September 28th, 2008
it’s my pleasure to review Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth because it’s so relevant to the work we’ve been doing on our back-to-school personal marketing campaign. Steve’s first published book reads like a volume of personal development’s greatest hits, but not in the tawdry, exploitative way that you might see on a late night info-mercial. Instead, you realize immediately that this is a guy who has read widely, thought deeply, applied fearlessly, synthesized intelligently, and then done us the enormous favor of writing down his observations. The result is a comprehensive yet simple framework for personal growth that helps you make sense of everything from diet to career choices to religion.
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September 21st, 2008
If I’ve learned anything at all from studying marketing it’s that the process is not random. The thousands of ads we’re exposed to every day are specifically designed to push the buttons of the demographic those marketers have decided to target — you.
The problem with many of our attempts to influence ourselves is that they’re much more generic than that. We exhort ourselves to eat less, exercise more, or save money without putting nearly as much thought into who we are and why we would do that as the people who sell us bathroom tissue. We try to change ourselves instead of understanding ourselves.
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September 14th, 2008
This week we’re going to look at your goals and choose one that you’d like to make real progress on between now and the end of the year. Since personal marketing can help with almost any goal, I encourage you to choose based not so much on what you think will “work”, but on how much it’s something you want to succeed at.
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September 7th, 2008
Regular readers will recognize that I’m just returning to TBYB! from a couple of months off. It’s been a great summer break for me, and I hope for you as well. The first article in the new series is called How to choose a goal for your back-to-school marketing campaign. In it, we take a look at your goals for 2008 and pick one that you’d really like to kick some butt on before the end of the year. Look for it in your favorite feed reader next week.
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