November 9th, 2008
TBYB! believes the most valuable thing we can do with our technological gadgets is to use the things they know about us to support our own growth. The Nintendo Wii, especially with Wii Fit, is one of the most elegant applications of computing power applied to human development I have ever seen. If your goal is to be more of an athlete (or just play one on TV), the Nintendo Wii is about as good as it gets.
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June 6th, 2008
I watched lot of softball this week on the NCAA Women’s College World Series. It turns out that Katie Burkhart, the pitcher of the winning Arizona Sun Devils - is a very successful personal marketing practitioner. According to the announcers, she’s spent a lot of time working on her mental game in the past year, and one of the tactics she now uses is to write messages to herself on the back of her glove, to remind her of thoughts that help her focus out on the pitching mound during the game. How cool is that?
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May 26th, 2008
Personal marketing uses commercial and social marketing principles to help us succeed at goals we have chosen for ourselves. It’s powerful stuff that can really help your life. But the following feedback from a reader made me realize that some of you may be feeling overwhelmed about how and where to begin. This article shows you how to find that starting point, and then how to continue step-by-step to develop a great ad to influence yourself.
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May 18th, 2008
You can’t advertise to yourself all the time. I guess you could, but it would be time-consuming and exhausting, sometimes you don’t really know what you want to work on, and other times you’re just busy with other stuff. Besides, if you do it too much you risk having your own ads become part of the mental “clutter”.
What you can do during the fallow or busy times is take advantage of the delivery channels you’ve already established to throw up very easy, low-maintenance messages that inspire or nourish you until you’re ready for the next round of progress.
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May 11th, 2008
Wakerupper is a free online service that delivers reminders to your phone. It’s always good to remind yourself about the benefits of a behavior you want to adopt. The scheduling feature of Wakerupper gives you the power to remind yourself right at the time you might need that support the most.
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April 6th, 2008
Thanks to “Bathroom Reader” for suggesting my new favorite location to place ads. Early testing indicates that this location is a winner, folks!
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March 24th, 2008
If there were truly ads on the moon it would mean there is no place on earth - not a single one - that is free of marketing messages. But consider how close that is to being true already. From the time we wake up in the morning until we fall asleep again at night most of us are almost constantly exposed to marketing messages of one kind or another.
Because ads are almost anywhere, each vendor must try to find a way to stand out and get your attention. They call it breaking through the clutter. One way to do that is to put their messages in unexpected places. Like the moon.
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March 3rd, 2008
Here’s a quick and easy ad hack for Windows Mobile users: write a text message on your Owner Information screen, and set it to display every time you turn the device on. It’s a great place to display a goal or affirmation that you really want to keep in your awareness for a couple of days.
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January 27th, 2008
In part one of this series, I showed you how to manipulate Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to decide how to best frame a message to motivate yourself. In part two we selected a slogan, took photos, and developed a creative concept. This week we’ll create the ads for your campaign and set up an automatic system for delivering them to yourself.
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January 2nd, 2008
Using some kind of “widget” to run a little slideshow in the corner of my computer’s desktop is my very favorite way to deliver advertising images to myself. It works well because the set-up is easy, delivery is automatic, and I see the ads frequently because I spend a lot of time at my computer every day. All I have to do is throw pictures of stuff I want to do in a folder to make them into instant ads; the slide show software takes care of the rest.
Starting with Vista, Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows PCs have gadget functionality built in. One of Vista’s new features is an area of the screen - called the Sidebar - that is reserved for installing these little software applications.
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December 21st, 2007
Alerting the people around you to your goals has many positive benefits:
* Someone else now holds the idea of you doing this thing in their mind, in addition to you.
* They are likely to ask you about it, which gives you an opportunity to talk about your goal.
* It creates the opportunity for them to inform you about resources they know about and offer other forms of support.
* It activates the psychological principle of consistency.
Postage stamps with a custom picture on them are a great way to activate all of these benefits, especially at a time of year when many of us correspond with people we care about, and who care about us.
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November 28th, 2007
TBYB! is always looking for methods to deliver our messages that will be automatic; that is, they occur frequently in the normal course of doing things you would do anyway without requiring any additional action or thought on your part. Dressing up your avatar can be a great way to accomplish that automation. Now that I have all mine all suited up and at the gym I see “myself” working out every time I check my email!
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October 22nd, 2007
Sometimes I wonder if messages from the past are so different from this one. As citizens of the future, we usually ascribe deep spiritual significance to ancient petroglyphs, but what if it was just some kid defacing a rock?
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October 20th, 2007
These petroglyphs are on a sandstone wall about 100 feet off the ground in a stunningly beautiful area near Lake Mead. The interpretive signage suggests they may have had religious or ceremonial significance. Although their exact meaning has been lost, the images are still reaching audiences 1000 years later.
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October 17th, 2007
Just north of Portland, Oregon on Interstate 5, I passed a huge sign for Rosa Parks Way. It occurred to me that naming streets is one way a community advertises to itself what its collective values are. For example, this sign may be reminding the citizens of Portland that there is no longer room in the world for racial intolerance; and that it’s important to stand up (or sit down) for what is right.
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October 10th, 2007
My early ads in the RV ad campaign were mostly just pictures that I downloaded from manufacturer’s websites. They worked well to keep the idea in my consciousness, and prompted me to take many actions that I’m sure I would not have otherwise. However, as the campaign went on I discovered a few other techniques that were so effective they produced huge shifts in my mental journey from impossible to inevitable.
Three of the four methods below use a variant on visualizing your desired future reality with you (or your home) already in it. I’ve written about that pretty extensively in the Put yourself in the picture series. Basically you use technology like your digital camera and/or Photoshop to help you make a picture of that future.
The fourth method uses large high-resolution color images that change very frequently. Think TV. Although this method was not at all technically sophisticated, I was surprised by how much it engaged my attention and emotions.
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October 4th, 2007
I just met a HUGE goal, largely due to a relentless advertising campaign I’ve been waging on myself for the last couple of years. Two years ago purchasing a motorhome seemed impossible. By last month it felt inevitable. Today I have a new RV sitting in my driveway. I’m completely convinced advertising is what made the difference.
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September 25th, 2007
Normally we buy souvenirs after we do something we’ve been dreaming about: t-shirts, mugs, postcards, whatever. TBYB suggests front-loading your souvenir shopping instead. That is, buy the t-shirt first to jump-start the process.
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September 10th, 2007
Look around you. Most of the ads you see contain both text and images. With all of the zillions of dollars at the industry’s disposal to test the effectiveness of different advertising methods, one has to assume that we see the image/text combination so frequently because it works. With the addition of one word to my cell phone ad I’m now using that same method to reinforce my own dream of one day hiking the Wonderland Trail many times every day.
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September 4th, 2007
How many of you have a photo of your pet as the background image on your cell phone screen? I must admit that I still do, even though I’ve been writing about personal persuasion for almost a year. Loyal readers know that I adore my dog. It makes me happy to see his picture and of course there’s nothing at all wrong with that. But I consult my cell phone many times every day because I use it for both a clock and a telephone, and I’m starting to wonder if I might be seriously underutilizing some really prime advertising space. In fact, I’m thinking that a picture in a display location I’m exposed to that frequently should probably be chosen very consciously; possibly to support very high-priority goals.
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August 13th, 2007
I think of a campaign as several ads that work together to deliver persuasive messages about the same objective. I’ve found that making a group of ads around the same theme has the potential to create a very powerful synergy. Each of the ads can illustrate a different facet of your theme, and thus reinforce the larger message.
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August 5th, 2007
Motivator is a free online tool that lets you upload a photo, add some text, and choose a border. It then spits out a really professional-looking poster that you can either order as a large print or save to your computer to use in ad delivery systems you may already have in place. You do have to pay if you decide to order printed posters ($15-$40), but saving the finished image to your computer is completely free.
I made several posters a week ago for my Google Sidebar slideshow and just love them. Something about the slickness seems to be very effective. Let me stress how easy it was, too.
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June 25th, 2007
A few months ago I met a woman named Fran at a party. When the inevitable “What do you do?’s” were exchanged, her answer boiled down to: “I’m looking for a job and worrying about it.” I told Fran about personal advertising, and suggested that the primary thing I it could do to help her was move her from a place where she primarily identified as someone who was unsuccessfully looking for work to thinking of herself as someone who has a job. We designed an ad campaign for Fran that yielded several requests from high-level executives at the organization she wanted to work for, asking her to help with projects requiring advanced skills and a lot of responsibility.
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June 10th, 2007
Soon after I started making ads that put myself in the picture I discovered what the challenge was going to be: who would hold the camera and take the picture? About the time I was getting really frustrated, Cool Tools came to the rescue with a review of the Joby Gorillapod tripod. I love my Gorilla tripod. It’s light, portable, inexpensive, and functions exactly like the all the glowing reviews say it does. The Gorillapod has freed me up to take timed photos of myself - both alone and with friends - just about anywhere I want to. It’s a great tool!
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June 3rd, 2007
Visualizing yourself achieving a goal has traditionally meant seeing it in your mind. But technology like digital cameras and photo editing software gives us the ability to actually SEE a picture of ourselves doing something that we have not done yet in real life. With a little imaginative costuming, props and scenery you can take a photo that looks like the reality you want to create already exists.
This is an astonishingly powerful technique. If you can visualize yourself doing something, you are more likely to accomplish it. One of the most effective things you can do to create the future you want is to literally put yourself in the picture!
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March 11th, 2007
The Hipster PDA is an ideal environment for personal ads. You proably already have cards in your stack for a calendar, to-do lists, and notes. To start advertising just include a couple more cards with personal messages or pictures on them. Once you have “installed” an ad, you will likely encounter it several times a day as you flip through your cards. Of course it’s ridiculously easy to move ads cards in and out of the stack, and I change them frequently to keep it fresh.
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February 28th, 2007
This technique uses a gadget called The Quote to display one- or two-sentence ads to yourself throughout the day. The Quote is a great tool for displaying advertising concepts that are more verbal than visual. Like the Photos gadget, it lets us use the power of repetition - one of the tools advertisers use on us all the time - to magnify the effect of our messages.
The content for the gadget is contained in a text file that contains a list of statements, separated by blank lines. The Quote gadget randomly selects one of them at a time and displays it in a box on your Google Sidebar.
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February 22nd, 2007
This is the article the whole gadget series has been building up to. As I said before, The Google Photos gadget is my favorite method for delivering ads to myself. It’s designed to display a slide show of images on your desktop, from whatever source you choose, and rotate them as frequently as you want.
Whatever else you’re working on, those pictures are rotating on the edge of your screen - and your awareness - all day. I think this is analagous to a lot of the advertising we receive in our environment. We’re not directly watching many of the ads, but some part of our consciousness takes them in. The slideshow method also takes advantage of another strategy advertisers use on us: repetition.
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February 19th, 2007
In the last article in this series I showed you how to install Google Desktop so we could get the very cool Google Sidebar, which is the container for the even cooler Google Gadgets. This article describes how to configure the Sidebar, how to use Gadgets, and how to customize your Sidebar by getting more Gadgets.
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February 16th, 2007
Collages are a very low-tech/high return method of advertising to ourselves. I think one reason they are so effective is that the time you devote to cutting and pasting your collage is a moving meditation on your goal. Collages also employ the basic principles that many of our methods are based on:
* Find images of what your life will look like when the goal you want has been achieved.
* Place those images in a place where you will see them a lot - like on your computer or refrigerator.
We can display pictures collections to ourselves in many other ways - for example a screensaver or widget slideshow. However we choose to display them, innowen’s article reminds us that it’s very powerful to create a collection of images around a specific theme - especially when they show us concrete details about the future we want to achieve. As she says, showing ourselves these pictures can make the difference between staying on the sofa or getting up to achieve our dreams.
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February 12th, 2007
Google’s widget engine is buried inside a larger application called Google Desktop. Google Desktop is an application whose primary purpose is to index every document, photo and email message on your computer, and make that material searchable for you. Regardless of whether you think making all of your documents searchable is a good idea, I recommend that you consider installing Google Desktop just to get the Google widget engine. It’s that good.
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February 5th, 2007
Desktop widgets and gadgets are really useful for personal advertising because they can display your ads in your peripheral vision while you are working. One of best methods I’ve discovered for advertising to myself is to set up a widget with a little slideshow of rotating pictures and position it in the corner of my screen. I also have another one with rotating bits of text.
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January 29th, 2007
We are wired to notice when the visual landscape changes, since that shift may be providing information about something that is coming to eat us. In the natural world, change often equals danger. Once we have determined that everything is OK, we no longer need to pay as much attention to our surroundings until something changes again.
Displaying a rotating slideshow on my computers is one of my favorite methods for advertising to myself, because it is both easy and effective. I put digital pictures in a folder on my computer (or a remote location), and then use a variety of different methods to show them to myself for a few minutes one at a time. Each time the picture changes, it captures my attention for a moment until my brain registers what it is.
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January 7th, 2007
Computers can dramatically increase our ability to imagine a desired outcome. That computer background is not just a digital picture on a screen. It’s a frequent reminder of pleasant time I have spent hanging out in a convincing visualization of my desired future. The changes I want to implement in my yard have already occurred in my imagination – and those changes are being massively reinforced by the imagery I have created for myself. Apparently that’s a really powerful combination.
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January 1st, 2007
Wow. I recently finished making my New Year collage. What an amazing project. I had not done one for a few years, and had forgotten just how powerful the process can be. Overall, I can say I do not recall ever feeling so clearly focused on my goals. Each day I feel motivated to do something about at least one of them.
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December 18th, 2006
Because the sense of starting a new cycle is so strong for me at this time, I often think about what I would like to accomplish in the next year. I have made a collage several times to remind me of those goals. It’s a lot of fun and an extremely effective way to key in on what you want to manifest in your life.
The process of building a tangible representation will cause you to define and focus on your goals in a very concentrated way. Your collage then helps both your conscious and unconscious mind remain aware of the things you said you want to do for the rest of the year. It is a remarkably powerful technique.
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December 14th, 2006
Some of the ideas we want to remind ourselves about lend themselves better to text than images. For example, maybe you want to get in the habit of giving yourself positive messages. In the last article I discussed how to compose an effective text ad for yourself. Now let’s combine that technique with a little technology.
Backpack is an online service with several nice features, including the ability to send text messages to your email or cell phone. The free version of Backpack will let you schedule up to 10 messages at a time.
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December 10th, 2006
The beauty of the Post-It note is the stark simplicity of the medium. Because producing and deploying your ads is so simple with this method, it offers the opportunity to focus solely on your marketing message. The centrality of message can be eclipsed in other, sexier, delivery systems, but not here. The zen of the Post-It forces us to look square in the face the question: What is my message? And that’s what makes this technique so valuable. Because even when we are enthralled by the delicious glitter of technology, message is all there ever is, really.
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November 30th, 2006
It turned out that for Jenny, the most important part of the whole scenario was taking the pictures. She wanted to take them with a very particular high-end camera, and did not have the money to buy it. The more we talked about it, it sounded like buying that camera felt like the obstacle between where she is now and where she’d like to be.
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November 26th, 2006
For many knowledge workers the background image on our computer desktop is something we return to many times each day. The stock patterns and nature photos that come with your computer are nice, but one of the easiest ways to advertise to yourself is to take control of that image.
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November 20th, 2006
Our refrigerator is in a very central location. I pass by it to go anywhere else in the house. In fact, you can see it from the room where my partner and I spend our evenings. And of course I visit it many times a day to get food. So this location has a lot going for it in terms of message placement. Consciously or unconsciously, whatever is up there is going to get a lot of play in our attention.
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November 18th, 2006
One of the easiest methods I use to advertise to myself is to simply print a picture of what I want. The internet is a rich source of images for our personal ad campaigns. Do you want to work somewhere? Download their logo. Go somewhere? Find some great photos of that place. Own something? It’s easy to get a picture of it off of a website. Read something? Grab a copy of the book cover from Amazon.com.
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November 16th, 2006
It seems that people choose to remind themselves of connections to others and fun times they have had in the past. And of course there is nothing wrong with that. But let me propose a slight tweak: in addition to reminding yourself of fun times from the past, what would happen if you showed yourself a picture of something fun you’d like to do in the future?
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November 14th, 2006
Over the course of the last 6 months I have deployed about two dozen ad campaigns, ranging from reminding myself about things I want, to behavior changes, to really large long-term goals. Nine of them have definitely worked. A few were duds and others are still in process, but there have been some really impressive successes. Let me give you an example of a success.
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