Marty's Blog

Posted on 05. Dec, 2009 by Ty Tribble 

 With great sadness we share that Jim Rohn, our mentor and friend, left us December 5, 2009 for a better place.

Over the past 18 months, in his battle with Pulmonary Fibrosis, Jim assured us with a smile that all is good, that he would fight until the last breath, yet he had no fear as to what would be next. Jim’s faith was as much a part of his life as his desire to inspire and challenge us all to be the best we could be and to live our dreams.

Jim’s courage in his final months and days were a testament to his message that we should all fight the good fight. He never gave up and never gave in.

Jim Rohn touched millions of lives over the past 46 years through his seminars, books, articles and CDs. He always stayed long after an event t o shake hands, take pictures and sign autographs. He loved making a difference in people’s lives, that was his passion and inspiration. Yet he was also a private man who kept a small, loyal and caring inner circle. He was a tremendous friend to those who knew him.

Harold Dyke, long time close friend of Jim’s for over 55 years said it best, “As Jim is ending one life he is simultaneously being birthed into a new life. One that he has talked about over the years and anticipated with great joy in his last remaining days.

”Kyle Wilson, long time colleague and friend of Jim had this to say about his mentor, “Jim Rohn was a great human being. Jim had the rare ability to take any concept or idea and then frame it in such a way that the rest of us could see it more clearly. His wisdom and insights positively affected everyone he touched on some level and to so many of us it was in an extraordinary way. But even more impressive was Jim Rohn the man. He possessed style and charisma, yet was humble, kind and understated to all who knew him. I find myself every day reflecting, benefiting and passing on the wisdom and ideas that are rooted in Jim’s message and wisdom. Jim is irreplaceable on every level. I will miss him beyond words, but am comforted as I know he was, that his message and legacy will live on and positively change millions of lives over the years to come!

”Someone once said “when you are born you enter the world crying while everyone else is rejoicing and when you die hopefully you have lived such a life that everyone will be crying while you are rejoicing”. Jim Rohn lived such a life.

There is a rumor that Einstein was this student. He was not! Whoever it was.. Nicely done!

The university professor challenged his students with this question.

“Did God create everything that exists?

Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is not like faith, or love that exist just as does light and heat. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God’s love present in his heart. It’s like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light.”

The professor sat down.

It is a rumor that Einstein was that student. HE WAS NOT!

Whoever it was…. Nicely done!

I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently about “truth” and the expression “The truth will set you free.”

Do you remember Shakespeare’s quote: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. 

Have you ever felt like you were a part in search of a play?

What I’ve realized is that along with controlling our thoughts and our response to the circumstances of our lives, the only other thing we can control is a desire for Our “truth” and the belief that our “climb” in life is ultimately about discovering Our truth.

A funny thing about life is that if we are not actively pursuing our “truth” than life will create the circumstances in which we are forced to face it.

Some people refer to this metaphorically as “facing the abyss”. 

By DOUG GLANVILLE  Dec 26, 2009  (NY Times editorial)

No one would have accused me of having multiple ladies on each arm when I was in high school or college. I was a diligent student, kind of nerdy, the son of a teacher, and as interested in baseball and computers as I was in girls. Still, I was told I had potential in the social department, if I applied myself.

But something magical happened before I had to do much work. I signed a professional baseball contract as a junior in college and went away to my first spring training as a member of the Chicago Cubs organization.

I remember returning to campus and, after appearing on a closed-circuit cable show to discuss my new career, having the attractive hostess offer to walk me home. Wow, that never happened before. Apparently, I had skipped a few of the steps to social acceptance, and before I knew it, “unapproachable” and “woman” were no longer being used in the same sentence.

So what actually did happen?

Even once you enter the professional ranks, there is plenty to worry about. A baseball player on draft day is still miles away from the big leagues.

Soon after being drafted, I realized something profound: a lot of the work required to make it takes place off the field, and involves how you manage your life. I witnessed a few of my minor league counterparts blow their opportunities in part because they were trying to live the life before they had the life, burning the candle at both ends every night. If it wasn’t for Phoenix’s early club curfew, there’s no telling when players would have come home.

Because I had a few shells to bust out of, I put my toe in that party water, too. I was just 20 when I was drafted and it didn’t take long to understand that a new kind of woman was interested in me: the sort of woman who in the past had stirred my insecurity. It was like a kid finding Batman’s belt in the lost and found. No point in giving it back until you’ve tried all your new powers. But we forget to ask, will I be able to stop once I’ve tasted these powers?

Superficially, the new bar for women was set based on the physical: some sort of exterior beauty, along with fame, sophistication, wild-child possibility, flirtation with the dark side — all qualities and places I could hardly fathom until I entered the world of a pro athlete.

It didn’t help that minor league players in spring training are in the same venues as the big leaguers. When the day’s training was over, the places to hang out were frequented by all levels of players, and even coaches.

As you climb the baseball ladder, your social confidence explodes. You receive the sort of attention you never did as an acne-ridden honors student. Quite frankly, it is addictive, and when you are in it, there seems to be no end in sight.

But it isn’t rooted in good practices; it’s more like, “flash your badge and they will come.” Your confidence is based on a pack mentality, strong in numbers. You can push aside the inconvenience of having to start a conversation — just by being in the V.I.P. section and offering tickets to the next day’s game, the conversation is started for you. If you have a well-connected agent or an entourage to find you a companion, you might not need conversation at all. At the very least, your newly acquired wealth can keep the drinks flowing to the point where you don’t feel like you’re trying to ask your first-grade crush, Michele Soleimani, to borrow her pencil.

The above dynamic grows exponentially, and before you can blink, your bad relationship habits are written all over the contact list on your cell phone.

So where can you end up?

Tiger Woods country.

In an athlete’s environment, money can be its own pollutant; you can become desensitized to the significance of what it can buy. Typically, if a person spends hundreds of dollars on arrangements to pass time with someone, that someone would be important in his life. But when you have extensive financial resources, it’s easy to send similar signals to people who are meaningful only for a moment. Even worse, you might only concern yourself with what it means to you. As the money flows in, so do the toys — cars, clothes, bling — and once in the stratosphere, a la Tiger, it is amazing how easy it is, if you are not careful and grounded, to start seeing women as another accessory in your life.

The pro athlete’s world is self-centered at best. Schedule is fixed, practice a must, travel a given. Anyone choosing to share that has to get on board and fit in. It can get to a point where the relationship is strictly one-way (the athlete’s way), and the other party becomes insignificant, more a prop than a true relationship partner.

If the player dares to take the next step — marriage — there will likely be a legal team at his disposal (via his agent) that can set up a prenuptial agreement. This negotiation is often dragged out for months as a way of seeing whether the future spouse shows an ugly side during the process. But it’s a red flag for your relationship if you have to resort to such tactics to force the worst in someone, and the prenup becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, set up not just to distribute assets but to deal with an inevitable break-up or philandering. In fact, it might as well be seen as a pre-meditated agreement (I may do all of this dirt, so when I do and you want to leave, I still win because instead of half you only get a check for X dollars and one house).

Reducing a marriage to time, money and X is usually a bad way to start. But in the athletes’ world, relationships can get crafted around their whims. The spiritual significance of an enduring commitment falls by the wayside, giving way to parameters and rules defined by the ego of the player, and maybe his legal and PR team. Although it doesn’t have to be this way, relationships can become part of the world of glitz and illusions.

With that kind of unstable foundation, it’s easy to see how someone like Tiger Woods could see his world come crashing down simply because he hit a fire hydrant.

Tiger Woods has been transformational for the game of golf in so many ways. That is indisputable. But he has proven to be just like every other figure who fell for the little guy with the pitchfork on his shoulder telling him, “It’s all good, no one will know, you can get away with it.” But that little guy on his shoulder didn’t tell him that in the real world, you don’t get away with it because even when you are the only one who knows, that is enough to destroy you. It just will happen from the inside out.

According to Denis Waitley, Self Esteem is the belief that you have the potential to become a world class person.   I like that alot!!!

Author and Spiritual Teacher Eckhart Tolle has helped me understand a little better the lunacy of our celebrity culture.

“Most of the people who are in positions of power in this world, such as politicians, TV personalities, business as well as religious leaders, are completely identified with their role, with few notable exceptions. They may be considered VIP’s, but they are no more unconscious players in the egoic game, a game that looks so important yet is ultimately devoid of true purpose. It is, in the words of Shakespeare, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” “

Got a case of information overload? You’re not alone.

A study released Wednesday from the University of California, San Diego, reports that the average American consumes a whopping 34GB of data and 100,000 words of information per day.

Over the course of 2008, Americans as a group gobbled up 3.6 zettabytes of data. (In case you missed the definition of “zettabyte” in your daily data binging, that’s a million million gigabytes.) For all you visual learners out there, the researchers helpfully point out that 3.6 zettabytes is equal to the “information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska.”

Between 1980 and 2008, the number of bytes consumed by Americans increased 350 percent. The average annual growth rate was calculated at 5.4 percent.

Here’s how TV and the Internet stack up in the “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers.”

(Credit: University of California, San Diego)

Dubbed the How Much Information? project, the study measured data consumption both at home and away from home. It includes several information sources, “including going to the movies, listening to the radio, talking on the cell phone, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and reading the newspaper.”

Besides bytes and words, the study also noted the number of hours spent consuming information.

In terms of time, traditional media still has a strong hold on the U.S. The study reported that “a large chunk of the average American’s day is spent watching television.” On average, 41 percent of an American’s day is given over to watching television shows, viewing recorded TV, or watching DVDs.

Noncomputer sources, the study says, account for more than three-quarters of U.S. households’ information time.

But if bytes are the standard by which American days are judged, it’s the video game that takes the top prize. Researchers found that the average American consumes 18.5GB of gaming data per day, representing 67 percent of all bytes they consume daily.

“Games are almost universal, but most of the gaming bytes come from graphically intensive games on high-powered computers and consoles, which have the equivalent of special-purpose supercomputers from five years ago,” report author Roger Bohn, director of the Global Information Industry Center at UC San Diego’s School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, said in a statement. “Games today generate their bytes inside the home, rather than having to transmit them over cables into the house, but gaming is increasingly moving online.”

The study found that 16 percent of daily information consumption comes from the Internet. A staggering 79 percent of all American two-way communications is done through the Internet.

Marketers Obsess Over Everything Else but Overlook One Important Factor

by Al Ries
Published: December 07, 2009

On my first real job (at General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y.) I noticed a consistent advertiser in the electrical publications with an unusual name.

A company selling wire and cable was called “Crapo.” Presumably pronounced Cray-po and not Crap-o.

That’s terrible, I thought. Oh no, my more experienced colleagues said, one of the first things you need to learn in this business is that names don’t matter. What matters is the quality of the product.

That’s been a common refrain in my years of marketing work. Whenever I objected to a brand name, I would hear the same thing: Names don’t matter.

For example, a recent column about DDB’s new Budweiser campaign on AdAge.com drew 26 comments. Mostly negative. Commentators were critical of the music, the superficiality of the idea, the absence of storytelling and the lack of authenticity, among other things.

Nobody bothered to mention the one thing that seems to be driving Budweiser into the ground.

Bud Light.

How can anyone position a brand called “Budweiser” when the entire industry is moving to light beer? Especially when the brand itself has validated the concept by introducing a light version of its regular beer.

Then there’s the fact that the Budweiser regular brand has lost volume every year in a row for the last 20 years.

If you’re going to re-position the Budweiser brand, you’re going to have to figure out how to get Joe Six-Pack to drink regular beer instead of light beer.

But then, names don’t matter to most marketing people. What matters to most marketing people is the casting, the story line, the emotional involvement, the big idea.

Names are important. Too many marketing campaigns start off with high hopes and an impossible name. That’s like drawing to an inside straight.

Almost every day, a large company jumps into the market with a major product launch and an impossible name. Take Dell’s recent announcement that it is developing smartphone products for sale in China and Brazil.

No mention of a new name, of course, and why should anyone expect a new name for the company’s smartphone line? Dell didn’t use a new name for its television sets, its MP3 players and its online music-downloading store, products and services it apparently no longer sells.

Names don’t matter, of course. What matters is how the new product stacks up against competitive products. That’s the conventional wisdom.

A number of years ago, I was working on advertising for Babcock & Wilcox, a company that received the first license from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for a nuclear power plant.

That should have been a sure thing, but the company never built a single nuclear power plant. One problem was the name. While General Electric was promoting its Boiling Water Reactor and Westinghouse was promoting its Pressurized Water Reactor, Babcock & Wilcox was promoting its Spectral Shift Control Reactor.

Spectral Shift Control Reactor? I spent the better part of a day arguing about the name with the engineers involved in the project. “Spectral Shift Control Reactor” is going to frighten electric-utility executives who were already concerned about the dangers of nuclear power. Why can’t we give the Babcock & Wilcox design a different name? Nobody wants his spectrals shifted.

It was a lost cause. Once a name gets circulated in internal memos for a couple of months, the name gets set in concrete and is almost impossible to change.

Category names like “spectral shift control reactor” are a particular problem when dealing with people who consider themselves “inventors.” Quite often, an inventor wants a complicated category name to demonstrate how important his or her invention is.

The first match was called a “sulphuretted peroxide strikable.”

The first lie detector was called a “cardio-pneumo psychograph.”

The first computer was called an “electronic numerical integrator and computer.”

Have you ever heard of the “Il Giornale” brand? That was a chain of coffee shops started by entrepreneur Howard Schultz in 1985. Two years later, he bought the Starbucks chain from Peet’s Coffee & Tea.

Starbucks or Il Giornale? Names don’t matter; it’s the quality of the coffee, of course.

Fortunately, names did matter to Howard Schultz, who had the good sense to rebrand his Il Giornale outlets as Starbucks, and the rest is history.

Have you heard of the “College of New Jersey?” Probably not, since 113 years ago it changed its name to Princeton University.

College of New Jersey or Princeton University? Names don’t matter, of course; it’s the quality of the faculty and the students.

For some reason, many educational institutions are locked into the idea that their names have to indicate their geographical locations. (It was a lucky break the College of New Jersey was located in the town of Princeton. It could have been located in Hoboken.)

Thirteen years ago, Trenton State College became the College of New Jersey, a second reincarnation of the name. After spending the money for a name change, you might have thought that Trenton State would have picked a more euphonious name.

Then there’s SUNY, the State University of New York, with 64 campuses and more than 400,000 students. The largest university in the SUNY system is the State University of New York at Buffalo. As The New York Times reported, “even its national reputation, buzz and research dollars put it nowhere near the ranks of the University of California, Berkeley.”

Buffalo or Berkeley? Names don’t matter of course; it’s the quality of the faculty and the students.

To have any power at all, a name must be linked to a positive idea in the prospect’s mind. Just because a name is well known doesn’t mean that it has any marketing value.

One place where names really matter is Hollywood. Many movie stars have replaced their birth names with more euphonious names. Alphonso D’Abruzzo became Alan Alda. Tomas Mapother IV became Tom Cruise. Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis. Doris von Kappelhoff became Doris Day. Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas. And the list goes on.

Over the past few decades, there has been a strong trend from analog to digital. This is the trend that has created a number of incredibly successful high-tech brands: Microsoft, Nokia, Google, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Apple, Oracle, SAP, Dell, Nintendo, Amazon, eBay, BlackBerry and Adobe.

Together these 15 brands are worth, according to Interbrand, $284.5 billion.

But missing from Interbrand’s list of the “100 best global brands” is Kodak, the inventor of the digital camera.

It was 23 years ago that Kodak introduced the DC4800, the world’s first digital camera. Now do you suppose that anyone at Kodak bothered to ask, “Why are we using a film-photography name on a digital-photography camera?”

Probably not. Logical left-brain thinkers might assume that the move into the digital world would have enhanced the value of the Kodak brand. That’s usually the excuse for hanging onto an obsolete name.

As one Kodak executive said recently, “It’s probably one of the most iconic companies in the world … to be able to work with a brand name like Kodak is a dream come true.”

The numbers tell a different story. In the eight years before the turn of the millennium, Kodak had sales of $119.7 billion, net profits of $7.9 billion and a net profit margin of 6.6%.

But in the eight years since the turn of the millennium, Kodak had sales of $100.2 billion and net profits … well, they didn’t make any money. They actually lost $5 million.

I’ve been on the losing side of “name” arguments with companies such as IBM, Xerox, Western Union, Eastern Airlines, Miller Brewing, Coors, General Electric, Tambrands, Continental Airlines, Scott Kay, Motorola and others.

But, of course, names don’t matter. It’s the quality of the product that counts.

Dec 7, 2009  By Chris Hedges

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.

I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.