Category: Abundance and Prosperity

Looking at abundance as not necessarily monetary–how to get your needs met and desires fulfilled without necessarily needing money to do it.

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Innovation, language, Psychology Tagged with , , , ,

Guest Post by Dan Miller of 48days.com

Editor’s Note: Not only do I love the message about overcoming others’ fears, but I love that Dan was inspired to write this by a visit to the zoo. I’ve been saying for many years that we can find ideas anywhere. I even have a big research folder for a book I haven’t yet gotten around to writing, “How to Find Your Next 10,000 Ideas.”

—Shel Horowitz, editor

Not too long ago, when I was at the Nashville Zoo with my granddaughters, we watched as the zookeeper offered to let small children hold an ostrich egg.

These amazing eggs are approximately twenty four times the size of a chicken egg and weigh about three pounds. But rather than embracing a once- in-a-lifetime experience, almost without exception the parental caution was—”Now, don’t drop that egg.”

Just what do you suppose was at the top of every little child’s mind as they carefully took that big egg into their arms? Were they marveling at the size, wondering how long it would take to hatch, imagining using that egg as a volleyball, or basking in the educational enrichment of the moment?

No, I suspect that the thought foremost in their minds was—”If I drop this egg I’m in big trouble.” I doubt that the teaching experience went much beyond the fear of dropping that egg.

Fear masks our ability to see the positive. If you’re focused on not dropping the egg you:

1. Will not try for the promotion now. “I’ll just hang on to what I have.”

2. Will not start a business in this economy. “It’s too risky.”

3. Will not buy a house. “If I ever get behind on payments the bank could foreclose.”

4. Will never love deeply. “What if I’m not loved in return?”

Most parents have never held an ostrich egg. They base their experience on knowing chicken eggs are fragile and break with the tap of a spoon.

Most people don’t know that an ostrich egg has a thick shell that requires a hammer or drill to crack.

Maybe the people holding you back have experienced too much pain, shortage and despair. They may be watching too much news on TV.

But don’t let their fear deprive you of a once-in-a-lifetime thrill.

Go ahead, take that trip, write that book, open that ice cream shop or buy that little house you’ve been wanting.

Live your life driven more by curiosity and passion than by fear.

And if you drop the egg, call twenty of your friends and enjoy an incredible omelet.

I hope this serves you well,

Dan Miller

This is an excerpt (used with permission) from Dan Miller’s book 48 Days To the Work and Life You Love. You can find out more at https://www.48days.com 

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Ethics: General, General Commentary, Gratitude, Innovation, language, People Helping People, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , ,
Here’s a true incident from my teenage college years. I made a mild request to a group of people and one of my dorm-mates lit into me about how I was always so selfish and didn’t care about other people. It hurt like hell to hear this–but I reflected on it and decided that he had a point. So I changed my behavior. Decades later, I saw him at a reunion and thanked him. He had no memory of the incident, but to me it was a key turning point.

Paths of apology and Forgiveness

Criticism usually has a grain of truth (or sometimes a bushel)–so start by expressing thanks, even if it’s delivered nastily. Especially, then, because listening and appreciating is the only way you’re going to get into a positive outcome with someone who’s hostile. Listen, let them get their feelings out, acknowledge their feelings, meaningfully apologize for your action if that’s appropriate. And even if you don’t feel a need to apologize for the behavior or policy, apologize for upsetting them or making them feel unvalued. Don’t try to explain or justify your action yet. Just listen.And whatever you do, don’t say, “I’m sorry, but…”–that’s not an apology. Keep an ear out for the opportunity to take a specific step that will help, and offer, out loud, to take that step. That might just be informing them ahead the next time, or it might be completely undoing an action. You have to decide how much of the criticism is justified and figure out what the real issue is (which may not be the expressed issue).
Once the other person is done venting and you’ve apologized or de-escalated, you might (but might not) want to ask, “would you like to know why I did it that way? Maybe we could think together about how I could do it differently next time so both of our needs get met.” With this, you make them a partner in your growth, and you increase the likelihood of finding a viable solution for both of you, building a relationship of cooperation, not hostility. But you’re really asking. if they decline, drop it. They don’t want to be your partner in potentially changing their behavior, or maybe they are just tired of doing the work of educating others on an issue that is a sore spot for them.
Abundance thinking applies not just to stuff or lifestyle, but to relationships. This is a strategy to create abundance by welcoming even the nay-sayers. Not only do you get to build a relationship, you discover flaws in your thinking, planning, and action that you might not have seen and can now work around. Who knows–maybe your critics will even become your friends or your business partners.
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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Frugality/Frugal Fun, General Commentary, Gratitude, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

Someone asked on a discussion group if members in the non-profit world ever experience “feelings of inferiority or imposter syndrome when surrounded by friends and family in the private sector who earn more income”–and this is my response (perhaps in time to encourage you to consider a New Year’s resolution not to obsess about money):

This is not just an issue in the non-profit sector. I have many friends in the marketing world who are multi-millionaires. Although I’m a business-sector marketing and sustainability consultant, I have far more modest income than they do, and every once in a while, the idea creeps in that maybe I have no right to call myself a marketer because I have not reached anywhere near their financial success. But then I remind myself that:

1) Money is not an end, but a means to various ends–and I’ve been extremely skilled at using other means to those ends. I even wrote a book on how to have fun cheaply, back in 1995 (The Penny-Pinching Hedonist). I have a great deal of abundance in my life; it just happens not to be based in the size of my bank account.

2) If my goal had been to be materially wealthy, I would have accomplished that. But my goal was to improve the world, and I have some legacy underneath that tent (and hope to have more).

3) I have a terrific life that many of those marketing geniuses probably envy: I am actively involved in making the world a better place, I travel, enjoy live music and theater, and fine food, and I get to make my career doing the writing, thinking, and speaking that I love.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Innovation, language, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,
interracial couple in US flag regalia
interracial couple in US flag regalia

As the United States of America marks its 244th birthday today, it’s a good time to look at the state of this nation.

The US was the first modern constitutional democracy, just shy of 26 years earlier than second-place Norway. That’s a terrific achievement that makes many Americans proud–including me. But the founders of this country were White, male property owners, some of whom saw human beings as part of their property. And the democracy they created was an unequal one that gave voting rights only to White, male property owners. It took all the way until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to extend that franchise all the way down to Black women in all parts of the segregated South.

Americans think of ourselves as a “can-do” people. Over the course of its history, the US has often been in the vanguard, with the rest of the world playing catch-up later. The US was especially good at technology, pioneering innovations ranging from the interchangeable parts that made mass production possible to the amazing moon missions that took less than seven years from JFK’s speech at Rice University to Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” as he became the first person ever to set foot on the lunar surface, to enormous leadership in green energy from the 1970s into the 1990s.

And Americans often see ourselves as the greatest country in the world. In many ways,  that image is correct. We have amazing natural and scenic resources, a wide diversity of people, cultures, ecosystems, and more. We are very resilient, even scrappy at times. We have a democracy that has not only lasted but expanded. We’ve birthed may popular movements for justice and liberation, and experiments in new ways to form community, that went around the world.

As one example, it’s hard to imagine the LGBT movement globally without the strength of that movement in the US starting in 1969 with Stonewall. Stonewall didn’t magically spring up out of nowhere. Little-known homosexual-rights advocacy groups like the Mattachine Society (for men) and Daughters of Bilitis (for women) had been around since the 1950s. The Gray Panthers, founded in Philadelphia, took on agism. Disability activists pushed through the Americans with Disabilities Act.

But we also lead in many areas where leading isn’t a good thing. 73 percent of US homicides involve a firearm, and per capita firearms ownership is more than twice the number of #2 Yemen. The US is the only country to have more guns than people. We have the highest healthcare costs in the world but far from the best outcomes. And of course, new cases of Coronavirus are raging in the US, while Europe and Asia have done a much better job on control.

And despite the perception of American exceptionalism–that we’re a beacon to the rest of the world–there are many areas where the US is far, far below “the best in the world.” This could be a much longer list, but here are a few examples:

The US has enabled an enormous transfer of wealth from middle-class and working-class people to the 1 Percent. People of color have faced numerous additional institutional barriers to participating in that wealth.

The US has also been a hotbed of hatred, where for centuries, people have been attacked and often killed for their real or perceived skin color, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other factors. The FBI’s most recent statistics, for 2018, document 7,120 hate crime incidents (this list taken verbatim from the site):

  • 59.5 percent stemmed from a race/ethnicity/ancestry bias.
  • 18.6 percent were motivated by religious bias.
  • 16.9 percent resulted from sexual-orientation bias.
  • 2.2 percent stemmed from gender-identity bias.
  • 2.1 percent resulted from bias against disabilities.
  • 0.7 percent (58 offenses) were prompted by gender bias.

My guess is that these terrible statistics don’t even count police murders of people of color.

What is the Real America?

Technically, America is much more than the US. It’s everything from the northern tip of Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina–and Americans live anywhere within. But right now, I’m just talking about the US.

And the answer is…all of the above, and more. Our diversity is part of our resilience and our strength. But our education (in school and out, and that includes social media) tends to sharpen our existing divisions and make it hard to find people who disagree with us–let alone have those meaningful, structured conversations that explore how we can work together with people who are not like us.

And it hasn’t helped that the current president has repeatedly and publicly embraced racism,  misogyny, ableism, and difference, while promoting suppression of real news and science, monolithic social mores that ignore or (sometimes even physically) attack different perspectives, and dictatorships in other countries. A president who has put children in cages, essentially closed the borders to legitimate asylum seekers (long before COVID), slashed the safety net, appointed a likely child abuser to the Supreme Court, and made a mockery of our cherished democracy.

This Moment: A Time for Action

Many things are changing in our society this year:

  • The pandemic has changed the way we interact–and created a ridiculous ideologically based divide between those who take precautions and those who don’t
  • Anger around police mistreatment has created a mass movement
  • COVID has shown that our entire society can pivot, that all those “impossible”changes around issues from climate change to racism are actually less drastic than what we’ve already changed

In short, the cauldron is bubbling. What emerges depends on what we put in–but this could be a time to Make America Great, finally.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Diversity, Eco-friendly, Environment, General Commentary, Innovation, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

An article called “Build Back Better,” offered eight ways we can mitigate the climate crisis as we reopen. It’s on the Singapore-based Eco-Business site (often a wealth of fresh thinking to my American eyes)

I’d only read a couple of paragraphs when I got the idea to start a community on the theme of building back better—but not just for climate change. I envision a portal with resources and ideas to create better futures in criminal justice/policing, nonviolent defense, immigration, equitable housing, transportation, community food self-sufficiency, education, the work world, democracy… There’s a ton of great stuff out there, but I’m not aware of a one-stop resource that crosses silos, and disciplines, reaches people with a wide range of passions, interests, skills, and demographics, and has the power to create change.

While it certainly builds on the work I’ve been doing for several years at Going Beyond Sustainability, I see it as a community project that would seek ideas both from thought leaders/subject experts and from “ordinary” people (none of us is actually ordinary; all of us are unique).

And use social media, press outreach, and other tools to get it in front of leaders in government, business, academia, nonprofit, etc. After all, every major site started small, even Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. Using the power of the Internet, this could evolve rapidly to a place that journalists and politicians turn to for sources and advice.

I got so juiced that I stopped reading, ran off to GoDaddy, and scooped up build-back-better dot net (not using the domain syntax because there’s no site up yet so I don’t want it clickable). Most of the more obvious variations were already taken, which tells me there could be some traction in the concept. Only after I secured the domain did I go back and finish reading the article. UPDATE, JULY 9: I’m now thinking it might be better to come up with a cool, brandable single-word name (and I have a few possibilities in mind)–rather than a three-word name whose meaning isn’t all that obvious.

So…who wants to play? If it’s going to fly, it’s going to need volunteers:

  • Thinkers and doers: researchers, authors, activists, business and community leaders, students, etc., who could post ideas-in-progress and let the community help those ideas evolve into workable solutions
  • Web designers who can handle complex threading and submission forms that allow people to submit and subscribe by specific idea, by topic heading, and overall—and who have a deep understanding of Internet security and SEO
  • Topic leaders who are experts in their subject and can moderate submissions so the spammers, trolls, and nut-jobs have to play someplace else—but who will put up actual ideas that are submitted in their area, even if they personally don’t see them as workable. (That would be an ideal opportunity to help them think their idea through. Post the submission and immediately post a comment that doesn’t put down the idea but grounds them in reality, with questions like “have you thought about what could happen if…?” “Do you think this could also be useful in (a different discipline)?” “What resources would this
    Residents of Wadajir, Somalia attend a meeting on community policing. Photo by David Mutui, courtesy Wikipedia Commons

    require and how would you go after them?”

  • Influencers (including journalists, bloggers, marketers, people operating successful online communities, people with a big fan base or lots of social media connections) who can bring the site to the attention of their networks
  • Revenue generators who would work on commission to raise money for hack-proof site operation, and eventually raise enough to start paying volunteers

Obviously, this is only a preliminary sketch. If you’d like to be part of this, use my contact form (on my sister site, Going Beyond Sustainability) to get in touch.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Green Marketing, Innovation, People Helping People, Socially Responsible Investing Tagged with , , , , ,
Singapore's Marina Bay. Photo courtesy Wikipedia Commons.
This challenge is based in Singapore. Photo courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

Just found this announcement as an ad on a story I clicked on in Eco-Business, an Asian environmental newsletter that often has cool and unusual stories. If you have a project needing funding in urban food production, circular packaging, or decarbonization that could work in an urban tropical area like Singapore, get thee over to The Livability Challenge page. RIGHT NOW.

Finalists in The Liveability Challenge 2020 could secure the following:

• Up to S$1 million in funding by Temasek Foundation•
• 1-year venture building package at The Circularity Studio •
• A mentorship with Closed Loop Partners •
• A spot in TXG Sustainability Business Accelerator Program •
• and more to be unveiled •

I have not vetted and have no more information other than what’s on that page. But if you enter and get selected, I’d love to know that you heard about it from me. In fact, if you have a cool idea like that and have no interest in the contest or aren’t chosen, please share it. If I like your idea, I’ll give you a brief marketing consultation, no charge. And I might ask if I can feature you in an article or blog post. Of course, I won’t disclose your idea to anyone without your written permission.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, General Commentary, Gratitude, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , ,

Healing

Sand Mandala by Anandajoti Bhikkhu from Sadao, ThailandThis year, healing will have both a personal and a global component, starting with a deeply moving experience in mid-December. In August, 2018, my stepfather was in the crosswalk in front of his apartment, on his way to his daily 3-mile jog. He had activated the flashing light and was making his way across when a driver, looking at the GPS on the phone in her lap instead of the road, struck and killed him.

On December 16, 2019, we finally got our day in court. In collaboration with my sister and my wife, we had submitted a statement more than a year earlier saying we didn’t feel incarceration would serve any purpose, and we proposed instead that the driver perform community service by speaking about distracted driving to audiences that would include high school students. This came out of our belief in restorative justice, and not out of any human connection with the defendant.

But that connection came when we went to court. I read my statement and added some unscripted thoughts based on information that had come to light since I’d submitted it. She read a deep and sincere apology. We both cried during our statements.

After she was sentenced to three years of probation with 200 hours per year of community service, half of it speaking, I went up and hugged her, and then we all (the defendant, my wife and I, and our respective lawyers) found a meeting room and spent about 40 minutes together, forging a connection that I think will be lasting. Before the hearing, I never in my wildest dreams thought we might become friends. Now I think that’s quite possible.

I wrote up that day in some detail in the Gratitude Journal I’ve posted daily on Facebook since March, 2018. And I heard from several people that my account was one of the most moving things they’d read in a long time. The Gratitude Journal, by the way, has deepened my life in many ways, but that’s for another time.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this hearing was a day after Shonali Burke sent out her newsletter with her three Brogan words, and that she and I have been emailing about her newsletter, and my promise to her that if I came up with the words, I’d share them with her.

So that’s on the personal side. Let’s touch on the global side of healing.

For me, healing is bound up with justice. All of the work I do to make the world better has both a healing component and a focus on justice. Whether I’m attempting to help heal an ill individual (I do send prayers when asked), a threatened ecosystem, or a rift between very different communities with different culture and values, these two parts will be there.

And especially when there’s so much division and even hatred in our society today, it’s very challenging to find the positive, find the places of agreement, and work outward from there to mutual respect even though our conclusions–coming out of those widely divergent values and cultures–may be so different.

This has been a challenge my entire adult life, starting when I was 17 or 18 and at a demonstration at a military base near my college in Ohio. I found myself drawn to the fences, where a few of us were starting to talk with the soldiers on the other side of those chain-links. And I found that this felt really powerful.

I’m far from an expert in cross-barrier dialogue, but I find that the more I do it, the easier it gets. Even with my limited skills, I work really hard to find ways for people who disagree to talk and listen with each other. And the opportunities are all around us. Over these fifty years, I’ve had conversations not just as a progressive talking with conservatives but also as a Jew talking with Arabs and Muslims, a bisexual interacting with and educating both straights and gays (separately), a believer in conscious capitalism working with socialists who have absolutely no use for the business world, a believer in minimum standards of living for poor people who gets into ardent discussions with uber-capitalists who think anyone can claw their way out of poverty, a techno-klutz among geeks and a whiz kid among Luddites. Some of these have been highly structured, others are casual conversations.

As I said, opportunities for dialogue are all around us.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my three words and the rationale and goals underpinning them. You’re welcome to share this with friends and colleagues–and to post your own three words in the comments.

If you missed the earlier posts, please click to read Part 1, Clarity, and Part 2, Justice,

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Branding, Business Ethics, Business-general, Copywriting, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Innovation, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Other, People Helping People, poverty, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Every year, bestselling author and social media visionary Chris Brogan challenges his huge reader base to come up with three words to provide focus for the coming year. This year, I decided to take the challenge for the first time since 2016. And this time, I’m going to emblazon them on a printout in huge type, and post it where I can see my words every day.  My three words are:

  1. Clarity
  2. Justice
  3. Healing

Clarity

The first three lines of an eye chart
I’ll discuss Justice in Part 2 (with lots of links(), and Healing–including  a deeply personal experience that happened to me this month–in Part 3.eye chart reminds me of having clarity in this year of 20//20 Clarity, 2020 AD

The year 2020 reminds me of 20/20 vision: seeing with perfect clarity. While I don’t expect to achieve perfect clarity, even with the new glasses I’ve just been prescribed ;-), I do want to focus on seeing and acting as clearly as possible.

It’s been several years since I changed the focus of my business toward helping other businesses (and other types of organizations such as nonprofits) find the sweet spot where profitability intersects with environmental and social good.

I now market myself as the person who can help any organization discover opportunities to do go in the world by creating, identifying and re-purposing, and/or marketing profitable products and services that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.

I’ve gotten a lot clearer in my messaging since starting this quest in the summer of 2013, since giving my TEDx talk in 2014, and even since publishing my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, in 2016 (which Chris Brogan endorsed, along with Seth Godin, Jack Canfield, and many others).

But I’m still nowhere near as clear as I need to be about:

  • Who wants to pay me to do this work?
  • Which services they most want, and to achieve what goals?
  • How to set a price structure that’s fair both to solopreneurs and large corporations? 
  • Who do I most want to serve?

I’m beginning to figure out the answers. I’ve settled on pricing based on the size of the organization, which seems reasonably fair because larger organizations are more complex and therefore a task such as a marketing plan our outlining a product development campaign will take a lot more of my time–but I’m not sure I’ve got all the bugs worked out yet. I’ve realized that I’d rather work with small entities than large ones, but I am very open to being farmed out by a larger entity to their smaller customers, suppliers, or business units–and to the larger entities sponsoring me in other ways, such as funding my speaking to organizations that can’t otherwise afford me.

Hopefully, seeing that message of clarity on the wall of my workspace every day will inspire me to figure all this out, and to make my message so clear that everyone understands exactly how I can help and why it’s important.

 

I’ll discuss Justice in Part 2 (with lots of links), and Healing–including  a deeply personal experience that happened to me this month–in Part 3.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Democracy, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Frugality/Frugal Fun, General Commentary, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,
Child brushing teeth (FreeImages.com)
Child brushing teeth (FreeImages.com)

We always hear from conservatives that they don’t see how we can possibly afford universal health care, let alone the Green New Deal. Thus, as a public service, I’m listing five ways (among dozens if not hundreds) we can locate the funds. This is not even pretending to be comprehensive (or in any sort of order), and I’d love you to add your favorite in the comments.

  1. Eliminate the private for-profit insurance system, which jacks up the price. According to The New Republic (2015), this is costing us between $375 billion and $471 billion per year. The savings in getting rid of the middlemen would more than cover the increase in taxes.
  2. Cap doctors’ salaries at something reasonable and generous. I’ll pull a figure out of the air: 200K per year for generalists, 300K for specialists—but it could be higher or lower.
  3. Eliminate the crazy subsidies and price protections in so many industries, and particularly fossil and nuclear fuel, Big Pharma, highways and bridges to nowhere, and chemiculture-based Big Ag. We are subsidizing all sorts of things that should not be subsidized! Our policies should support the changes we want society to make (but right now, our policies interfere with those changes.
  4. Cut the military budget down to the expenditure of China (the country second on the list). Right now, the US is spending an obscene $649 billion per year (2016) to “defend” 329,345,285 people (more than the next seven countries combined). Yet China manages to protect 1,420,615,635 people, more than 4.3 times the US figure,  with military spending of just $146 billion (2016), or less than a quarter overall, less than a sixteenth per capita. So if the US slashed military spending by 75 percent to match China’s, it would still be spending more than four times per person than China does. Surely that would be enough to protect ourselves!
  5. Increase the tax rates for multimillionaires and for multinational megacorporations. Under Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent; now it’s less than half, just 37 percent. Meanwhile some of the most successful corporations pay zero income tax even while decimating local economies built on mom-and-pop retailers; In 2018, Amazon managed to double its profits from $5.6 billion in 2017 to $11.2 billion, and paid zero income tax both years. Lets end socialism for the rich.
  6. Do a Marshall Plan-style investment program to convert the entire nation to safe, clean, renewable energy; the upfront cost will be quickly amortized by energy savings AND healthcare savings, since we’ll be eliminating major causes of asthma, emphysema, etc. Plus, the cost of converting to solar, wind, etc. will drop way down, as economies of scale kick in. Even without a big government investment in converting the whole economy, solar and wind prices are now often compatible with or even better than fossil or nuclear power sources.

So next time you meet someone who wonders how to pay for the world we want, this article gives part of the recipe. Readers, please add your own favorite ways to find the money for these improvements, and please include a source for your data.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Gratitude, Innovation, People Helping People, poverty, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

One of Seth Godin’s recent posts was a fascinating look at framing problems. He cited nine factors that make it easier to address them.

Seth Godin. Photo by Jill Greenberg. Courtesy of Seth Godin.
Seth Godin. Photo by Jill Greenberg. Courtesy of Seth Godin.

Riffing on two of the nine, I wrote him this letter (I’ve done some minor editing for clarification since sending it to him):

Non-chronic–rationalization is our specialty, and the reason we learn to rationalize is so that we don’t go insane when faced with long-term, persistent issues. We bargain them down the priority list.  

Solvable–see that earlier riff about rationalization and chronic problems. If a problem doesn’t seem solvable, we’re a lot less likely to stake our attention on it.

Maybe this is one key to why I haven’t yet really made a full transition to marketing myself as a consultant at the intersection of profitability and solving *chronic* problems such as hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. I have done some messaging on these problems being solvable even though they are millennia-chronic, other than climate change, which is only 200 years old as a major problem. But maybe they still feel too big and scary for most people to see themselves as part of the solution. 
And yet, in our brief lifetimes…

A lot of the progress is very recent, and I think much of the credit goes to the eight UN Millennium Development Goals (adopted in 2000) and their successors, the  17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (adopted in 2015),

So here’s the question: What advice would you give me in marketing my consulting, speaking, and writing to a population that is so shut down about solving these massive problems that they don’t see the progress we’re actually making? (And may I quote your answer in the blog?)

Shel Horowitz – “The Transformpreneur”(sm)

<End of my letter to Seth>

I got back a one-sentence reply agreeing that we’re making progress and noting that the progress happens more easily when we tell those stories.

So, here’s your opportunity to go where Seth doesn’t go. Let’s get a nice discussion going on how we can convince people that we can–and should–solve long-term, systemic, chronic problems. Please leave your comments.

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