, it’s pretty much all positive except for a few sites that have not yet been optimized for Chrome and look a little messed up.
The Bottom Line
The Bottom line is that Google is making things easier for the end user and in this world that is all that really counts.The lesson we can take from Google is to do as much as we can make the end user happy even if it inconveniences us a little (or a lot) in the process.Companies are no longer in the position to tell their consumers to “take it” or “leave it”.If we don’t give the consumers what they want, they’ll leave and let the whole world know about it.
Problogger posted a while back about a conversation he had with Seth Godin about Twitter.Seth mentioned that he doesn’t use twitter and barely even uses Facebook.He feels that if he does something, he wants to do it really well (which is a whole other post) and it’s better not to do it at all than do a mediocre job.
If Seth Godin Doesn’t Use Twitter, Who is Using His Name on Twitter?
Whoever it is has thousands of followers who think they are following him.That person isn’t really trashing Seth Godin’s name or reputation, but he could if he wanted to.There is so much possible damage that can be done by someone taking your name, so why let them?
Take Ownership of Your Name
Buy the domain name of your name, preferably .com if it’s available.You may even want to buy the .net, .info, .name and any others that are available.At $7/year, you can’t really lose.You should also secure your name on twitter, blogspot and any other Social Media tools that can be hijacked.
The web is growing exponentially and the amount of time we spend online is increasing as well and will continue to increase.Even if you just get your name now to secure it for the future, it is a good investment.Who knows what you will need it for in 10 years.You should even consider buying your kid’s names, I know one person who already does.
Five years ago, it was almost unheard of to buy your name’s domain.Now it’s almost common practice as people are using their domain for their blog, business, resume, or just a place to show things off online.
If you want to get lucky in 10 years when having your online identity is crucial, get it now.After all, Luck is all about being prepared for what lies ahead.
I’ve mentioned before that old or traditional media is pretty much corporations developing a message that suits them and yelling it out at the world as often as possible.With the average person being exposed to 3000 ads per day, that’s an awful amount of being yelled at.Social Media allows companies to interact with its consumers and have a two way conversation.Some companies are not moving fast enough to drop their monologue act and let their customers join the conversation.The Bubble Project took it upon itself to protest the monologues by turning ads around the world into dialogues.
In New York, Milan, Buenos Aires and Amsterdam so far, People involved in the Bubble Project have been placing cartoon speech bubbles over ads all over their cities and allowing anyone to fill them in.This gives the random person on the street a voice, the witnesses a good laugh and the corporations a strong message that we don’t appreciate being yelled at.
Each day, more and more people are getting a voice through social networks, blogs and other creative tactics like the Bubble Project.Do you have a voice yet?Let me know in the comments.
This self improvement blog is full of advice on how to increase your luck and improve your life. You can start off by reading 40 Ways to Increase your Luck.
