Month: March 2019

Throughout art history we see a culture of expanded perceptions from artists like Kandinsky, to musicians like Duke Ellington. Artist Nina Norden sees colours and shapes in association with just about everything she experiences. In fact, she can’t imagine how things can exist without a colour and a shape—she has synaesthesia and it forms the basis of her art.

By Deepak Chopra, MD

For centuries a quality has existed that is referred to as wisdom. A phrase like “wiser heads prevailed” implies that wisdom can save us from stupid or foolish actions. Elders were once considered wise, and so were philosophers. But once you bring up these references, wisdom feels antiquated and irrelevant. Who are the wiser heads in our day? Aside from a revered figure like the Dalai Lama, it’s hard to name one, and he is really a spiritual figurehead more than the classic wise man.

Whatever wisdom might be, the average person doesn’t think about it very much, if at all, and when you consider the problems that feel the most disturbing—climate change, terrorism, racism, poverty, and international tensions, for example—nobody is clamoring to call on wisdom to solve them.

But maybe only wisdom can. Let me explain what I mean.

Every problem, not just the big global ones but problems in everyday life, get solved by using a mental model. This model explains what has gone wrong, which is the first step in making things right again. Consider a common problem like feeling depressed. In our time we apply a medical model and send the depressed person to get help from a doctor, who will prescribe an antidepressant, or to a psychologist, who will apply some kind of therapy.

In the past, other models would have offered a very different explanation of why someone is depressed. Instead of calling depression a mental disorder or a psychological malady, which leads to trying to understand the person’s brain, depression would have been considered a lack of personal discipline or a moral failing. A depressed person in another model would be considered possessed by evil spirits or punished by God for some hidden sin. It’s strange to think that depression might be treated using everything from bleeding to exorcism, but such is the power of mental models.

Models fool people into believing that they are true. In modern society, the general belief that depression is an illness like catching a cold or contracting cancer feels so certain that few would disagree. But in fact, the disease model is not always workable in depression. The action of popular antidepressants on the brain isn’t certain and may be totally misunderstood. You cannot reliably predict who will get depressed, and quite often depression comes and goes on its own for no reason anyone can explain.

If your model doesn’t predict things correctly, leads to haphazard solutions, and depends on unproven assumptions (in this case, the assumption that depression is a brain problem), it’s not a model that matches reality. In modern life, we rely on a model of reality that has three components or levels.

The first level is data, which we collect and assemble into facts. Facts are supposed to match reality, but thanks to the human gift of rationality we now have so-called “alternative” facts, that are really just stubborn opinions that refuse to be rational.

The second level is information. Information consists of the conclusion that the data reveals. If your blood test comes back with an abnormal blood sugar reading (fact), your doctor might inform you that you are diabetic (conclusion). But in many cases of other disorders doctors and other experts frequently disagree. The same information can often lead to opposite conclusions.

The third level is knowledge, which consists of understanding. You are a knowledgeable doctor if you went to medical school and acquired the knowledge of diseases and how to treat them. Knowledge is the summit of the scientific or rational model. Data gives us the facts; facts assemble into correct information; information, when absorbed as knowledge, allows any problem to be solved, any question to be answered.

And yet knowledge also breaks down; in fact, it breaks down all the time. A good example is diets. There is enough information out there about the failure of diets to show that they don’t work, but the fact that only around 2% of dieters can lose five pounds and keep it off for five years doesn’t inhibit the massive lucrative diet industry. We know all kinds of things where our understanding is futile: carbon emissions warm the planet, women are equal to men, wars have no upside. Gender inequality, global warming, and violent conflicts run amok, not for lack of understanding—after all, the data, facts, information, and knowledge about these problems are irrefutable—but because the current model has failed.

What do people do when their cherished model of reality breaks down? They cling to it even harder and continue to do the same old things that have never worked. Science, the ultimate icon of the rational model, clings to the totally unproven notion that the brain creates the mind, for example, and if you say that this model has lots of problems, a brain scientist will ignore your objections. He clings to his model because it seems good enough, despite its inconsistencies, and his job depends upon it.

Enter wisdom. Wisdom has grown scarce for the simple reason that it follows no model. Socrates made the point, and it got him into a great deal of trouble, that wisdom cannot be taught. You can teach data collection, the amassing of facts, and many branches of knowledge, but wisdom stands apart. True wisdom leads to such things as insight, intuition, depth of experience, self-awareness, and humility before mysteries that will never be fully comprehended.

Because wisdom contradicts the certainty that models try to give us, it has had a hard time in society, as the death of Socrates shows. Society defends its favored and cherished models (which can be mythical, religious, animistic, scientific, and so on) with ferocity; certainty is not to be flouted. Wisdom calls for a totally different way of looking at reality. I will argue in the next post for taking the road back to wisdom. It is the only way to fulfill the infinite potential that human beings possess, and on a global scale, it is the only way we will reach desperately needed solutions.

(To be cont.)

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Choprahost a new podcast Infinite Potential available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com

Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Garrett Moon, one of the Co-founders of CoSchedule, a marketing management platform.

Tune in to hear about Garrett’s 10 years’ experience in the advertising/marketing industry, how he believes he’s solved the makeshift marketing problem and why it’s important to have a separate growth marketing team from the content marketing team.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

• [00:50] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
• [01:35] Garrett has been in marketing and advertising for over a decade. He got his start at an ad agency as a Creative Director.
• [01:50] He met his Co-Founder for CoSchedule at the ad agency.
• [02:20] They made the switch from a service-based company to a product-based company, which is how they ended up creating CoSchedule.
• [04:22] The first iteration of CoSchedule was intended to connect WordPress and social media accounts. It was a plug-in that only worked with WordPress.
• [05:00] The goal of CoSchedule was to automate the promotion process as much as possible.
• [05:30] As they moved up-market, the product continued to develop.
• [06:25] They wanted to create a product that could combine all the information into one marketing calendar, so you could easily manage marketing teams.
• [06:58] It gives a great bird’s-eye view.
• [07:52] Garrett believes there is a makeshift marketing problem.
• [07:58] Makeshift marketing is using a ton of different tools to get one job done.
• [08:35] CoSchedule sought to create a way to erase the need for tons of tools and bring all the information together in one place.
• [09:55] The least expensive plan is $50/month and gives you everything you need to integrate blog posts, manage email marketing, and social promotion.
• [10:47] Plans go up to six digits per year for larger, enterprise companies.
• [11:42] Garrett started his agency in Bismarck, ND.
• [12:15] When they launched in 2013, they had four angel investors.
• [12:30] The company consisted of two engineers and the co-founders.
• [15:45] CoSchedule provides 60 tech jobs that wouldn’t otherwise exist in North Dakota.
• [17:40] Garrett likes to ask what the one thing that a given company is focused on and will they get the right results using metrics?
• [18:15] Even though people say not to take stock in page views, Garrett still thought it was important to track.
• [20:50] CoSchedule focused on getting traffic more so than conversions, because they knew they could make conversions happen once they had a solid amount of traffic.
• [22:10] The metric they focused on was how to get more traffic.
• [22:33] By focusing on page views, they were able to generate results rather quickly.
• [25:00] Garrett and his team looking into what their competitors were doing to see what they could do better.
• [27:30] It’s important to check comments on your marketing content to see how people are reacting.
• [28:10] High-performing content has up to a 20% conversion rate for CoSchedule.
• [29:10] Garrett’s team is working on improving calls-to-action to increase conversions.
• [30:10] Whenever they launched a new feature, they would create content about it.
• [30:35] They are not shy about using their email list and social accounts.
• [31:28] They have both a growth marketing team and a content marketing team.
• [33:00] Garrett has written a book called The 10X Marketing Formula.

Resources from the interview:

• CoSchedule
• Garrett on Twitter
• Must-read book: The 10X Marketing Formula

Leave Some Feedback:

• What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below.
• Did you enjoy this episode? If so, leave a short review here
• Subscribe to Growth Everywhere on iTunes
• Get the non-iTunes RSS Feed

Connect With Eric Siu:

• Growth Everywhere
• Single Grain
• Eric Siu on Twitter

The post GE 299: How CoSchedule’s Co-founder Garrett Moon Started the Company with Only 4 People (podcast) appeared first on Business & Personal Growth Tips.

During the 1960s the field of psychology focussed on the science of how past trauma creates present symptoms, and how to reduce people’s misery. Professor Martin Seligman wanted to change that focus. He’s become known as the Father of Positive Psychology, and he’s had a profound influence worldwide. In Part 1 of our 2 programs with Martin Seligman, hear him address an exclusive audience in Australia on happiness and human flourishing.