Category: Citizen Payne

The reason your competition is more successful than you has nothing to do with their success or your lack of success.

The reason your competition is more successful than you is perception. As in, you perceive they are better than you.

And that is a simple product of good marketing.

A story is being told of how great they are. Maybe they are great, and maybe they aren’t that great. But what is definite is that they existed in a plane long enough to have a following large enough that the perception of their success is there, even if a deep dive into their practice may prove them to be just as much of a hot mess as you.

The government should hire people to drive around with a cooler full of sandwiches, looking for children lounging around, and hand them a sandwich.

The government should also hire another person to drive around with a trunk full of books to follow the person with the cooler of sandwiches. They see the kid holding a sandwich in one hand and hand them a book to go into the other.

Does every random child need to be given a sandwich and a book? No. Some families have an abundance of sandwiches and book for their children and a few of the neighbor’s children. Does it matter? No.

The problem is not ‘giving free sandwiches and books to kids who don’t need them’ because of all the resources we waste; a book and a sandwich for a child is pretty non-offensive in any rational sense.

The problem comes from kids who receive the ‘wrong’ sandwich or book from the ‘wrong’ official. If a child has a peanut allergy, give them a tuna sandwich, or vice versa. No issue, right?

What if a child is given a book that offers insight into a different part of the world than their parents have sold?

Getting the ‘wrong’ information from the ‘wrong’ people is nothing new. The new hotness of xenophobia is the belief that you can shut yourself away from the world’s ways and still survive instead of facing off with their ideas and then just walking away.

I am blessed to have collected a weird menagerie of friends, followers, and associates with wildly varying opinions.

Some of the ‘Breaking News’ that have been reported in the last few weeks (specifically in the previous few days) is proving to be a treasure trove of insight from an extensive sample of your random group of people.

This is a good thing until we start to call each other poo-poo heads, and well, you get it.

You don’t follow best practices to stand out or the crowd.

You follow best practices to become a part of the ‘average’ crowd that strives to offer consistently above-average results.

There is something to being an ‘authority’ that gives the opinions you have significant weight.

And there is something to just being conscience and having an opinion you are willing to give that has its weight, significant or not.