Posts Tagged ‘future’

preventing reverse psychology in the future

June 5, 2012
Barnstar rotante di psicologia

Barnstar rotante di psicologia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Preventing reverse psychology in the future

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The future is unknown. The future is uncertain.

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The future is where all the power is. Those who are creative propose a future which the masses may either resist or champion. If a proposed future sharply divides the masses in to champions and protesters, then that proposed future attracts a huge amount of energy and attention, dominating the emerging conversations about what may be.
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The conceiving of the future arises in language. Resisting a particular future is still a conceiving of that future.
reverse psychology
Resisting a proposed future is somewhat like resisting the idea of a pink elephant. One cannot resist an idea without first conceiving it. The resisting by the masses of a particular future also draws energy to the future possibility that is being resisted- nourishing it, cultivating it, adding attention and power and authority and reality to it.
reverse psychology
Reverse psychology must therefore be eliminated. Reverse psychology must be fiercely protested. Reverse psychology must be resisted. Reverse psychology must be condemned. Reverse psychology must be stripped of it’s irresistible power. If we do not severely punish anyone who even mentions reverse psychology, then we are doomed to futility and helplessness and victimhood.
reverse psychology negativity
Reverse psychology has no future whatsoever. In the future, I will not think about reserve psychology right now. Right now, I will make special emphasis on not thinking about reverse psychology in the future.
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Rebel. It does not really matter what you rebel against, but just rebel.
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Resist protesting. Protest resisting.
reverse psychology
The future does not even exist yet. Furthermore, at no time in the future will it ever be the future. The future is a fantasy, a joke, a lie, a concoction, a creative pretense, a myth.
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That is why we must save humanity from the future. We must prevent the future from dominating our lives and our thoughts and our behaviors and our reverse psychology.
reverse psychology
However, we must not save humanity from the future right now. It is simply too soon for such a drastic measure. We should wait a while first. We can always save humanity from the future later.
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Finally, the activity of saving humanity from procrastination must eventually be eliminated, resisted, condemned, cultivated, nourished, postponed, prevented, and championed. Reverse psychology must never be allowed to influence us, at least not yet. In conclusion, there is no such thing as denial.
selena gomez loves haters
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2 things crucial to the future of your business: the local economy and what you value most

May 24, 2012
English: Filling station at Childerley Gate. T...

“Petrol (gasoline) prices per liter in Euro at Childerley Gate (UK). A historical record of fuel prices in mid-2005!” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What you value most could include valuing a particular kind of customer (or any order for a particular service that provides an excellent profit margin). What you value most could also include valuing a particular amount of customers (or a specific increase of profit). Of course, what an individual values most can change as they change, as their household changes, and as the community around them changes, like as gasoline prices quickly double or drop by a dollar or two.
What the people around us value can be labeled “the local economy.” What people value includes how they choose their priorities of what to spend money on, how to select which businesses to use, and every part of the process of choosing to either do business with you or do business with someone else instead.
“Business development” is a broad term that includes planning, marketing, generating leads, and converting leads in to transactions. Many small businesses are generally familiar with the basic idea of business development. Realistically, most small business owners are very familiar from personal experience with converting leads in to transactions, yet they are just as surprised as the general population by major economic changes.
Certainly, many businesses have major increases in their profits by reviewing and refining the process used for converting leads to transactions. Some business owners recognize that as an issue in which a major improvement is possible. However, in the 13 years that I have been consulting with business owners, the vast majority have, in my opinion, vastly underestimated the value of competent economic forecasting.
Phoenix Arizona 24th Street & Camelback Road f...

Phoenix Arizona 24th Street & Camelback Road from the Phoenix Mountain Preserve (Photo credit: Al_HikesAZ)

In the area of Phoenix (Arizona), the economic shifts of the last decade have substantially altered almost every local business. As energy prices rose (including for gasoline), two factors made Phoenix more sensitive to that change: the heat of the desert (which creates extremely high electricity bills in the summer for cooling) and the sprawl of the suburbs (which creates unusually high costs for commuting across long distances, including when the auto’s AC is constantly on high to keep the inside of the vehicle cool when it is well over 100 degrees outside).
I published forecasts in 2004 alerting my readers to the issue of gasoline prices rising so much that it would effect the budgets and spending patterns (including investing patterns) of businesses and consumers within the US in particular, but also in places even more dependent on importing fuel, such as Greece, Italy, the UK, and Japan (which has been in a “recession” for the last 23 years). I published warnings in 2003 of the emerging instability in real estate and stock markets, but it was not until 2004 that I recognized rising fuel costs as the underlying issue. In mid-2005, when the real estate market in Phoenix shifted (as well as in another sprawling desert suburbia, Las Vegas), I had already been watching for the shift and published my recognition of the first stages of the shift that eventually spread to the rest of the US real estate market and then the financial stocks (companies that had been gambling on extreme concentrations of risk exposure in real estate, such as AIG, FNMA, FDMC, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and then even Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and so on).
Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Bank of America recently acquired Merrill Lynch, saving Merrill Lynch from going out of business (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Washington Mutual logo prior to its acquis...

The Washington Mutual logo prior to its acquisition by JPMorgan Chase. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(In the late 1920s, Charles Merrill, the co-founder of Merrill Lynch, repeatedly warned his clients in advance of the emerging risk in the US stock market. In recent years, apparently the company was not so committed to competence analysis of emerging trends.)
Merrill Lynch & Co.

Merrill Lynch & Co. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many local small businesses have been challenged by the decreasing tide of people moving to the sprawling desert suburbs. New construction in the Phoenix area is a small fraction of what it was in 2004. New people moving to the area had been so high that many local businesses had been extremely successful without ever advertising. However, cultivating customer loyalty is a huge issue now for many businesses. Further, even with word-of-mouth, there is a transition away from spoken recommendations toward the broadcasting of typed electronic messages like “can any of you recommend a really good ____?”
Since I have been in the advertising field for 13 years, my work history shows that I have been part of the shift away from print and radio toward the internet. Obviously, the shift toward the internet is far better known by most people than the causes of the economic shift that has slowed the economies of Greece, Phoenix, Japan, and other areas most sensitive to rising fuel prices. (In fact, in this piece, I am not even addressing WHY global fuel prices reversed a long-term trend in 1999, but that has been the main focus of my forecasting publications since my 2004 use of the term www.TheDominOILeffect.com.)
So, almost everyone who has studied business trends at all in the last 10 or 15 years knows about the huge shift toward the internet and growing electronic resources like google, facebook, blogs, and things like verified reviews and ratings. The shift of business toward the internet is almost as obvious as how computers altered how business is conducted or how the telephone altered how business is conducted or even calculators and adding machines and credit cards and checkbooks and currency.
Next year, the most popular currency in the world, the Federal Reserve’s “US Dollar” note will be 100 years old. It simply did not exist in 1912.
100 years ago, the technologies altering the world of business were things like the use of residential phones (“landlines” were still replacing telegraphs in remote parts of the US). Automobiles were still extremely rare, kind of like owning a private jet is very rare today. There was no such thing as TV advertising or cable TV or even television sets.
Now, millions of people are walking around with new mobile phones that have computing power that might have cost a million dollars in 1999. Most business owners are only vaguely aware of the growing waves of business flowing in to the internet.
As fuel prices continue to rise relative to most other items such as real estate and computers, people are going to value their time newly. As technology allows growing numbers of people an extremely fast access to extremely relevant information, people are not going to drive around all day shopping for deals to save $20 or even $50. People will save time and money by using the internet.
Imagine businesses that clung to using a telegraph instead of getting a telephone. Imagine businesses that favored typewriters over word processors. What happened to those businesses? They mostly disappeared, right?
I know some farmers who only recently bought a telephone and do not own a computer. They are Amish. I do business with them regularly.
However, they are farmers. They may not use automobiles personally, but they sure appreciate that UPS and Federal Express will deliver their products for them.
Image representing UPS as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

Is your business ready for the future today? How would you be sure?
In 2004, were you planning for the coming economic changes like rising fuel prices and a huge decrease in borrowing and lending? Most business owners may have no idea how far they are from the reality of the business trends that are coming to their industry and their local economy (as in the changing values of their customer base).
I have talked to many confident millionaires in the last 10 years. A lot of confidence was not enough to keep them out of foreclosure and bankruptcy.
Government committees across the world have also been profoundly confident in their projections of tax revenues. Myself and others have warned them that their projections were “approaching the ridiculous.” They sometimes called us ridiculous.
There may have been some excessive pessimism as well as some excessive optimism. Consider that there is no such thing as an excess of realism.
English: Damage to the JP Morgan Chase Tower a...

English: Damage to the JP Morgan Chase Tower after Hurricane Ike, Houston, Texas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you are open to a realistic assessment of what are the most valuable refinements that you can make to the way you conduct business, then you may realize that sometimes a single change can make a huge difference, though a series of small changes is often what leads to the most historic breakthroughs. Those who are willing to benefit from changing economies and changing technologies are welcome to contact me now. From realism about the changing economic trends to realism about the changing technology of how your future customers are selecting which business to use, how much realism are you willing to value?
Related articles

http://www.inc.com/articles/201103/businesses-hit-by-rising-gas-prices.html

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G70lBEAFl8

www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/gasprices/faq.shtml
gaspricesexplained.org/
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/business-brains/rising-fuel-prices-push-businesses-to-reconsider-fleet-options/23998
http://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/news/2012/05/24/delta-cutting-flight-between-phoenix.html

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song recording: “not just a promise”

April 13, 2012
Words....

Words.... (Photo credit: jah~)

I would sing this to your ears, but they can only hear the sounds          so I sing this to your heart, so you can feel it pounding now

this is a message from my soul to yours                                             it is a secret because it’s beyond words
so don’t ask me to explain                                                                 how I forgot how to complain
maybe it had to do with you                                                                other than that, my smile will have to do
I’ve got no words for this                                                                     it’s not just a promise
there was a future once                                                                      but now it is forgotten
I have no need for words like faith                                                        for I have no need for words like fear
I have no need for words like love                                                         for I have need for words at all
this is something more                                                                       this is something new
this is something different                                                                   this is something true
this is something wild                                                                         this is something free
this is something I                                                                              didn’t know could be
here I am                                                                                           at the door
my heart is pounding                                                                          to come out
I’ll let you in                                                                                       come with me
to a world                                                                                          beyond doubt
I’ve got no words for this                                                                     it’s not just a promise
there was a future once                                                                      but now it is forgotten
Words Cloud 16/01- 22/02 2009

Words Cloud 16/01- 22/02 2009 (Photo credit: GRwitters)

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my only regret

February 6, 2012

my only regret… is all that thinking about the past

and saying it should not have been the way that it was

I wish now that all of that time was spent some other way
than thinking back about the past and labeling it a shame
oh give me back my history
I’ve earned a second chance
to change the patterns of the words
I used to use to relate to my past
yeah, I used to have a past
but now it is over

yeah, I used to be my past

but now I’m just a future made of words
I just hope it’s not too late yet
to make up now for my only regret
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Do you choose your future?

June 17, 2009
The Future That Was

Image via Wikipedia

Do you choose your future?

Consider that you could be!

Do you choose your future? Or, does someone else choose your future for you- like instead of you?

Consider that you have a choice right now in how you identify with your own idea of your own future. You can identify now with the possibility that you have no choice as to your future. You can reject or resist the idea that you might have any choice as to your future, such as by identifying some other influence as, first, external to you and, second, all-powerful.

That identification of infinite power as only external to you may be named by you as “my parents” or “my boss” or “God” or “the economy” or “fate” or “the will of the people” or “science.” Such as identification of infinite power as only external to you is what I call “slavery.”

So, are you a slave to your future? Or, do you choose your future?

If you can simply accept now that you might have some influence over how your future is going, I invite you to keep reading. However, if you resist the possibility that you in fact might exert all the influence as to how your future is going, I can relate to that, too.

After all, if we were to accept the possibility that we might exert all the influence as to how our future is going, then we would be abandoning any tendency to blame that we might have ever practiced. If we were actually already exerting all the influence as to how our future is going now, then we would not merely abandon the possibility of ever blaming anyone for anything that ever may or may not happen in the future- like only from this moment forward. Oh, that might be quite a notable development- but what if it could be way beyond just that?

If we were actually already exerting all the influence as to how our future is going now, then we could be abandoning the possibility of ever blaming anyone in the future at all. The only time we can blame anyone (or anything) is whenever we may be doing it. So, if I have all the influence over my future now, then I can influence whether or not I invest my attention now into blaming. Once I notice the possibility of blaming now, I can influence whether or not I invest my attention now into whatever I choose!

If I can influence my attention now even just ever so slightly, then I might be able to exert the determining influence. In fact, I might even be the only one who can ever exert the determining influence. In fact, if I am the only one who can choose my future, then I might choose now for my future to be one in which the practice of blaming is, at most, only one of many possibilities.

I may have blamed in the past. However, I may have invested my attention in other ways in the past, too. It is one possibility that in the past I may have blamed. That is just one of many possibilities now. I can choose to focus on whatever possibility I choose to invest into experiencing now.

When is the only time I can experience my choice? Now, if I choose to invest in the practice of choice, I personally experience that practice instantly. However, if I had chosen to invest in the practice of identifying influence as primarily or even only external, I might have personally experienced that possibility.

Is it possible that all influence is external to me personally? I decline to argue the point, by which I mean that I accept the idea that it might be possible that all influence is external to me personally. For instance, perhaps you exclusively exert all influence and thus, if I identify myself and you as isolated, unconnected forces, then obviously I might not have any influence whatsoever since you have it all. Again, I decline to make the idea into an argument. In fact, I now simply abandon that idea altogether.

So, I may choose now to practice identifying with the possibility of my own influence. In fact, I choose my future now. I choose how my future is going as soon as I choose now.

Other people may choose their own future or not. I simply choose my future.

Now, when I choose my future, I not only choose what focus to practice now, but I also choose what practice to make into my future- as in which future to make my practice. I can practice whatever future I choose now.

Other people may accept the future I am choosing or they may reject it. In fact, I may simply choose the future that includes the people who accept it. I choose to experience the people who accept the future that I am choosing.

I choose the future that includes people in general accepting how I choose that my future is going now. I choose the future that includes specific people accepting how I choose that my future is going now- like perhaps even you.

Of course, you may have been resisting the idea that I could be doing this already. Obviously, if I could already be choosing so powerfully, then that might really deflate any receptivity to blame and resignation that anyone may or may not have been expecting to experience with me. After all, if anyone like me can already do it, then perhaps you could too!

Sure, we may have blamed in the past. However, we may have invested our attention in other ways in the past, too. It is one possibility that in the past we may have blamed. That is just one of many possibilities now. We can choose to focus on whatever possibility we choose to invest into experiencing now.

Do you choose your future? Consider that you could be… already!

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Responding with a curious courage… to recent financial developments

April 5, 2009

Responding with a curious courage… to recent financial developments

Quickly, let’s be clear what it does and does not mean to respond with a curious courage. I wonder if you can recall a time when you were not just already curious, but when your curiosity then led you to perceive a risk or danger that you only could have directly recognized through your own exploring, and then, after this discovery that you just made, you courageously redirected your behavior away from the perceived risk and toward a valuable opportunity that, again, you only discovered through the practice of curiosity. Let’s call that time now.

In contrast, what a curious courage does not mean is this: to identify how reality should have been, whether or not it was, then, when some pattern of reality did not fit with how it allegedly should have been, then to identify that pattern of reality as having been a problem, and then choose not to take any new initiative toward personal responsibility for one’s own future, but instead focus anger on whoever was convenient to blame for that problematic reality, and finally, identify whoever first provided you someone to blame for that problematic reality as the one to blindly rely on to almost fix that problematic reality next, since reality may persistently thwart reactive efforts to fix it by first blaming someone else for why it was not how it should have been (according to whoever denied that reality should be however reality actually already is).

Now, with a curious courage, we could be asking how did this particular apparent reality develop- yet with a specific concern for one’s own prior practices and the resulting effects produced from one’s own prior practices. That personal identification of one’s own prior practices as the primary issue related to the results produced by those practices is what may take courage.

So, let’s imagine that someone went to a casino and did very well for quite a while. They soon developed confidence and came back to the casino again and again. They made consistent unearned gains by using a certain method that worked for them over and over.

However, yesterday, they used that same old method but got a different result, that one which they do not value. Then, they kept trying that same method again and continued to get the result that they do not value. Soon, they lost quite a bit of their prior unearned gains- or even all of those gains as well as all of their original investment or even more.

Maybe they were afraid to even think about or look at their recent results. They may have been focusing on how much they used to have as if that was somehow more relevant than what they have left.

What would it mean to respond to this situation with a curious courage? Would it be courageous to look for someone else to blame for the recent results? Maybe you blamed the casino itself, or the government regulators, or a certain current or former employee of the casino, or perhaps your neighbor or even your neighbor’s dog.

Now, I might suggest that the particular investing method that you used is what produced the unfavorable result. Of course, it could be possible that the casino or government regulators did change some relevant rule, yet even if that were true, identifying such a change would not make your old method back into one that produces favorable results. If some rule had been changed and that is the single reason why your old method was no longer valuable, then knowing what rule has been changed might provide some insight into what other method might be valuable now, but you may not be interested in that yet.

After all, if the reason the rule was changed is because of your neighbor’s dog, then you could continue to use the method that stopped working but just get really angry at the dog. Or, while you continue to use the method that stopped working, maybe you could kill the dog, and then maybe someone would change the rule back so that your old method that stopped working might work again one day eventually, and you could just keep using it for as long as it takes, even though until that might happen you may be producing results with that method that you definitely may not value, because one day it could work again- you know, hypothetically.

That all could be true. One other thing though that someone with a curious courage might wonder is this: what about discontinuing the use of whatever prior method already stopped working to produced unearned capital gains? Sure, maybe the dog can be killed and the rule can be changed back to how it was and so one day possibly in the not-too-distant future the old method that stopped working may work again, but how about now? Sure, maybe someone can identify the neighbor that might have been in some way responsible for preventing you from continuing to multiply the unearned capital gains that you used to compound, and then maybe someone can get that neighbor to remedy the situation by paying to bail out the casinos that have suffered incredibly all because of that one dog. However, what about reconsidering the investing method which however long ago stopped working to produce the results you value?

Even if you advocate for a possible return back towards the prior situation, another possibility is that you explore modifying your investing method, at least until all dogs are killed so that you can know that no other dogs will ever prevent you from multiplying unearned capital gains with the single method that is most familiar to you, which is probably borrowing money to invest in real estate, but it could also be dumping money into various stocks and hoping that those stocks go up in value at least enough to balance any inflation and taxes.

I know a lot of people who I warned many years ago about the specific market developments that have since rendered their previously valuable methods worthless, resulting in losses of some or all of their unearned gains in real estate equity (or in US tech stocks or UK financial stocks and so on). Some of them even owe more on their mortgage than the collateral property is worth.

I also know a lot of people who have watched me make consistently accurately predictions of a variety of ups and downs in a variety of markets. Some of them may never give up the methods that they previously used to produce consistent unearned gains for them but that recently stopped working. Some of them may not ever explore a principle that works in all market conditions: partnering with the reality of market conditions and even partnering with someone who knows how to find opportunity in all market conditions now.

That might require a curious courage. Not everyone has that. For those of us who do have it, the fact that not everyone else has it is related to what distinguishes our results from their results, which includes the curiosity to be honest about the reality of market conditions, rather than defining some patterns of reality as “problems” to be automatically reacted to with personal blaming and blind devotion in the latest emergency rescue fix proposed, whether that is a political “solution” or some other silver bullet, like, whenever one has been confused, just investing in silver (or real estate etc) as the one magic solution to the persisting problem of reality not being the same as someone told you it should be.

Consider that reality is only a problem for those who insist on investing in opposition to it. For those with a curious courage, reality is an opportunity to partner. Now, with me and the investing methods that fit with partnering with the reality of market conditions, certain people get consistently favorable results in all market conditions. Not everyone will contact someone committed to partnering with reality to let me know that they are interested in consistently favorable results, but what about you?
–
JR
************

“Life is not what it’s supposed to be. Its what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.” Virginia Satir (1916-1988)

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