@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

For the last sex yarrons I’ve been studying online networking styles of thought and expression, the same way you probably have only different I expect because you have a right to your opinion too…
Anyway, sod that, now that I couldn’t care less it’s starting to become clear to me that there are all sorts of infantile and idiotic styles through which people strive to be right all the time and top of the class, leader of the pack, part of the incrowd, or just “liked” or whatever.
I may comment on these more extensively as time goes by but the first type I want to talk about is the helpful teacher’s pet, the one who whenever you say something that could possibly be a question immediately bombards you with the most obvious answer as if you’re so damn stupid you can’t use Google yourself. This person is obviously still back in school and trying to impress everyone that they’ve remembered how to thunk and read the stupid books or whatever. I hate them. They never take any risks. They should be mocked, mercilously, especially the ones who give unasked for business and personal development advice at the same time as being obvious.
A close relative of this teacher’s pet is teacher’s snitch, the one who comes pounding in whenever you criticise the Germans or say anything remotely sexist, ageist, anti-anything they hold dear or inadvertently not environmental enough. This version of the thought police seems to be especially strong on the internet, I don’t know why. I never meet them in real life, or if I do they go straight in to shock and I don’t notice because I feel no empathy for the human mind whatsoever, only for the soul and the poor old body, those good bits that are constantly being bullied by the kids who want to impress teacher that we all carry within us and some people can’t help wearing on their sleeve.
I never give advice unless I am asked for it and I never give information except about myself if I think it might entertain or enrich someone else. They usually ignore me in any case, because they’re all so busy scoring points.

Ruthlessness
Stubbornness
Contrariness
Spurious facticity
Rigidity
Charm
Pointlessness
Automaticity
Chess
Theories
Ambition
Charisma
Smugness
Tidiness
Gossip
Wealth
Sports Utility Vehicles
Horror Movies
Solutions
Rescuers
Matronliness
Violence
Cunning
Secretiveness
Superiority
Fashion
Hierarchies
Witchcraft
Horse Racing
Myers-Briggs
Jungian Archetypes
Freudian Analysis
Derivatives Trading
Taxation
Torturers

I think the list is endless and that when I get around to a list of things I do admire it is likely at first to be rather shorter and it would start with

Humility

Stupid little exercise but try this:

Pick someone you don’t care for and imagine saying to them:

What I like about you is…..

The result is quite liberating.

It become somewhat more challenging when you get to the next question: what I like about me is…

Someone who is better than you could even have hoped for. How would that be?

This is a much bigger question than it appears to be if you dwell with it for a while and remember being a teenager looking for love and self-esteem.

Part of my contribution to a larger debate for a brief initiative called “Hunger Week” on Ecademy c. 2005, long before the economic crash, when people in the west were still booming in the bubble…

One contributors says this (which puts me in mind of the wonderful work being done by the banking system in Bangladesh to enable start up business among the disadvantaged:
I believe that by a small change in the money system, we can unleash huge
improvements in our social system. It’s the highest leverage point for change in
our society, and surprisingly few people are looking at it.

Roger Hamilton responds with this interesting statement:
Water always flows from higher ground. Similarly, money flow allows us to create a hierarchy of values. Money always flows from higher value.

So money that flows is an entirely different thing to money that does not. Quantum mechanics identifies a similar property in electrons. Fix a location, and it becomes a particle. Fix a time, and it becomes a wave. Try and fix a location and a time, and ‘poof’ it eludes you.

As I’ve said somewhere else in this forum, wealth is a quantum phenomena, and there lies the magic.

And Ron gives it this spin:

Money is like attention, is like the river. It is the carrier of (social) energy. In the case of money, the energy is called “value” or “meaning”. It is in fact emotional charge. Which is the value of money, and not money itself.

Energy goes where attention flows. Value goes where money flows. I think this is the wealth paradox in essence.

My question is how does all this metaphysical talk about money relate to the simple truth that we in the West are generally speaking saturated with what money can buy and making ourselves sick with the results of greed as we fascinate ourselves with personal gain and our personal wealth profiles…

Whereas: billions of people lack infrastructure, routes to market, legal protection, a voice in their own lives, protection from rape, murder and torture, medicine, food and even water.

The image of the tourists at the airport somehow does it for me: happy to be home to their safe lives, thrilled at how adventurous they just were, smug about how far their money went and how great the service was from the people eating crumbs at our table.

Any answers to these conundrums gratefully accepted, the more real the better. Somehow I have the feeling that the energy of money is going to take longer than forever to “cascade” down to our brothers and sisters who are dying from want of even a couple of dollars a day. Hungry Week participants have a remote idea of the torment but imagine what it must be like for growing bodies to never know the simple satisfaction of a full belly. Doesn’t sound too metaphyical to me, though I imagine those kids in Darfur could do some wealth profiling* to show what’s left after you have nothing left.

What’s real, people? am I just barking up the wrong tree?

*Wealth Profiling is a personality test offered to Ecademy members as one of the tools that will help them grow their business; I think it is based on Roger Hamilton’s concepts.

I saw some goats networking in Greece once, very successfully deciding not to clamber over a barbed wire fence, explaining to me in their uniquely beautiful language that to them success meant being happy on your own side of the fence even if the food is a trifle chewy. Fair enough.

In the last couple of years we have established quite conclusively that insects are networking crazy and since there are 1.6m ants for every human on earth this makes our little quivery friends easily the most prolific makers of useful contacts on the planet.

But is there any creature that cannot benefit from networking, I wonder? What do you think? I mean, does whatever lives in pools of polluted sludge on old Dr Who sets have an inner life with emotional wealth sufficient to benefit from a friend in every cesspool?

(Originally published as a joke on Ecademy)

“Networking fever” is now considered the number one form of emotional disease in the world, some Australian scientists have claimed. All over the planet people have started “networking” and withdrawn from real life, seeing their virtual addiction as a source of imaginary friends and even as a way to earn a living. Some truly pitiful souls show a religious zeal, even consider it a “healing” experience for their afflictions, both physical and emotional. But ahead of them lies the tragedy of “blogger burnout”, the downside of the fever, a tragic state in which the victim finally realises that no one is really connecting with them and no money has come from all the effort they put in.

The solution? Just say NO. Ration yourself. Life is still life, just like it used to be. Go out and meet some real people and do some real work. The world will still be much the same tomorrow.

I think this SEO stuff is a bit like black magic, with the “experts” who sell it trying to convince us all they can achieve results that they simply cannot. Ditto Adsense and the new religion of posting articles and Twitters all over the world.

How do you explain this: there are 3 main global search terms that cover most of the enquiries relevant to my business. Since Google first existed in about 1998-1999 my sites have appeared on page 1 for all of them, right up to 2009. Then I started doing stuff and they slipped to page 2 of Google. Then I stopped doing stuff (including switching off the SEO here) and we’re back on page 1 again. If anyone can beat doing nothing, please tell me. Otherwise I’ll do nothing for anyone for £1000 flat fee.

It’s hokum and it’s all too late in any case. To establish a really powerful internet presence you need a pre-existing brand name or a huge spend in at least six figures. If all you want is to come no 1 for “yogic plumbers in Mexborough” search that term in a couple of hours and you’ll probably find this if it hasn’t been closed to Google. I don’t know. I don’t care any more. I just now that hundreds of thousands of people all over the world are posting endless drivel all day long in the hope of being noticed and that they’re wasting their time.

We now have large communities where everyone is a seller and no one is a buyer and the clever sellers sell to other sellers better ways of selling themselves that basically don’t work because nobody’s buying. Most networkers should quit with their current losses and go back to getting a job.