Secu­rity is mostly a super­sti­tion. It does not exist in nature, nor do the chil­dren of men as a whole expe­ri­ence it. Avoid­ing dan­ger is no safer in the long run than out­right expo­sure. Life is either a dar­ing adven­ture, or noth­ing.
— Helen Keller

The con­cept of “secu­rity” in busi­ness — and in life, as Helen Keller observes — is a Chimera.

You can start with the fact that we are mor­tal, and that our exis­tence is both ten­u­ous and brief. As a great philoso­pher once said, “ain’t none of us get­ting out of here alive.”

So the very idea of try­ing to cre­ate a safe haven is absurd on the face of it.

“The things of this world go where they were always going, so that they shall not be. And in their pass­ing they shred the soul with sick desires because the soul longs to rest secure among the things it loves. But in these things there is no rest­ing place. They do not stay, they go.” — St. Augus­tine, Confessions.

If you’re an entre­pre­neur, a busi­ness owner, the con­cept of secu­rity is both use­ful and use­less. Twenty years ago when I left a very good job at a very good salary to start my own busi­ness, I some­times was asked the rea­son. “Secu­rity,” I would reply. Since most peo­ple asso­ciate “secu­rity” with a “job” a lot of peo­ple found this answer con­fus­ing. But I knew that if I had a “job” I could be fired at any time for any rea­son. If I built a busi­ness with lots of clients/customers, they could fire me, too, but it was very unlikely that they would all fire me, at once. Thus, own­ing my own busi­ness was more “secure” to me than work­ing for some­one else, no mat­ter how great the job.

Now, I am asked by new clients “How long ‘til I feel secure? When will I be able to relax and know I have it made?” And I usu­ally answer, “Never.”

Suc­cess is never per­ma­nent. You have to get up the next morn­ing and do it again. And really, you should relax. The uni­verse is expand­ing and every­thing is going to explode anyway.

Vic­tor Med­ina from Smart Mar­ket­ing on Vimeo.

Kim­berly Lee from Smart Mar­ket­ing on Vimeo.

From Print magazine:

Brands That Will Make You Popular

For the most part, peo­ple like to asso­ciate with win­ners, con­sciously and uncon­sciously. When Doc­tors Neilis­sen and Mei­jers in the Depart­ment of Social Psy­chol­ogy at Tilburg Uni­ver­sity for­mu­lated research on brands and social struc­tures they found,“Contemporary con­sumer cul­ture can be char­ac­ter­ized by its pri­macy on mate­r­ial expen­di­ture as a means of estab­lish­ing and defin­ing social rela­tion­ships.” In other words, the brands you wear influ­ence the way peo­ple treat you.

In the Tilburg study, stu­dents were placed in sev­eral areas of a large mall and told to approach shop­pers and ask if they would take a brief sur­vey. Some sur­vey­ors wore shirts with­out insignia, oth­ers wore polos with a high-end brand logo. Care to guess who was afforded more time by shoppers?

Yes, those who wore high-end logos were obliged 52.2 per­cent of the time, while unla­beled sur­vey­ors got affir­ma­tives just 13.6 per­cent of the time, prompt­ing the researchers to note, “This sup­ports the pre­dic­tion that lux­ury dis­plays yield ben­e­fits in social interactions.”

The same researchers also stud­ied how a job appli­cant would be viewed based on clothes label brand­ing. The results skewed toward the appli­cant with the lux­ury label who inter­view­ers found more suit­able for the job.

I make no pre­tense of pass­ing judg­ment on the pon­tif­i­cate of Bene­dict XVI. Although a bap­tized Catholic (by Car­di­nal Cush­ing of Boston, no less), I have acci­dently missed Mass for the last, oh, 55 years or so. If I ever went back and went to con­fes­sion, the next in line would have to wait for a year.

I also make no pre­tense of judg­ing Benedict’s poli­cies on, or respon­si­bil­ity for, the sex­ual abuse by priests, oppo­si­tion to birth con­trol, con­dem­na­tion of gays, or refusal to admit women to the priest­hood. We can have all those fights another day, and I dare­say that Bene­dict may even­tu­ally be judged as wrong on all of them.

Nonethe­less, I admire what the Pope has done in resign­ing his office, sched­uled to take place later this week.

I have a pal whose mother is 91. His father died six years ago, so his mother lives alone. Last year, while dri­ving, she side­swiped three parked cars. The police came to the house and took her license away. The fam­ily has var­i­ous finan­cial inter­ests (they own a shop­ping cen­ter) and his mother con­tin­ues to run these, send­ing out rental invoices on an old type­writer and pay­ing the bills. But of course, she has become increas­ingly for­get­ful, can’t recall what bills she paid and when, and so on. It is the same sit­u­a­tion with her invest­ment port­fo­lio, sav­ings and other finan­cial affairs, right down to the elec­tric bill at her home.

On top of that, she is can­tan­ker­ous and views with sus­pi­cion any attempts to help her.

What is my friend to do? He could go to court and attempt to be named guardian, but the fact is, he loves her. He doesn’t want to be in an adver­sar­ial posi­tion with her. All options have been explored, includ­ing in-home help. She is adamantly opposed.

For obvi­ous rea­sons, most of us don’t like step­ping aside. Look to the world of sports for myr­iad exam­ples of great play­ers who didn’t know when it was time to go; who hung on and tar­nished their own legacies.

Many of my clients are elder law attor­neys who see (and help with) these sorts of sit­u­a­tions every day.

Pope Bene­dic­tus XVI (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Pope, at age 85, has wisely rec­og­nized that he lacks the phys­i­cal and men­tal strength to deal with one of the world’s most demand­ing jobs, and he has found a way to grace­fully step aside, despite 600 years of tra­di­tion (that’s how long it has been since another pope resigned).

The words of Bene­dict to res­i­dents of a Rome facil­ity for the elderly a cou­ple of months ago hint at his upcom­ing decision:

“I come to you as Bishop of Rome, but also as an old man vis­it­ing his peers. It would be super­flu­ous to say that I am well acquainted with the dif­fi­cul­ties, prob­lems and lim­i­ta­tions of this age … At times, at a cer­tain age, one may look back nos­tal­gi­cally at the time of our youth when we were fresh and plan­ning for the future. Thus at times our gaze is veiled by sad­ness, see­ing this phase of life as the time of sunset.”

Bravo to Pope Bene­dict for not cling­ing to power, for not stand­ing in the way of the energy and strength that younger man might bring to the job, for becom­ing again Joseph Ratzinger. And may his action be an inspi­ra­tion to other seniors, who could ben­e­fit from let­ting go of the bur­dens and respon­si­bil­i­ties they have car­ried for so many years.

Click below to lis­ten to SmartTalk, episode 23, in which Vic­tor and Mark dis­cuss their encounter with ebola woman; the beauty of Minute Suites; Victor’s new real­ity show: My Three Sons; how Mark would have run the Red Sox; the advan­tages of con­sis­tency; Mark’s burn­ing desire to do a Christo­pher Walken impres­sion; Victor’s keys to his suc­cess­ful 2012; the employee as profit cen­ter; and Woody Allen’s secret suc­cess formula.

http://www.smartmarketingnow.com/smarttalk/episode-23/

This is the fourth of ten inter­views with Smart­Mar­ket­ing clients. Videos are approx­i­mately three min­utes long, and will take approx­i­mately 30 sec­onds to load.

Dis­claimer: Attor­neys inter­viewed were not com­pen­sated and I was not present dur­ing the interviews. 

Neel Shah from Smart Mar­ket­ing on Vimeo.

Every time some­one rips off my intel­lec­tual prop­erty, I feel two con­flict­ing emo­tions. The first is a lit­tle thrill — hey, some­body out there thinks my stuff is good enough to steal! The sec­ond is a resent­ment that is ignited by sev­eral aggra­va­tion fac­tors. If you didn’t give me any money, I’m annoyed. If you didn’t ask my per­mis­sion, I’m annoyed. If you didn’t give me any credit, I am really annoyed. If you are a direct com­peti­tor of mine and you just took my work, with­out pay­ment or attri­bu­tion or a link, well…I’m mov­ing beyond annoyed to…aggravated.

So, here is an arti­cle that has been up since Octo­ber on a competitor’s web­site: attorneywebmarketing.net.

My first reac­tion on read­ing it was, “My, that’s awfully well writ­ten.” (Ha!) My sec­ond reac­tion was, “Hey, wait a sec­ond…”

Here is an arti­cle writ­ten by me a long time ago (Feb. 2005), pub­lished in a law jour­nal, and fea­tured on my company’s website.

Mind you, I’m a nice-enough fel­low. If some­one called me and said, “I’d like to reprint your arti­cle, giv­ing you full credit” I’d have said okay — even if that per­son was a com­peti­tor. I’m down with the abun­dance phi­los­o­phy: plenty of work for every­one. I’m not so down with com­pet­ing against my phan­tom self, however.

So, let’s see…possible expla­na­tions. Per­haps Brian French hired some (for­eign?) firm to cre­ate con­tent for his site, and they are the cul­prits, and if he knew about the pla­gia­rism, he’d be hor­ri­fied? Per­haps he, or some­one work­ing for him, was lazy and intended to call me and seek per­mis­sion — but just for­got? I know, god do I know, that cre­at­ing new, worth­while intel­lec­tual con­tent requires time and thought and work. It would have been easy enough (even with­out my per­mis­sion) to have writ­ten some­thing that said: “Great arti­cle on cre­at­ing elder law refer­ral sources here” with a link to my arti­cle. But instead, it seems, this was delib­er­ately pre­sented as the work of Brian and/or his company.

So, what to do, what to do? Call Brian French and ask him to take it down? Call my lawyer and send a for­mal cease-and-desist let­ter? Do noth­ing, for­get it, don’t worry about it?

Or per­haps just write this blog post and hope that embar­rass­ment accom­plishes the task?

(Dis­claimer: I know the gram­mat­i­cal dif­fer­ence between “bad” and “badly.” I’m going for a cer­tain tone here.)

There are lots of things I want, but not enough. Not enough to work and sac­ri­fice to get them. Not enough to spend hard-earned money. Not enough to spend that most pre­cious com­mod­ity — time. Not enough to ruin my self-image by suck­ing at it. Not enough to give up some other thing that I want.

I’d like to speak Chi­nese. If I could add Man­darin to the Eng­lish and French I already have, then add Span­ish, I could prob­a­bly com­mu­ni­cate with 80 per­cent of the peo­ple on earth. (No idea if that’s true. I just made it up.) But you know, I don’t want it bad enough to study lan­guages 3–4 nights a week for a cou­ple of years.

I want to read every sin­gle book on mar­ket­ing that has ever been writ­ten, but not enough to stop watch­ing the Patri­ots on Sun­days in the fall, or the Red Sox pretty much every evening in the summer.

I want ten new clients for Smart­Mar­ket­ing. My kind of clients. Do I want it bad enough to put in the time, make the phone calls, speak at the con­fer­ences, put together the emails — to devote the com­ing months to sales? It seems like a lot of work, a lot of time. There’s a risk that what­ever I try won’t work.

I’d rather not. I’d rather you would all line up in my recep­tion area, and wave your check­books at me.

Maybe I have enough clients. After all, I’m doing okay. Bills are paid on time, and I’ve got a few bucks left over for toys.

The ques­tion is: how bad do I want it?

Maybe I don’t want it bad enough if it will take a lot of time, or costs money, or involves hard work, or car­ries an ele­ment of risk.

I’m afraid that’s how most attor­neys I meet think about marketing.

They tell me that they don’t have the money. That’s okay, I say, you could write blog posts, go to net­work­ing events, write a book — all of which are free or nearly free.

I don’t have the time, they say. Plus, I don’t have any tal­ent for writ­ing. And I really don’t like those net­work­ing things.

But that’s not the real prob­lem, is it? The real prob­lem is, they don’t want it bad enough.

We all play by the same rules. Our time is lim­ited. Our dis­cre­tionary funds are lim­ited. Our atten­tion span is lim­ited. Our risk tol­er­ance is lim­ited. Our courage is lim­ited. If we want to accom­plish some­thing, we are going to have to over­come some of those lim­its, at least some of the time.

If you want to grow beyond where you are today, you’ll have to go fig­ure out which of those lim­i­ta­tions you want to over­come. As for me, I’ve decided I really want those 10 new clients, so in the new year, I am going to take some risks, spend some money and bust my ass.

It might not work. But it won’t be because I don’t want it bad enough.

This is the third of ten inter­views with Smart­Mar­ket­ing clients. Videos are approx­i­mately three min­utes long, and will take approx­i­mately 30 sec­onds to load.

Dis­claimer: Attor­neys inter­viewed were not com­pen­sated and I was not present dur­ing the interviews.