Tag: Business

Selling certainty

Posted on by philipdodson

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For all those who are in the business of selling certainty, stop it, you can’t sell it. It doesn’t exist and you are manipulating others purely for a financial gain.

For all those wanting to buy certainty, stop it, you can’t buy it, no matter what the ‘guru’ is telling you. All you are seeking is to shortcut hard work and being personally accountable.

Certainty, even if it existed, is boring and it is a tool used to get us to comply through fear and satisfying our seeming desire for instant gratification versus patience, meaning and the sense of achievement that follows hard work.

So sure death is currently a pretty certain outcome for us all, the other part of the well-known phrase, ‘taxes’, is now only a certainty for some. That apart, all the rest is an unknown outcome varying from reasonably certain to completely unknown.

In the business world, the peddlers of certainty are selling you something that you can’t simply replicate and turn into a money making winning formula in just 6 months!! You are not someone else, their thing has been done, and if life was as simple as reading a book, watching a course online or going to seminar then there would be a) no point to life and b) why aren’t the peddlers busy making millions instead of selling us their ‘magic formula’?

Don’t fool for short-cuts and don’t try to sell them. Find something in life that is risky, rewarding and meaningful.

Copying others

Posted on by philipdodson

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There is a view that all you need to do is study other successes in the market and copy that formula, maybe tweak it a bit, but essentially it is a sure bet, right?

For example, real estate, where districts like SoHo in New York, where the old warehouse and factory district became an uber cool place to live, long before people used phrases such as ‘uber cool’.

Then what happened in SoHo, it became gentrified, marble bathrooms, luxury trinkets were added and boom multi-million dollar apartments sprang up. It was a way of making money.

The next stage was the copying machine went to full throttle and real estate executives all over the globe used the same formula, even building fake old warehouse-style buildings with exposed beams, high ceilings, wood floors and exposed brickwork. Then flogging them to the well-to-do execs at huge sums of money. They even copied, especially in the US, the naming acronyms model too. So everything became shortened to be trendy. SoSePla was actually short for South of the Sewage Plant.

The existing local populations and communities became displaced, alienated and destroyed. In came the high rollers, the fancy restaurants, and ching, ching the money rolled in.

The problem with copying something without it having any real substance, history, community or soul behind it, other than a money making formula, is that it is unlikely to last. There is no substance to it.

It is similar on a much smaller scale in life and business. If you copy someone, you will never be able to replicate the real reason for that person or businesses success. You simply can not replicate or copy the soul, passion, and the ‘why’ of someone or something else. You can’t replicate uniqueness.

Don’t copy, be you, as you are amazing.