But that’s NOT what I meant!

“I REALLY LIKE YOUR GREEN HAT. Where did you get it?”

“I’ve always liked those pants. Are they coming back in style again?”

“Are you always this funny when you’re drunk?”

Even though the speakers didn’t actually say to you, “Green hats are ridiculous, those pants are out of style, and you talk like a drunk,” you’d probably find it hard to respond favourably to those “compliments”, because you would have heard MORE than was actually being said.

Like me, people have learned to hear much more than is being said, especially when it comes to advertising. I’m convinced it was all the hype advertising that taught us to listen with suspicious ears. “Sale! Sale! Sale! 60% 70% Up to 80% off! This offer ends today at 6pm!”

This kind of advertising might have worked back in the days of our naiveté, but that day ended when we got our first Multi Level Marketing pitch or received our first letter from a time-share resort:

You have definitely won one of the following prizes: (1) A brand new Cadillac

(2) A Sport Boat (3) A $5000 Rolex (4) A home entertainment system worth $10 000

(5) A year’s worth of free flights anywhere in the United States. Please call to let

us know when you can pick up your prize. Bring proof of identification.

To be effective at advertising in today’s market we have to understand our listeners’ reluctance to believe the claims of advertising.

We must volunteer the proof they need.

The time has come to offer a remarkably better product or service. No longer will the prize go to the company who tells the biggest lies and shouts the loudest.

If you want your advertising to be productive, you must have a story to tell, and you must tell it persuasively.

By the way, I once got that time-share letter in the post and travelled 120 miles to collect my prize. After 3 hours of (unsuccessful) pounding and hard selling, they tossed me a two-dollar inflatable raft and said, “Thanks for making the trip, Sport. Here’s your boat.”

You might ask how I am so sure that people are becoming less naïve. Well the time-share people quit mailing those letters when the letters stopped working.

Want A Free Boat?

When last did you take a day off and drive 120miles to pick up a new boat, Sport?

-          Martin

Roles & Goals

 I have always wanted more.

Because of this I spent the first twenty years of my life searching for ways to add to my ever increasing material pile.

In my mind, I was on track. In reality, my only alternative was to be honest with myself and what I really want, and it was too early for that.

The day I actually paused and thought about what I want was rather momentous. I’ve worked on myself for quite some time. And now out of the blue as if I’ve been teaching it for years, it dawned on me.

To be aware is to be content. And vica versa.

As a kid, I was always impressed when a friend would open his kitchen cupboard to get a drinking glass and reveal two dozen matching glasses inside. If his family also had the matching bath towels they were well on their way up Mt. Affluent.

I remember attending a Multi Level Marketing meeting with my parents when I was fifteen. The multilevel evangelist was amazing. He made everyone in the room feel like wealth, health and happiness was at their fingertips. He was a great speaker, but I felt betrayed by his phony offer – “I want to come over so we can get to know each other” – when all he really wanted was for my parents to sell bottled health products for him. We didn’t join.

I do remember agreeing with one thing he said. He asked, “Aren’t you tired of reading restaurant menus from right to left?” I had to answer in the affirmative.

This is how far back the need to “have more” goes. We are continuously sold on a better life, better environment, and more time with the kids.

Yes, someday I want a villa on every continent of the world. Someday I want to write a book you can find on in any bookstore. Someday I want to sell out music concerts and own private planes.

 But if none of these things ever happens, I’ll continue to live a contented man, because I’m the guy who still gets on stage every night rocking to ten people as I would to ten thousand. I order what I want when I want. I go where I want whenever I want.

At home my drinking glasses are all alike and my bath towels are a matched set. From here on out, anything else is gravy.

Too much has been written about financial goal setting in business, and too little about how we can measure success in more meaningful ways.

Let me ask YOU: What are you Roles & Goals?

 “You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not? – George Bernard Shaw

- Martin