Archive for March 22nd, 2012
Fifty Boomers is the new thirty? The mathematical impossibility of universal delight?
Posted March 22, 2012
on:Fifty Boomers is the new thirty? The mathematical impossibility of universal delight?
I have links to three of Seth Godin posts, and I decided to publish them “As Is” this time around.
Fifty is the new thirty
“Baby boomers continue to redefine our culture, because there’s just so many of us, we’re used to being the center of attention. (See note 1).
Add into that the fact that we’re living much longer and careers are becoming more flexible, and it’s pretty clear that in just about every cultural respect, fifty year olds are living, acting and looking more like thirty year olds every day.
This changes more than personal financial planning. It changes the marketing of every service and product aimed at consumers–and yet most traditional advertisers are stuck in the mindset that thirty is the end of your chance to find a new customer or build a new brand.”
Conflicted
“Everything we do that’s important is the result of conflict. Not a conflict between us and the world–a conflict between us and ourselves.
We want to eat another dessert but we want to be healthy and skinny as well. Who is we? Who is the self in self-control, and who is being controlled?
We want to stand up and make difference and we want to sit down and hide and be safe.
We want to help others and we want to keep more for ourselves.
It’s not a metaphor, it’s brain chemistry. We don’t have one mind, we have competing interests, all duking it out.
This conflict, the conflict between I and me, is at the heart of being human. One side sells the other. Like all kinds of marketing, it’s far more effective if you know your audience.
You will do a better job of telling a story (to yourself) if you understand who you are marketing to. In this case, I is marketing to me (and vice versa). The marketing is going on in your head…
Successful people have discovered how to be better at self marketing”.
The mathematical impossibility of universal delight
“Jack Nicholson calls it, “rabbit ears.”
If you’re hyper-aware of what others are thinking, if you’re looking for criticism, the unhappy audience member and the guy who didn’t get the joke, you will always find what you’re seeking.
For it to be any other way, you’d either have to be invisible or performing for a totally homogeneous audience.
Invisible is an option, of course. You can lay low, not speak up and make no difference to anyone.
That’s sort of like dividing by zero, though. You’ll get no criticism, but no delight either.
As for finding a homogeneous audience, good luck with that. The one thing that’s true of all people is that they are different from one another. What delights one enrages the other.
Part of the deal.
Note 2: “What do you think we ought to do about education?” Seth published a 30,000 word manifesto (190 pages), totally free to read, share, translate, print and, most of all, use to start an essential conversation What is school for? (Click the link to get to the free download). http://www.stopstealingdreams.com is ready to read and share
Seth wrote: “This is an experiment in “fire starting”: I’m hoping that removing friction from the sharing of this idea will help it spread. If you’re interested in the topic (and I hope you are), please tweet or like the project page, download the files, post mirror copies on your own blog and if you can, email them to every teacher, parent and citizen who should be part of the discussion about what we do with our kids all day (and why).
If just a fraction of this blog’s readers shared it with their address book, we’d reach a lot of people”.
Ultimately, our future belongs to a generation that decides to be passionate about learning and shipping, and great teachers are the foundation for that.