via Quantitative Easing is silently stealing older peoples assets | Mail Online.

I've made the point before that our economy seems especially good at mass-producing toxic junk. Food that malnourishes us, entertainment that bores us, "news" that isn't, finance that blows up our economy, et cetera. So somewhere into the bottom half of the bottle, I found myself sinking into the well-worn mental ruts that are probably familiar to anyone who has ever hated Valentine's Day: how it's a suspiciously consumerist celebration of cheesy pink-tinged coupledom that exists for the sole purpose of selling pink (or blue) fuzzy (or smooth) disposable crap (or overpriced blood diamonds). Smile winningly, pledge your troth, and log into the intertubes to breathlessly proclaim "Life goal achieved!!!!<3!!"

Throw The Art of War at me if you must, waterboard me, glue my eyes wide open and dress me in one of Rick Santorum's sweater vests if you have to, but I'd suggest, when it comes to real human prosperity: the truest denominator of a life searingly well lived is love. And that has nothing to do with pop songs, rom-coms, or candy hearts.

Hence, here are a few things I've learned along the way — thanks to a long string of catastrophically failed relationships, imploding corner offices, living in between multiple cities, a couple of fistfights, and long evenings of solitude at the bar. These aren't the only lessons — or even the "best" ones; just a few of mine.

Experience. There are many kinds of love. The Greeks distinguished between agápe, éros, philía, and storg?. Consider: five millennia ago, a more nuanced conception of love existed than the McLove that surrounds us today. Without experiencing the many forms of love — evoking them in one another, and elevating them for one another — we'll probably always feel a little empty.

Act. Love is a verb, not (just) a feeling. Love is investing in, sacrificing for, and caring about; seeking what I'd call higher-order returns — igniting the creation of real human wealth in others (and reciprocation in kind). The former without the latter is to love what Mission Impossible 4 is to great film: banal, disposable, and shinily vacuous. Love, above all, must be lived.

Suffer. Love transforms, and transformation hurts. Hence, you probably won't love if you can't surrender to a little bit of suffering. You can't love your work if you don't suffer for the art and craft in it. You can't love your partner if you don't suffer a little bit sometimes when you see them — as if the act of seeing them reminds you of the heart-stopping fragility of life. And I'd bet you can't fully love if you can't deprogram yourself from the cult of consumer not-quite "culture" and its relentless cycle of self-loathing. You have to take a deep breath and plunge into the arduous journey of figuring out why you're really here, who you are — and why it matters.

Mean it. Erich Fromm, after a lifetime inquiring into the meaning of life, famously concluded: "Love is the only sane and sensible answer to the question of human existence." To which Woody Allen tartly replied: "Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer sex raises some pretty good questions."

Sure, it's possible to divert yourself for a long, long while with money, power, fame, toys, and the other assorted fun and games we've used the institution of a consumer economy to produce. But love is not a commodity. Love is the messiest, most singular, least interchangeable, and most transformative idea our species has yet invented. Unlike the humdrum, yawn-inducing stuff our institutions can offer us, love can't be bought off the shelf in a neatly packaged twelve-pack.

But it can, if you're very lucky, be earned. So don't front. At the end of the day — and especially at the surprisingly short end of life — there's no such thing as a substitute for the real thing. And there's no better way to miss the real thing than to tell little white lies to yourself about it. So love your partner. Love your friends. Love your family. Love your life. Love your job.

Despite our attempts to trivialize it, commercialize it, and strip-mine it of meaning, love is still dangerously, incandescently meaningful. While we may try to reduce it to a mass-made quasi-luxury we purchase on credit once a year, obediently, in the form of chocolates, flowers, and dinners, it remains vital. While we may try to turn it into an option — one more choice to be plucked off the shelf, depending on whether you prefer the red label or the blue — it remains necessary. And it must be evoked and created, nurtured and renewed, tilled and cultivated — because without it, life is little more than sleepwalking.

Perhaps our celebrations of "love" are so often tinged with a quiet desperation because what we're really pursuing is a caricature of love. And perhaps by endlessly redrawing that caricature, we ourselves are lessened, little by little; as if we feel we don't fully belong in the human world, but can't quite understand why.

None of us belong here. But we are here. And there's not enough time. Cut the bullshit. Love.

The people in your target audience have a powerful emotional investment in their existing emotional response.  These responses are the result of their lifelong experiences. Even if those responses are inaccurate, distorted or flawed, they are real to the prospect.  Trying to change them is seen as a direct challenge by the prospect….in essence, your telling them that they’re either wrong, deaf, blind, tasteless, ignorant or stupid.

That’s inevitably going to trigger a highly-emotional, “fight-or-flight” reaction.  That’s not exactly a productive process.

In summary..

1. Targeting an existing emotional response is safer, easier, better and smarter.
2.  Trying to create a new emotional response is dumb.
3.  Trying to change an existing emotional response is dumber – terminally

John Counsel

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From time to time, John or I will receive a letter from a reader of The Go-Giver asking for advice on applying the principles; usually within the context of frustration at dealing with people who are not Go-Givers.

Typically, at the root of the challenge is an underlying false premise, thus the name of a two-part post with that right in the title.

Just recently, we received an email like this, and we hope the response will help you if you face a similar challenge. (Of course, we received the writer’s permission to print his letter, and we have disguised or deleted any details that could possibly reveal his identity or location.)

He writes:

The sales profession is very interesting. I’ve tried hard to be “Mr. Nice Guy,” a “Go-Giver,” and to focus on helping others. What’s interesting is how some customers will try to take advantage of me (and our company). Often they exaggerate or outright lie, make promises they don’t keep, and in general treat me like dirt. (I’m sure they treat all “salespeople” like that. I don’t take it personally.)

There are days when I feel like, “Okay, no more Mr. Nice Guy. I will just sell them and won’t care so much.” I’m trying to decide on which “sales personality” to adopt: Nice guy or hardass. My natural personality is “Nice Guy,” but I’m getting tired of being run around and taken advantage of.

May I ask for your thoughts about this? Any advice?

My response: While I’m very sorry about what you are experiencing, this one is pretty easy to answer.

You may be confusing being a Go-Giver with being a “nice guy” who allows himself to be treated poorly and taken advantage of. In fact, being a Go-Giver means no such thing. And being a “nice guy” should never (let’s make that NEVER) be confused with allowing oneself to be taken advantage of or treated poorly or disrespectfully in any way.

Being a Go-Giver simply means that you seek to embody the philosophy of focusing on providing great value to others, and that you follow the Five Laws. Nowhere in there does it say anything about being taken advantage of.

I have a favorite saying I’ve tweeted, posted on Facebook, and even written a blog post around over at my Burg.com site. And that is:

“If you are nice and being taken advantage of, it’s not because you are nice — it’s because you’re allowing yourself to be taken advantage of.”

When you say, There are days when I feel like, “Okay, no more Mr. Nice Guy. I will just sell them and won’t care so much,” this implies that you expect to sell more by not caring about them. But in order to sell most effectively you do have to care about adding value to their businesses. I’m not saying you have to care about any other aspect of their life — but you do have to care about adding value to their businesses.

And they may simply not be interested in anything about you other than how you can potentially help them in their business. If that’s the case, then fine; focus on them, and on how you can give them more in value than you take from them in payment (Law #1). That’s the only (honest) way to build a profitable business, in both the short-term and the long-term.

Please don’t misunderstand or confuse what being a Go-Giver means.

Being a Go-Giver is indeed a profitable way of business. It’s also a way of doing business out of strength, not out of weakness (being taken advantage of).

Best wishes for great success. Looking forward to hearing back from you.

And boy, have they been tedious: mostly, about eking out slightly sharper terms for deals for more yawn-inducing stuff (whether flicks, financial instruments, or kicks) that's destined not to matter. So here's a tiny hypothesis: maybe the real depression we've got to contend with isn't merely one of how much economic output we're generating — but what we're putting out there, and why. Call it a depression of human potential, a tale of human significance being willfully squandered (on, for example, stuff like this).

If that's the best we can do, no wonder our economy is falling short of its potential — and no wonder our lives occasionally feel empty, even meaningless. (Even star quarterbacks married to Brazilian supermodels occasionally say to themselves, there's got to be more than this.) Hence, If we want to do better, I suggest it's time to get lethally serious about doing stuff that actually matters. So here are three questions to ask about yourself about what you're spending your life doing:

Does it stand the test of time? Ponder this for a moment: the vast majority spend the vast majority of our lives sweating, suffering, and slogging mightily over stuff that's forgotten by next quarter, let alone next year or next century. Call me crazy, but I'd suggest: mattering means building stuff that's awesome enough to last. Maybe not forever, like Giza's Pyramids — but surely more than a couple of months, before it's absent-mindedly tossed into the dustbin of history along with the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of the age of disposable plastic junk. I'd give you a handful of recent real-world examples, but beyond the labors of love a new generation of artisans are working on, whether microbrews, novels, or games, here's the hard truth: when it comes to the stuff our largest institutions are invested in, I can't think of any, so poor is our cultural performance at standing the test of time. (Just ask yourself: is anybody really going to be watching Mission Impossible 4 a century from now, except a handful of irony-soaked action-movie-worshipping 22nd century hipsters?). Of course, all that really means is that since nearly everyone seems to suck at standing the test of time, you've got a tremendous opportunity not to.

Does it stand the test of excellence? In most boardrooms, the first and last question asked is: will "the markets," financial and "consumer," like your latest shiny trinket slightly better than the next guy's? Of course, that's a perfect recipe for mediocrity: to have barely satisfied weary, oppressed, jaded "consumers" already trained to demand the bare McMinimum is to have furiously smashed the glass ceiling of the lowest common mass-market denominator — and little more. Here are some higher bars: do critics, scholars, aficionados, and diehard enemies pan it, or love it? Mattering means recognizing that everyone's opinion is not created equal — some count more than others, for the simple reason that some opinions are more nuanced, educated, sophisticated, historically grounded, and self-aware than others.

Does it stand the test of you? Sure, I can understand why the dudes and gals I've been overhearing in my little Manhattan adventure are so energized by the stuff they're "working" on — it feels exciting to be part of a buzzing milieu's in-crowd. But let's face it: on our deathbeds, the accomplishments that matter most to most of us probably won't be recounted thus: "In 2012, I sold another thousand copies of someone else's middle-of-the-road blockbuster to an overweening VP with really bad hair and worse manners at a giant monopolistic corporation that was destroying my grandkids' futures. Man, I lived." So while I too sometimes feel enchanted by the seductive power of glittering fantastic excess that seems to have mesmerized my little informal sample of Manhattanites, I'd also like to challenge them — and you — to consider the questions of mattering in a slightly more sophisticated, humane, considered way. It's one thing to work on stuff that seems sexy because it's socially cool and financially rewarding. But fulfillment doesn't come much from money or cool-power — all the money in the world can't buy you a searing sense of accomplishment.

Being human is never easy. But that's the point. Perhaps as an unintended consequence of our relentless quest for more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now, we've comfortably acceded to something akin to a minor-league contempt for the richness and grandeur of life unquenchably meaningfully well lived. Hence, call this post my tiny statement of rebellion. Hex me with all the bland management jargon in the world, zap me with all the perfect theories and models you like, but I'll never, ever accept the idea that triviality, mediocrity, and futility are appropriate goals for any human being, much less our grand, splintering systems of human organization.

We're all built differently — but none of us is here to not make a difference. So what are your three questions for getting lethally serious about doing stuff that matters?

via BBC News – Web economy in G20 set to double by 2016, Google says.

You need to be part of the action – don’t miss the Home Page Pays launch

via To-Do Lists Dont Work – Daniel Markovitz – Harvard Business Review.