The Greek historian, Plutarch had it right; way back in 45 AD, when he said that ‘the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled’. The spark of that fire can only be relished  once you are forced to step out of your comfort zone and thrown into the unknown as in a crisis that we are now.

Crisis can fill your mind with doubt, confusion and inaction or it can fuel your mind with the fire of creativity, rewarded by some growth in intuitive knowledge, strengthening of character, or initiation into a higher consciousness.

A crisis, like the one we are emerging from, triggers new needs and habits.

For instance, the 2002-2003 SARS pandemic in China was a huge factor for the rise of e-commerce giants like Alibaba. Duncan Clark, author of Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, writes, “[SARS] came to represent the turning point when the Internet emerged as a truly mass medium in China…. Crucially for Alibaba, SARS convinced millions of people, afraid to go outside, to try shopping online instead.”

Having said that, in this article, we draw inspiration from 5 books that can help change the pattern of your brand, land your victory and get you situated for the long haul.

Wrapping up with a Question

How will you use this moment in time and pivot your brand to serve the bigger context?

Amazon didn’t change the face of global retail market by replicating a physical store online. It created something new, using technology as the launchpad to change the industry entirely while putting consumers’ interests first.

Jack Bogle did not create another mutual fund. He introduced Vanguard’s at-cost quasi-nonprofit structure. Vanguard index fund gives all cost savings back to shareholders.
Started with Vanguard and spurred on by Robinhood and Wealthfront, these financial companies have taken what “was an expensive, elitist, analog and slow process and made it the opposite: accessible, affordable, digital, and instantaneous.”

And it does not end here. Science and technology is carving up new frontiers.
Rainmaker that harvests fresh water from humidity in the atmosphere is directing their business towards becoming a major global water utility company. It’s model: water as a service.
Now, that is a contextual and purposeful business model, given the fact that by 2030, 47% of the world will fall into severe water stress. (source: OECD Environmental Outlook, 2008)


Thoughts and ideas are welcome.
Until next time!

Right now, if you are feeling inner disquiet and debilitating disharmony, you are not alone.
You have lost your routines, friends, activities, sports, independence, time in nature, travel, and necessary novel stimulation. The best technology can offer is simulation of physical events and or webinars. Like zombies, you are doing your part in attending without much participation and even less expectation. In fact, brands are at a loss on how to maintain it's prominence and be at the center of their clients' decision making process.

The controversy of COVID19 compiled with the uncertainty, the pandemic is proving to be a challenge in providing visibility into fluid plans. According to Newscred, 42% indicated that their marketing team lacked the bandwidth to quickly create new content as the result of shifting priorities with another, 40%+ indicating that managing realignment of budget & people resources is problematic.

For so long we were so focused on tangible goals, that now we are at a total loss on how to go after our goals, garner leads, construct conversation and finally package our conversion. I believe, the clue lies in going beyond the surface and take a dive into the mental construct of your audience.

Building Your Butterfly

COVID-19 gives you a reason to examine your ecosystem, dismemeber the parts that is not working and design a brand configuration that is strong enough to survive and thrive.

“Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The caterpillar’s immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar’s immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing butterfly.”

The caterpillar is a necessary stage for brands to become relevant and sustainable. It is the precursor in defining the new developing reality.  The task is to focus on building the butterfly — the success of which depends on powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of brand deliberation and brand engagement.

The COVID-19 crisis is daunting and disorienting. There is no doubt that this health crisis has turned our personal world and the business world on its head. Health crisis has changed our lives in fundamental ways and turned the business world on its head. For example, brand that were planning to attend or host trade shows, conferences or other events have to quickly pivot to virtual events.

According to Newscred research, there is a significant increase increase in investment in the following channels:

• Virtual event creation - 78 percent 
• Web content - 72 percent 
  
• Webinars - 67 percent 
• Social media - 66 percent 
  
• Blog content - 57 percent 
• Video - 50 percent 

This means that marketers are either having to venture more deeply into areas they’ve only dabbled in, like video creation for example, or, more likely they are needing additional resources to help them create the content they need to survive in the coronavirus chaos. 
So, brands have a chance to expand their reach through the use of new channels and agencies and freelancers have an exciting opportunity to serve new clients with new and creative services. 

Keep your spirits high. Stay Positive!

On May 15, 2013 when Nasa announced that the days of Kepler are numbered, the whole scientific community mourned. Geoff  Marcy, [and his team] who discovered over 250 extrasolar planets was of course saddened by the news and he turned to poetry for solace.
When asked why poetry? His answer simply was: "I did not think. I just felt." 
"Kepler was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week, no weekend rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talks, my song;
I thought Kepler would last forever: I was wrong."


When a hardcore scientist combats his sadness with poetry, it makes you wonder of the magic that lies in the echoes of poetry. Often, we are enthralled by its mystery.  Why? you may ask. The short answer is  "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." It is the language in which you explore your own wonderment. It gives you "the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it." It is a powerful vessel that engages your emotion, inspires your will and makes you do.


“Emotion recollected in tranquillity,” gives birth to poetry.

Emotion – once a largely ignored field of cognitive psychology – has become accepted as a major spring of consumer behaviour. So much so, that many advertisers now view the creation of emotional engagement as their primary objective. – David Penn, md, Conquest Research
Major leaps in neuroscience has overturned the traditional view of consumer being driven by rationality to the one being dictated by emotions and subconscious.


The science of the our firing neurons teaches us these key lessons:

• Human brain process at a sub-conscious level, far beyond the conscious awareness.
• Most of this subconscious processing is emotional, not logical. Because, logic resides in the realm of conscious decision while emotional is the seat of sub-conscious or the non-conscious. It is not outrageous to say that we think with our hearts.
• Our sub-conscious form the vast majority of our decision making. Our conscious choice represents only a minority.

Hence, the rush for brand marketers to capture the emotional sentiments of the consumers.
If emotion is the driver in decision making then, our responsibility is to find ways to perpetuate it. And there lies the limitation in traditional approaches.

Because, "When you ask someone about an emotion, you change the emotion." And requesting consumers to quantify or rank emotional responses, such as on a scale of  1 to 10, is even more difficult for them.
Source: Marketing and Neuroscience What Drives Customer Decisions

Here is where memory metric plugs in.
In order for memory to work, you need to be recalling memory and creating memory all at the same time. So, you bombard those neurons with creative repetition and arouse the synaptic nerves with poetry. Yes, Poetry. Let's just try this. Shall we?

Read the poem below and as you are reading be mindful of the visuals that your neurons are formulating to help you digest this information. How do you feel? What do you see?

Every word in this poem strikes me with its' aching beauty. The truth is tender, yet glaring. I am haunted by the words “unanimous blood" – that we are all, even in our difference, part of this complex interconnection. It reminds me of the basics: the oxygen that sustains us and our memories that write the poetry of our tiny lives.
[The Salvadorian revolutionary poet was twice sentenced to death and jailed by the State for his beliefs and both times he evaded fate. The escape would become an essential part of his myth: the revolutionary the dictatorship couldn’t kill, the trickster poet favored by the gods. However, at forty he was eventually murdered. Perhaps he wrote with this eventuality in mind. With eyes wide open, a joke dying on his lips; in this poem and in others, "he expressed the vividness and universality of that which sustains us: poetry and bread."]


What is so special about poetry?

Using fMRI imaging, Professor Adam Zeman, a cognitive neurologist from the University of Exeter Medical School, led an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of psychology and English. They found that emotionally charged writing, like poetry [not prose] aroused several regions in the brain, predominantly on the right side; very similar regions that had previously been shown to produce the “shivers down the spine” emotional reaction to music. Also poetry, not prose, was found to activate areas of the brain associated with introspection and recollection. These preliminary findings does point to the fact that it is poetry that lights up more regions of your brain, thus paving way for more synaptic connections. And we all know, "neurons that wire together, fire together."


"Biologically we are feeling creatures that think." --Dr. Jill Taylor Bolte   
If you feel nothing. You do nothing.

And, poetry makes you feel.  It makes you "laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone and not alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it however tragic it may be all that matters is the eternal movement behind it – the great undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exaltation and ignorance – however un-lofty the intention of the poem…"

Today, you are inundated with insurmountable mount of data—demographic data, purchasing data, search data, social data, and web data. With this data you are able to understand the need, desires and the mindset of your customers based on their behaviour and their journeys.

With your creativity you make the engagement interesting and desirable, not just functional and utilitarian. And, poetry strengthens you in your creative journey that prevents your brand from fading into mere commodities in both engagement and product experience.



“Creativity is a means of controlling chaos, finding order. Business and poetry draw their waters out of the same well.”  —John Barr, President, Poetry Foundation

In her book, What Poetry Brings to Business, Clare Morgan and her colleagues demonstrate how the steaming creative energy, emotional power, and "communicative complexity of poetry" contributes directly to human innovation and problem solving. “Poems put down their roots in the no-man’s-land between thinking and feeling,.. the borderland where logic shades into the non-logical, where a world defined and delineated by language gives way to the more diffuse territory of what psychologists sometimes call ‘the feeling state’. This is the same strange land, in which twenty-first-century business executives and [marketers]  routinely find themselves, a world in which facts and data are never enough and there is rarely a right or a wrong answer. "

For the first time in the written history of mankind, we are flourishing in a society (i.e the matured economies) of having more than enough. This "more than enough" is being spent on products and services that have more than mere utilitarian function.

As we transition from an Information Society towards a Dream Society, we expect more from the brands and the companies that we do business with. We now value one "human ability that can't be automated: emotion." We want to be inspired. We want products and services that have a design, a story and a heart.

Don't just persuade and promote.
Empower me — Make me dream, make me laugh, make me cry, make me high!

“When god created the horse, he said to the magnificent creature: I have made thee as no other. All the treasures of the earth lie between thy eyes. Thy shalt carry my friends upon thy back. Thy saddle shall be the seat of prayers to me. And thou shalt fly without wings, and conquer without sword; oh horse.” Anonymous

This piece is in honor of the horse.  After all, it is 2014 . It is the Year of the Horse!
In doing my research, I was astounded to find the unfading nature of this symbol that spanned across centuries and influenced cultures across the globe. Ancient wisdom traditions have used symbols to communicate between the two worlds: the seen and the unseen. The horse has been used as the super highway between them.

Why? perhaps, they are a projection of our dreams about our higher selves – free-spirited, strong and beautiful. They remind us to nurture our spirit the dwells the flesh, to emancipate ourselves from our mental slavery and possibly to inspire us into thinking that we are not prisoners of this three dimensional world but "voyagers through it."

In the Hindu scriptures our 5 sense perception has been compared to the horse.
"Know the self as a rider in a chariot,
and the body, as simply the chariot.
Know the intellect as the charioteer,
and the mind, as simply the reins.
The senses, they say, are the horses,
and sense objects are the paths around them....
When a man lacks understanding,
and his mind is never controlled;
His senses do not obey him,
as bad horses, a charioteer." ... Katha Upanishad {translated by Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996

To know the self that dwells the flesh, curb your sense perception. Journey inwards, explore the richness that is you. It is beyond time, space and all material consumerism. "The internal universe, the real, is infinitely greater than the external, which is only a shadowy projection of the true one. This world is neither true nor untrue; it is the shadow of truth. It is imagination – the gilded shadow of truth." Swami Vivekanada
This eternal truth is reflected in the sentiments of Harvard neurosurgeon: “Our eternal spiritual self is more real than anything we perceive in this physical realm, and has a divine connection to the infinite love of the Creator.”
― Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife

In buddhism the horse is a conduit of the mind. It symbolizes the energy or "prana" that runs through the channels of the human body.
In the mountain hermitage which is my body, In temple of my breast
At the summit of the triangle of my heart,
The horse which is my mind flies like the wind
He gallops on the plains of great bliss.
If he persists, he will attain the rank of a victorious Buddha.
Going backward, he cuts the root of samsara.
Going forward he reaches the high land of buddhahood.
Astride such a horse, one attains the highest illumination
[Milarepa's "Song of the galloping horse of a yogi." Translated by Losang P. Lhalungpa]

"Pegasus the winged horse will appear and gallop aloft in the heavens. It will bring forth people endowed with swiftness of movement and limbs alert to perform every task." [Manilius, Astronomica, 1st century AD, book 5, p.350-353.]
In Greek mythology, Pegasus carries the divine thunderbolts of Zeus. It unites the heavens and the earth. It carries the treasure of the mind. It was his hoof pawing the ground that the Hippocrene (horse-springs), the inspiring fountain of the Muses sprang forth. "Everywhere the winged horse struck hoof to earth, an inspiring spring burst forth"
The 'ancient midddle-men' of culture - the Phoenicians were also known as the 'horse people' by the Greeks. These astute sea seafarers adorned their mighty ships with horses’ heads in honor of their god of the sea, Yamm. These horse heads were purposeful tributes to the might of Yamm and were used on the ships to reign in the chaotic force of the sea.

The great Pharoah Ramses II glorifies his horses for the victorious battle against the Hittites.  In utter devotion he proclaimed, “Henceforth their food shall be given them before me each day when I am in my palace ....”  The horses were loved and adored for their unshakable spirit. It is said that the warriors of the desert when "mounted on their finest Arabian steed, proved to be invincible as Islam's power spread throughout the civilized world.".... “They spurned the sand from behind them – they seemed to devour the desert before them -- miles flew away with minutes, yet their strength seemed unabated . . .    

Over the ages the horse has been cherished for its loyalty, speed and unyielding valor. Because of their sensitivity, consistency, and patience, the various creation myths have endowed them with elegance, poise and mysticism. They inject us with unshakable strength and assures us that “we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The Labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. And where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.” Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

With your "beauty unsurpassed, strength immeasurable and grace unlike any other"– it is up to you to decide as to how you will ride the horse.

Illustration inspired by Andy Scott.

“The human mind is a wanderer by nature. The daydream is the mind’s default state.”― Author Jonathan Gottschall

I often daydream.
Because, daydreaming gets a bad wrap in our culture as it is deemed unproductive, my ego likes to call it visualization: daydreaming with a purpose. The creation happens in my mind before it gets down in paper. It is an arduous process of engaging the sub-conscious with the varied research and ideas both of the possibilities and that what is impossible and somewhere in between. It is a constant communication of "what ifs" and "maybe(s)". At the end, somehow, some way the sub-conscious takes the myriad transmission of thoughts and comes up with a solution. It works like a charm without fail. Perhaps writers appreciate its importance better than most of us because a "fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited."

Always fascinated by the workings of the brain, today I get to explore the necessity of daydreaming in all our creative pursuits.



This is how it goes.
We all had our personal "Aha" moments. Suddenly you have an answer to a problem that you were long working on. It creeps onto you, apparently appearing from nowhere and creates a shift in your mental perspective that instantly transforms the way you perceive a problem. "It could be the solution to a problem; it could be getting a joke; or suddenly recognizing a face. It could be realizing that a friend of yours is not really a friend." says psychologist John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia. These sudden insights as proclaimed by neuroscience requires some complex neural connectivity. By monitoring brain waves, psychologist Joydeep Bhattacharya at the University of London's Goldsmith College, saw a pattern of high frequency neural activity in the right frontal cortex that identified in advance who would solve a puzzle through insight and who would not. "It's unsettling," says Dr. Bhattacharya. "The brain knows but we don't."


Neuroscientists has come long ways but they cannot determine as to what makes us more inclined to the Eureka experience only at some moments. However, they all agree that these Insights does favor a prepared mind. You are more likely to have more insightful moments if you are in a relaxed and contemplative mood. While in the public baths, Archimedes observed that the level of water rose in the tub when he entered the bath. This observation is known as the Archimedes Principle: "An object partially or wholly immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object." Based, on this principle big sea faring vessels are built. He was not the first person in history to get a sudden flash of inspiration, but Archimedes is the man who made eureka famous. "Eureka! I have found it!" The moral of the story: when you are stuck while working on a problem, walk away and do something completely different and that will help your mind wander away from the problem at hand. Perhaps, that is why Einstein played the violin and spent a huge chunk of contemplative time in nature.“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

"People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty," says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. As measured by brain activity, however, "mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem." Daydreaming or mind wandering  as some researchers call it is an essential part the creative process. It drives Insight. When you are driven by insight you create transformational changes. Here are some examples that have changed course of civilization because the masters involved in it were guided by insight.

When you are driven by insight you do not make transitional change. You are the harbinger of transformational changes.

Special Relativity
"For years Einstein had been trying to reconcile - or prove one of - two seemingly contradictory theories about space and time. One day while riding a street car home one day, he was struck by the sight of Bern's famous clock tower. The answer was simple and elegant: time can beat at different rates throughout the universe, depending on how fast you moved."

Alternating Current
Nikola Tesla knew in his guts there had to be a better way than the direct current that was designed by Thomas Edison. It somehow eluded him. "One day he was out for a walk (quoting Faust, according to legend) when it just came to him. He used his walking stick to draw a picture explaining how alternating current would work to his walking partner."

Chemical Composition of Neurotransmitters
In the 1900's scientist hypothesized that nerve impulses were transmitted chemically. It was the dream of Otto Loewi that gave the direction to conduct an experiment to prove so. The story goes that just before Easter Sunday in 1920 "Loewi dreamed of an experiment he could do that would prove once and for all how nerve impulses were transmitted. He woke up in the middle of the night, excited and happy, scribbled the experiment down and went back to sleep.
When he woke up, he couldn't read his notes. Luckily, he had the same dream the next night. The experiment and his later work earned him the title, the "Father of Neuroscience."

Television
Legend has it that the back-and-forth motion of the till, while plowing the potato field inspired Philo Farnsworth to lay down the ground work of electrical television. "Farnsworth realized that an electron beam could scan images line by line - simply put, that was the basis for almost all TVs until LCD and plasma screens came along. He went on to demonstrate the first operational, all-electronic television system in 1927."

Polymerase Chain Reaction Process
The 3 hour drive from his office at Berkley to Mendocino helped Kary Mullis was an important factor in formulating PCR, a process by which tiny bit of DNA can be exponentially amplified. "That amplification allows for all kinds of applications - everything from the diagnosis of hereditary diseases to catching criminals and paternity testing."

Coordinate Geometry
René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy - "I think there for I am." ( I would love to counter that: I am there for I think) was in the habit of staying in bed till noon. "One day, while watching a fly flit around above his head, Descartes realized he could describe the fly's position by saying how far it was from the walls and ceiling." The Cartesian coordinate system — allowing reference to a point in space as a set of numbers, and allowing algebraic equations to be expressed as geometric shapes in a two-dimensional coordinate system (and conversely, shapes to be described as equations) — was named after him.

Microwave Oven
Legend has it that Percy Spencer had his dose of inspiration when a candy bar he had in his pocket melted near the radar set that he was working on. A quick flash of insight revealed microwaves being emitted by his "magnetron could penetrate the exterior of a food and cook it from the inside - unlike using plain old heat from an oven, or fire which cooks food from the outside in."

Velcro
One day George de Mestral took his dog for a walk in the woods. When he and Fido got back, Mestral noticed burrs all over his pants. The tricky little devils would not come off. "Chance favors the prepared mind," and boy was Mestral prepared. Looking at the burrs under a microscope, he saw that they had tiny hooks that had attached themselves to the loops of thread in his pants. Rest is history.

The triumph of human civilization rests on many such stories.

Try this.
Spend a portion of your day in silence. “Letting silence into your day gives the daemon [muse] a chance to be heard from.”  Contemplate silly far fetched ideas. Wear the cloak of contemplation as your daily companion. It will serve you very well.
"Pay attention the next time you’re not paying attention. A well-timed daydream may be the most productive thing you do today." Brian Clark

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As I was toying with the title of this article, fear creeped in me: "am I asking you to go out on a limb here?" But, the inner critic was quickly shot down by the ambiguous creator within. "Let's see where is goes. Let's see how it manifests. Let's see what the ancient seers had to say about it".
And, so I start my journey… Let's see if I can pull if off… (funny, how the critic always have to have the last say)

We designers are immersed in this cycle of continuous creation, radical rejections and ebullient  exaltation. It is a part of our daily life. A life of ceaseless seeking that we lead. We do not know what that is. All we know, this is not good enough and there is more to it. Martha Graham puts it very eloquently, "[There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

In this search for something that is transformational and transcendental, the brain often puts up an instant resistance…."oh no, that cannot be done." But, if you trick the brain into believing that you are just tinkering with the idea; the brain not only relaxes, it gets stimulated by “what ifs”, “what then”, and “why not”.

The intimidating big picture of creation, completion and acceptance gets buried somewhere in the cortex and eventually make it’s journey into your sub-conscious. Once, the sub-conscious takes over, the process of effortless creation ignites into motion and unleashes the creative force that is within you.

Modern science is just now figuring out the profound power of sub-conscious in our daily lives. This non-verbal space of highly productive action and associative connection is very much conscious in our current stream of consciousness. This is the space that gives birth to Effortless Creation.

There’s a concept in Taoism, “wei wu wei”, which is often translated as “action without action” or “effortless doing”. "Do less and accomplish more." is the cardinal principle of the vedic science. Inspired, by this high science  Dr. Deepak Chopra in his book The 7 Laws of Spiritual Success mentions that "when your internal reference point is the ego, when you seek power and control over other people or seek approval from others, you spend energy in a wasteful way... When your internal reference point is your spirit, when you are immune to criticism and unfearful of any challenge, you can harness the power of love, and use energy creatively for the experience of affluence and evolution."

I believe, when Mexican Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus told Carlos Castaneda, "…most of our energy goes into upholding our importance.... If we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two, we would provide ourselves with enough energy to ... catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe." he had the vision of the coming future. Seeking approval of others is so rampant in our age of tweets and likes and subscribes that we have forgotten the uniqueness of our own creativity.

The goal is to master the law of least effort and nail it down so that it becomes part of your daily living. It is not a step by step guide but a set of precepts that you might want to incorporate as a part of your life style. (This is not me talking. This is the high knowledge that has been handed down by the ancient seers and has successfully been put into action by the leaders of our times.)

1. Undertake Action that is Prescribed by Passion. Do, because you are excited about it, not because you should or some one else wants you to.
2. Question yourself. When you are dreading to do something. The very act of questioning will lead you to certain answers. For example, I absolutely despise recycling designs. But sometimes I am asked to do exactly that. Now, the onus is on me to furnish a design that speaks to specific brand attributes. The end goal should always be for the greater good… does not matter if the design gets acknowledged by the clients or not.
3. All You Control Is Yourself. When we try to control others, failure, frustration, and conflict follows. Be like the water that flows around the obstacles with a minimum of effort.
4. Stay in the Moment. "This moment — the one you're experiencing right now — is the culmination of all the moments you have experienced in the past. This moment is as it is because the entire universe is as it is." Radical acceptance of this moment makes you aware of the seeds of opportunity that is contained in this moment.
5. Explore Possibilities. When we have our minds set, and our vision set, on one destination, we are often blind to other possibilities. Cultivate an explorers' mindset.
6. Find Sweet Spots: If you find the right spot, achieving something takes very little effort. For example, planting a rose bush in a pre-conditioned soil takes minimum effort. "Finding these spots of maximum effectiveness and minimum effort takes mindful effort, which is why effortless action isn’t mindless action.”
   
7. Defend Defenselessness:  A tall oak tree cracks and collapses in the storm. A reed bends and flows with the storm and survives. Resist the urge to defend your point of view. Resist from defending your point of view. Commit to follow the path of non-resistance. "This is the path through which nature's intelligence unfolds spontaneously, without friction or effort." This was the path taken by Mahatma Gandhi to bring down the British empire to its knees, paving the way for India's independence some 60 years ago.
   

When you have the exquisite combination of the above factors, you will experience life flowing with effortless ease. “Effortless action is a way to not only achieve focus in a world of chaos, but to be effective without stress, to respond to any situation with economy of effort and action, and to pursue our passions while beating procrastination”.
Leo Babautam, Focus: A simplicity manifesto in the Age of Distraction

"You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support, and you market every time you send a memo." This is the perennial face of marketing. It transcends culture, community, space and time.

What has changed today, is the different streams in marketing. We have a garden variety of choices. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, You Tube; just to name a few are the channels through which our messages are dished out. "Inbound" is the refreshing concept in digital marketing, engagement is the sustenance of it and delivering delight is the ultimate target of todays' marketers. Digital marketing dominates our lives. We are inundated with never-ending stream of emails, instant messages, text messages, and tweets that has given way to mediocrity leading to diminished creativity and stifled critical thinking. Keep in mind, these are the marketing messages that we have all opted in. The result: We all suffer from this new disease called, digital distraction.

One of the articles published by moz.com Offline is the New Online Link Building Strategy  talks about a physical event that was hosted by a high-end European fashion retailer and how the event was designed to draw attention to their brand and distributed across the social channels. Today, these events are considered offline link building, but prior to the internet it was simply called public relations. Back in the 1920s when the PR genius Edward Barneys was hired to rally more women to smoke, he devised the NYC Eater Sunday Parade-"Torches of Freedom". Today, instead of having a photographer taking the pictures and then distributing around the world; he would have used the technological eco-sphere of hashtags and Instagram.
     
Today, we have the infinite space of the internet. [Our finite minds are finally starting to grasp the concept of infinity.]
But, we miserably fail to draw people's attention. Partly because, we are all swimming in the sea of sameness. Making advertising messages stand out is the scorching challenge of marketers today. The life span of your twitter message is 90 mins and your Facebook update is 3 hours. Hence, the dire need for your messages to strike an emotional chord. Your Facebook updates, your tweets need to have triggers built in so that people take action. It should be no different than putting an ad in the trade magazine that prompts one to take action. In fact, you can do better than that. Follow the 10:4:1 Rule. [For every 15 of your social media updates, 10 should be pieces of other people's content, 4 should be your own blog articles, and 1 should be a landing page.]

What is the Key Differentiator in Marketing Today: It is You, the Marketer
It is no longer the few, the powerful and the furious who shapes our collective destiny as a species. It is you who choose the destiny of your tribe. With so much marketing data available at the click of your mouse, targeting the right buyers at the right time is of key importance now. "Marketing was inefficient without the intelligence that is commonplace with most marketing and advertising platforms. When marketers began to decrease their print ad spending, it wasn’t because print advertising was a bad idea; it was just less intelligent compared to most digital platforms." Today, the ability to target individuals based on their behavior and interests is the key difference between then and now. Today, you have the option to use Cloud2You or MarketSync, which deliver mail to individuals based on behavior. The keyword here is behavior.

Fusing the Old and the New
While we have established that the kernel of marketing is essentially the same amidst the changing media landscape, we now have to focus on the creativity and the strategy of the content that we put on line. We have to craft our messages with the same delicacy and intent as a high-end print ad or that of a Super Bowl Ad. If you’re creating blog posts, eBooks or look books for content marketing purposes, you need to advertise these materials just as you would a free demo or sale. "You need to market your marketing". As C.C. Chapman says: People always seem to forget that little part. Have to prime the pump for those first eyeballs.

It is about time that we move into a mind set that fuses the old and the new paradigm thus ushering the age of post digital fusion marketing. Here we use the different marketing tool sets as and when needed.
Above all, "Our job is to make change. Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get where they’d like to go. Every time we waste that opportunity, every page or sentence that doesn’t do enough to advance the cause, is waste." Seth Godin

It is language that creates the idea of who we are.

Ancient sages and now cutting edge science have now come to the same conclusion: Life is just an idea. Life as we know it does not exist. Only thousand and thousand living processes exist.

There is nothing like life.

Life is not a noun. Life is a verb. Life means living.
Be aware of this moment and you will realize: everything is becoming, nothing is stagnant. Even when you are at rest, there is a process going on, something is happening. You are breathing. Your heart is beating. Everything is in a constant state of happening.

Human energy needs to be in constant flow to remain alive.

You are like the river and more. A river needs to be flowing, changing course in different plains and mountains until it reaches the ocean. But the destination of your life energy is not the ocean. It is a river that is always seeking and searching – and that is finding but there is always more to explore, to experience, to express.


It is this urge for more that makes us aware of  the dual aspect of our human nature.
It makes us restless and strikes us with conflict.

Often we find ourselves at the crossroads of selfishness and generosity, love and hate, frailty and strength, hope and despair. We are in a constant state of embracing and accepting these apparent contradictions as the "key to transforming each twist and turn of life's journey into a new discovery of who we are meant to be."  In doing so we throttle the wonder that dwells within us...that so desperately wants to find its unique expression through us.


It is said, that before he died, Einstein was asked "If you are born again and God asks you, I am certain you would like to become a great physicist and mathematician again." He said, "No, never! If another opportunity is given to me, rather than being a physicist I would like to become a plumber. I would like to live a very very ordinary kind of life, anonymous, so that I could enjoy life more easily with nobody coming in my way. My fame, prestige, research -- nothing coming in my way, so that I could have a deeper communion with existence."


You are born brilliant. You are an universe unto yourself.
But very soon, you start compromising.
And, when you do so, your talents disappear, your intelligence disappears. The world is not enriched by your unique expression.


"It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open." Martha Graham

Live life slow. Treasure three magic moments every day. Tune in to what’s good in your world. Control the controllables. Load up on compassion, kindness, forgiveness and empathy. Keep on keeping on.

Dare to daydream!

"Twenty years ago, the annual US spend on food and beverages was $614 billion; $2 billion was spent on computers – a ratio of 300 to one. Today, that spending ratio is at parity. We spend as much on technology as we do on our nutritional needs."
- Cheryl Swanson, principal managing partner, Toniq

Let's face it.
Navigating today’s digital marketing landscape can be a daunting task. It is a complex world of mobile, SMS, QR Codes, banners, video, social media, rich media, email ….. you name it. New Media has forged new opportunities to reach consumers anywhere, anytime in stunning ways. One wonders if New Media happens to be the norm of New Marketing, are trade shows still of value in today's economy.

A recent report published by ceir.org confirms that the top-ranked important reasons for attending exhibitions is a blend of coming to see what is new and having a chance to interact with experts. The highest-importance scores are achieved for: see new technology, have the chance to talk to experts and gain industry insights. The research further confirms that exhibitions are doing well in meeting the needs of attendees, with more than a majority of attendees saying their top-ranked important needs are met.

Empowered by such analytics we may now move on to some digital trends that is gaining traction in the world of trade shoes and events. It is a phenomenal way to educate and to entertain the visitors of your booth.

Virtual graffiti wall is a powerful in engaging your audience to realize their inner artist. It allows attendees to literally “paint” on a digital canvas. These interactive art walls encourages laughter and conversation and soon becomes the life your booth. User generated, unique pieces of art can then be leveraged across all your marketing promotions. www.tangibleinteraction.com

Digital signage: It has been pretty popular at trade shows and events. Using your brand visuals across multiple screens creates the high impact and high touch that is needed to entice your audience. Take a signature visual and break it up across multiple moving screens to create unexpected wonder that will enthrall your audience and leave a lasting impression.

Tablet Phenomena: Tablets have changed the way we engage one-to-one and one-to-few. With iPad mini and PaperTab (as thin and flexible as paper), you are no longer confined to the parameters of your floor space. It is a portable branding message on the go. Projection Walls: Has been with us for quite some time. Now, with the flip of a switch you can transform your environment from morning keynote to lunch breaks to an evening reception. Projection make it fun, attractive and memorable.

Interactive Media: High touch, high technology, high design goes into play for this compelling experience. Interactive product and brand messages is programmed to respond to motion-based body gestures. stratacache.com/press.php?ID=369

Your booth is the stage that anchors your space. It is your show. Make it fun. Make it memorable. Make it interactive.

“Don't just be a consumer, be a creator. Somewhere inside you is a masterpiece waiting to be exposed.” As an exercise to find how this 'thing' called 'creativity' works, I venture out in this audacious journey to demystify creativity. The 4 nuggets that I jot down here is my very humble way to harness creativity. Perhaps you ask, "harnessing creativity? How very arrogant." After all, Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree doing apparently nothing is the grand master of creation that the planet has ever known.

Be insanely curious about anything and everything. As Arne Dietrich, Professor of Psychology mentions creativity can be deliberate and cognitive. That means you have to be perpetually on the lookout for information that is new and happening. Every 'bit of information' that is specially not part of your core discipline when combined with other knowledge nurtures the seed of creativity. As Professor Dietrich puts it, deliberate and cognitive creativity comes from the PFC in your brain. The PFC is responsible for focused attention and connecting the dots between information that you have stored in the other parts of the brain. When the nobel laureate, Professor Muhammad Yunus reversed the circle of "low income, low saving & low investment", into a circle of "low income, injection of credit, investment, more income, more savings, more investment, more income" he put together existing information in new and novel ways being extremely deliberate and cognitive in his creation.

”Prisoners who never wrote a word in the days of their freedom will write on any paper they can lay hands on,” says Dorothea Brande in her classic, Becoming A Writer. ”Innumerable books have been begun by patients lying on hospital beds, sentenced to silence and refused reading.” Furiously unplug while you’re incubating your project. Spend time with yourself in solitude. It is the fertilizer for your creative crop. Spend time on yourself doing something festive. Set an Artist Date for yourself. Visit museums and monasteries, hike through widerness, attend "lectures on the odd, the improbable, or merely interesting… participate in musical performances by traveling Tibetan monks"...or do that which brings you in touch with yourself. This creates a rich tapestry of new images, thoughts and perspectives that gets seeded in your subconscious, to be revealed when you are at emotional crossroads. This gives rise to what Professor Dietrich says deliberate emotional creativity.

“Those who do not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discovery.” The Art of Scientific Investigation, a must read by W.I.B Beveridge In this book, he explores the minds of the most famous scientists of watershed discoveries. His conclusion: serendipity, intuition, and imagination displays the habits of mind that produce good ideas." "[Intuition] is always in response to something.” When Frederick Kekule's (1829 - 1896) saw the dream of a snake coiled and biting its tail; in an intuitive flash, he realized that the molecular structure was characterized by a ring of carbon atoms. It is important to recognize that Kekule was immersed in the problem of how atoms combine to form molecules, and he was focused on benzene. Intuitive outcomes are prolific when there is a strong emotional focus and intention to solve a specific issue.

This "eureka" moment of a sudden flash of knowledge is what Professor Dietrich calls spontaneous and cognitive creativity. It involves the basal ganglia of the brain that operates outside your conscious awareness. "Out of box thinking" requires the conscious brain to stop working. By doing this, your subconscious takes the driver seat and the PFC is activated in connecting information in new and novel ways.

“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.”  Leonardo Vinci.
Creative inspiration is mysterious. When the conscious brain and the PFC are resting, it is then possible for spontaneous ideas and creations to happen. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sums it up very well.
”When I am… completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer — say, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.
“Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory…[and] if I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account…
All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance… What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively dream.”

Amygdala is the seat of spontaneous and emotional creativity. These spontaneous and emotional creative moments are very powerful, such as an epiphany, or a religious experience. This type of creativity is not cognitive. But often skill (writing, artistic, musical) is needed to create something from the spontaneous and emotional creative idea. As Professor Dietrich mentions, you cannot design for this experience to happen. It is spontaneous!

"Each man comes into this world with a specific destiny: he has something to fulfill, some message has to be delivered, some work has to be completed. You are not here accidentally, you are here meaningfully. There is a purpose behind you. The whole intends to do something through you." osho
Your ideas and your thoughts will open up new worlds. Go Create!