Dreaming

The great Taoist master Chuang Tzu once dreamt that he was a butterfly fluttering here and there. In the dream he had no awareness of his individuality as a person. He was only a butterfly. Suddenly, he awoke and found himself laying there, a person once again. But then he thought to himself, "Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?"

Kurt Vonnegut

I thought about this post all day. What I would say, how I would say it. What words could possibly convey the sadness I felt for the death of this great man. I thought about quoting some of his work and talking about how it applied to my life and how he had helped me. But then I realized there was only one thing I really needed to say to Kurt for everything he had given both me and the world.

Thank you.

The Art of Selling Part 1

In order to be successful, you must sell 3 things for every sale you make. First, you must sell yourself, then you must sell your business, and then you sell your product.

The Art of Selling idea

I like to study "The Art of War" by Sun-Tzu. Even though its about war, strategy, and tactics; many life lessons can be drawn from it. And while many people have read "The Art of War", few people have read it. Everyone I know who has "read" it went through it in an hour or so, reading every line, and saying they understood it. I'm not of the opinion that this is the way its intended to be read. To truly read the art of war, I recommend reading a single page, then thinking about it for the next 2 or 3 days in your free time. After you've meditated on it for a couple days, read another page. Its like condensed fruit juice, there is a whole pitcher of wisdom to be had in a small container, but you'll only get benefit from it if you take the time to prepare it.

So in that vein I'm doing a little thing on here called "The Art of Selling" The man I work for is truly a genius, and he's doing his best to teach us about being a salesperson, but he gives it to us all at once and I simply do not learn like that. So I'm going to put it in the format set down by Sun-Tzu. I'm writing down stuff he says then every few days I will add something to the blog. A single line of wisdom that he has given us so that I can think about it and think about how to apply it to my life. I realize that I doubt anyone even knows about the existence of this little blog, but you never know, maybe someday I will get a reaction to one of them and it will help move my train of thought into a direction I wouldn't have seen on my own. Yeah, I'm being optimistic again, I should really stop that shit.

An epiphany of sorts

I actually got some free time to myself today to just sit and think. Not trying to guide my thought process, but just letting my mind wander. And somewhere in that 30 minutes or so of pure bliss I realized something. I've been constantly worried lately trying to read people, and figure out what they're thinking, and to anticipate what they're feeling so that I can help them. Everybody seems to want me to do this, to know what they're thinking without telling me, but I've decided to just ignore it. If they don't have the courage to tell me what they're feeling or thinking about that subject then its not worth my time or effort deducing it so I can give them help with incomplete and/or inaccurate information. I've always been a straight shooter about telling people what's on my mind, if they can't do the same for me then apparently they don't care enough about me to keep my life as drama free as possible.

Now, by drama free I don't mean I don't want to know about my friends' problems and worries, I just don't want all that other bullshit that a few of them seem to think goes along with it. I don't want the hours of deducing the problem from reading cryptic blogs, reading body language while they're talking about other things, piecing together partial sentences, and figuring out the unspoken meanings to things. I just want to know so that we can work on a solution, fuck the rest of that noise.

I sincerely doubt that I ever achieve this with many of them though, and I can't figure out why. At first I thought it was simple fear. They're scared to talk about their problems. But they should have nothing to fear from me, I would fight to the death for them, and they should know that I always have their backs. No, I think it comes down to a much more simple explanation, pride. How do you arrive at this conclusion you ask? Well, its simple really. In each of our minds we have a certain set of "standards" that we hold ourself to, this is our public persona, the person we show the world. And if we have feelings or thoughts or actions that go against this public persona, we are simply too proud to admit it. I find that I have indeed been guilty of this myself, though I would like to think that I could rise above it in the company of my closest.

I could write more but I'm not sure I could get a lot of my other thoughts into words on the subject, maybe after I've meditated on it some I'll do another entry.