One of my friends, Jay Conrad Levinson, the author of the Guerilla Marketing book series and the best selling marketing book series in the world, has authored 56 different books in his lifetime.
To me, that’s a great number to look forward to. I’m intending to break the record of the total number of books an individual can write in a lifetime, because I think there’s lots of stuff in my head that’s waiting to come out into a written form. (hence the blog, heh)
I read with a lot of dismay at the recent news relating to how a best friend allowed her friend to commit suicide. It all goes to show that if you truly want to be a friend, you need to know what to do.
A process of risk assessment is usually in order, and you have to make sure anyone whom you remotely think is going to commit suicide be referred to a trained specialist who can deal with such isses.
After speaking to a close friend of mine about business in China, he enlightened me quite a bit about the way business is done in China. For example, it is commonly known that 关系 (guan1 xi4), or relationship, is often used as a pretext for developing a business relationship. They even go so far as to say that ALL business depends on 关系.
In my limited time in business, I have found a few truths. Firstly, the whole idea that successful business is about relationships alone is a whole load of B.S.. Relationships matter period, regardless of business or not. After all, you will want to retain some kind of relationship with people who are nice, who are willing to help some time or other.
I just had a flash of insight a couple of hours ago because I was in the middle of doing an unprecedented in-house training for a group of my trainers. While we all had a fun time with “mind blowing” details (I was teaching them the dynamics of marketing online), it somehow struck me that there are things that people are “interested” in doing, but won’t do. There are also things that people are “obsessed” with doing, that no matter what happens, they MUST do.
This year I’ve been on a number of different trips out of the country, most of them for work purposes. While I seldom go to different places for the purpose of looking at things or ‘vacationing’, I do enjoy the getaway in a foreign place once in a while just to chill.
For some people, though, this vacationing is like an obsession. It’s planned several times a year and given deadlines as though there were a profit margin to be earned from it. It must mean that they will end up “musting” their desires into reality.
I was doing some research about motivation and the effect praise has on it. It is surprising how little people actually know about motivation and praise, and the psychological background to it.
Here’s a diagram that I took from Henderlong and Lepper (2002), which reveals the findings from research done on verbal praise and how it enhances a child’s behavior. 
While this may have less impact on adults, I believe this to be useful for two reasons. First, it gives us a benchmark as to how exactly to praise our children, and hopefully to learn the lessons within to even praise adults. Second, it shows us which factors actually could lead to praise being ineffective.
I just read this while waiting at the airport for my flight to Jakarta:
“Participants are 52 per cent more likely to be lonely if a person to whom they are directly connected (at one degree of separation) is lonely,” the authors write.
At two degrees of separation, they were 25 per cent more likely to feel lonely. At three degrees it was 15 per cent and at four degrees the effect disappeared. This pattern – what the authors term the “three degrees of influence rule of social contagion” – also appeared in the obesity, smoking and happiness studies.