Author: Suresh Dinakaran

 

Modesty Blaise is a British comic strip featuring a fictional character of the same name, created by author Peter O’Donnell and illustrator Jim Holdaway in 1963. But the rant below is far removed from that.

 

It’s a day and age when vanity and vanilla metrics are omnipresent. The biggest of them engage in shameless narcissism and self-promotion. Being heard, seen, spoken about, consumed, revered, shared and more is the order of the never ending day.

 

Why does self-promotion have a bad name? Why is it labeled an act of being shameless? Quixotic to say the least.

 

Do we all have million of dollars to spread the word on our new product, service or solution? Most certainly not. If we don’t tell the world about our work or art or creation, who will? And while we do that we are actually exhibiting courage to take the good with the bad, the rough with the smooth, being accepted or rejected. The risks and the upsides are both omnipresent. If you have build or created something and do nothing to promote it, the one word that will come to people’s mind to address you would be ‘weirdo‘.

 

Self-promotion is never to be a carte blanche to intrude, spam or take advantage of. The objective is to do it with grace,(most certainly)permission and respect. Please don’t consider someone else’s inbox to be your winbox.

Ideas are plenty but ideas without action are regrets. If you create something worthwhile and don’t tell the world about it, the potential users will not turn up. If you are working for a charity and don’t do what you have to, there won’t be any donors queuing up. If you are an author and don’t promote your book or blog or newsletter, the readers will stay away.

 

Your voice can trigger change, opinion and add more voice muscle. People like us do things like this. Your art will enable another person or communities’ art. Your blog can inspire others to start writing and finding their inner calling. Unless you want to ‘Die Empty‘(I wrote a blog on this some time ago and if you are keen you could access it at https://www.sureshdinakaran.com/blog/2022/04/10/die-empty/ ) and take your unwritten and unreleased book, music, poems, inventions, big ideas to the grave, show up and ship out. Wield the megaphone, go to the rooftop and tell the world about it with respect, permission and grace.

 

So, what we have to be actually shameful about is create something that can better and enrich other people’s lives but refrain from doing so. That will be selfish. That is when you need to feel guilty. Not otherwise.

 

Self-promotion comes with the caveat of rejection.So, when you are sticking your neck out, you are showing courage. To be vulnerable, to be unselfish. To put your ego on the back burner. Wear a new lens on self-promotion and see that as an act of kindness, grace, sharing..

 

The biggest of marketers, brands, organisations, mega celebrities do self-promotion all the time. Out of sight can also be out of mind. So, mind it!

 

ENDS

 

Regular readers of this blog might be left wondering whats with me in the New Year- my first post yesterday was on loneliness and today the rant is on vulnerability, which in an world that revers the Alpha human, will come across as certainly NOT cutting it. How remiss of me!

 

Before I get going on this rant, I am tempted to guide you to my earlier blog that had vulnerability in the main lead. You can read it here on this link https://www.sureshdinakaran.com/blog/2018/07/15/from-povpoint-of-view-to-pov-power-of-vulnerability/ 

 

In a fake believe world(well almost) airbrushed to perfection by Instagram and what have you, authenticity has no place on the social republic canvas. I am tempted to use the phrase that I used in my earlier blog on this subject – ‘to stand naked in your own truth’ – is pleading for retribution. 

 

 

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.”  – Madeleine L’Engle

 

Chasing Vanilla metrics would mean a perennial quest(pressure?) to build ‘connections?‘ There are no filters here for authenticity, meaning or depth. What if we were to walk in the direction opposite to where the herd is headed. Not be birds of the same feather. I’m not talking about more networking opportunities or surface-level relationships that encumber our online lives. Seek fewer connections but deeper, stronger, trusting & solid. With people who matter to you.

 

And the gravitas for such connections begin with you wanting the love and belonging. Believing and living your authentic selves. With all our failings, shortcomings and vulnerabilities. Wanting to be seen, really seen, just the way we are. Sharing the story of who you are with all heart. No filters. When we open our hearts, we get better.

 

Fewer but deeper connections. Where vulnerability is an expected, accepted and respect default.

 

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
― Brene Brown

 

Game on?

 

ENDS

 

 

Mind you- you are not alone in your loneliness. If there is more than a hint of double entendre in that line, it is meant to be that way.

 

The natural tendency to look at loneliness has mostly been from the prism of negativity. Not surprising. And because that call is coming from deep within ‘ yours truly ‘, and open articulation about it is at a premium, the net result is that you feel even more isolated. Emotional inadequacy takes centre stage and the loop is endless.

 

Yes, loneliness is a drive to overcome a persistent feeling of separateness. This does not mean that we are doomed by it. It comes with the territory, it is part of the human condition. Pioneering psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described the pain of loneliness as “the result of a ubiquitous yearning for an unattainable perfect internal state.”

 

Aloneness, individuality and identity form an inseparable trifecta. So, being separate from the rest is good news in more ways than one. When loneliness meets onlyness, the potential is uniqueness.

 

Let’s look at another aspect of loneliness which probably goes unacknowledged. When you are spending most of the time with your own self, which can be painful surely, what you end up distilling is a path to insight. When you dive into the deepest ravines and unearth your imagination and experiences. As novelist Zora Neale Hurston puts it ” it is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams “.

 

Loneliness and creativity are partners in rhyme. Man’s search for meaning( if one were to borrow liberally the title of Viktor Frankl‘s seminal book of the same name) are all call outs from the valleys of loneliness. In aggregate, there are disparate groups of people who are building things based on their own perspective not despite loneliness but because of it.

 

Contrarian as it may sound, and as painful as it maybe, our feelings of separation are what provide the scope for holding us together.

 

So, the way out(or way in?) would be to see it in ourselves, see it on others, talk about it not as a failing but as a catalyst for change, for self-discovery. And in that lies the deepening of our ability to identify with that most human of feelings.

 

“Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.” —Pearl Buck

 

ENDS

 

Intuition: the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.

 

The Britannica Dictionary meaning of intuition goes something like this- “a natural ability or power that makes it possible to know something without any proof or evidence : a feeling that guides a person to act a certain way without fully understanding why”.

 

In a world besieged by data and analytics, a compelling need for rationalisation, our default thinking and our incredible capacity to miss the word for the trees, we regrettably overlook the value that stems from this secret emissary of knowledge by investing copious amounts of our emotional and cerebral energies making intuition and its significant potential sub-optimal. Unfortunately.

 

Being prudent in hindsight is a given. It often gives us a clear sense of what was already there, somewhere, well before it penetrated our mind. Not much weightage is given to gut-instinct but it is time that we started throwing that weight around. For all the wonders of modern technology, there is no substitute for the gut instinct. The psychology of intuition is trusting your gut. “Trust your hunches. They’re usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.“

 

Javier Marias encapsulates this beautifully in his book Your Face Tomorrow– he writes ” Everything is there on view, in fact, everything is visible very early on in a relationship just as it is in all honest, straightforward stories, you just have to look to see it, one single moment encapsulates the germ of many years to come, of almost our whole history — one grave, pregnant moment — and if we want to we can see it and, in broad terms, read it, there are not that many possible variations, the signs rarely deceive if we know how to read their meanings, if you are prepared to do so..”

 

 

When people talk about having great intuition or being good decision-makers, it’s because they’ve worked at honing their gut feeling skills. Intuitions are personal, and no one else can understand the full extent of your gut feeling. You have to deal with it alone. Trusting your gut or intuition is an act of trusting yourself.

 

Ready?

 

ENDS

 

The zeitgeist is filled with comments, reviews, recommendation engines and collective bias. There is ample arsenal at everyone’s disposal to judge, critique, offer an opinion on anything and everything. Most of the world is gainfully employed doing this. So, the jury need not be out on this one.

 

Someone else’s opinion of you, your art or business is NONE of your business. Because a lot of the input coming in is irrational with utter disregard to the rational context it has to be perceived in. They are not emotionally connected but given the infinite freedom of expression inventory at their disposal, they find a way to say something. And in any case, humans are woefully slack at explaining our irrational feelings in the context of rational reasons. So, we make things up. Fill the void. Without realising that it ends up being void and baseless.

 

Your daughter applying for University or a close one getting admitted to a hospital. Yes, a second opinion might matter. Generally though, in public domains, the comments or recommendations may not align with relevance and reality.

 

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance- Plato. Be careful how you operate on the altar of ‘ collective bias ‘.

 

ENDS

 

 

 

If you are curious, why a blog post on curiosity just a few weeks after I had written about enrolling into the university of curiosity( you can read it here if you are interested https://www.sureshdinakaran.com/blog/2023/11/11/have-you-enrolled-into-the-university-of-curiosity/), it is because of my quest to build a curious mind and encourage a few others to do the same.

 

The old saying goes ” curiosity killed the cat “, which is more a caution to being too nosy or inquisitive, but in reality, asking questions and seeking knowledge is a valuable way to learn and grow. Our default thinking revolves around assumptions, biases and certainty and the lens with which we see things(both old and new) is conditioned by that. By living a curiosity-inspired life, including practicing things like asking great questions and seeking out diverse perspectives, you are showing others how we can all begin to live and in turn how we can begin to change how we approach our relationships, the way we help children learn, the way we help young people cope and grow.

 

That said, there are two sides to the curiosity coin. Curiosity can impede you as well just as much it can inspire. Because curiosity can send you in multiple directions( being macro-curious) and fracture your attention and focus, both of which are the bedrocks of progress and achievement. So, curiosity without focus is a sub optimal calling. Which could be the reason why you might start a few projects and complete not very many. You drift from one thing to the other, and because they might be unrelated, you do not accumulate any continuity or advantage on the way.

 

Micro curiosity helps move the needle forward on the task at hand. Exploring areas that are heterogenous to your own, finding hacks to solve a problem that you are encountering, asking questions as to how things work etc but all of that while being diverse confluence back to finishing your task or project on hand.

 

How is your curiosity being directed? Is it rocket fuel or a speed breaker? Is it macro or micro? Get the cue..

 

ENDS

 

Addiction: a compulsive, chronic, physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance, behavior, or activity having harmful physical, psychological, or social effects and typically causing well-defined symptoms (such as anxiety, irritability, tremors, or nausea) upon withdrawal or abstinence : the state of being.

 

You can add FOMO to the mix of symptoms in the above definition of addiction. And get away with it without question.

 

A simple Q&A: Who is responsible for social media addiction: Both me and you!  The very purpose of social media marketing is to create addiction. As we know, here’s the journey. Begin with creating content so insanely relevant(with the aid of a recommendation engine) that people spend a lot of time engaging with it on an app or website or a social media platform. Based on the consumption habits that you capture as precious data as they soak in and devour the content, create ads that are bespoke tailored and personalised for the user through targeted advertising. In other words, create social media addiction … at all costs. Create addiction. That’s social media marketing success.

 

All that is great because it is working for marketers, brands, organisations( predominantly the MAANG brigade viz– Meta | Alphabet | Apple | Netflix | Google – the flip side to it is that it seems like a ‘Khoon Bari Maang‘ (for those who follow and understand Hindi). The consternation of this consume at all costs phobia comes with a serious dent in mental health. Unsurprisingly, insights from multiple surveys suggest that design strategies by tech companies that encourage prolonged use of social media are working. And how! Platforms like AirbNB design for trust and a lot of social media platforms design for addiction.

 

Shouldn’t we be concerned? Yes, we damn well be. Suicide rates for teens and young adults are rising. Although some suspect a link between social media use and suicide, there is currently not enough evidence to definitively confirm it as a proven factor. Social media can increase exposure to negative messaging, however, that may promote self-harm.

 

Anxiety can make it hard for adolescents to go to school or participate in activities. According to a recent Pew survey, parents worry about anxiety or depression (28%) and lower self-esteem (27%). They also worry that social media leads their teen to feel pressured to act in a certain way (32%) or could be bullied (29%). 38% of teens say they can feel overwhelmed with the drama on social media.

 

There is a complex relationship between social comparison on social media and eating disorders, which are both medical and mental health conditions. Platforms such as Instagram can be saturated with hyper-idealized and sometimes highly edited images. The perfect life is just an air brush away is the myth. The reality is cruelly different.

 

In November 2021, Lush(the cosmetics brand) decided to remove most of its social media accounts(Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat & Facebook) across 48 countries because of ignored harms to users. Some research has found an association between the frequency of comparing one’s own physical appearance to others on social media and body dissatisfaction. One study suggested that teenagers’ widespread use of social media could put them at risk of eating disorders, particularly if they’re already vulnerable to body dysmorphia.

 

So, what is the higher goal here for brands and marketers. Can we begin with “Do No Harm” as an ethos and practice? Me, as an individual, maybe causing no harm in my personal attempt at influencing my readers | users, but when the entire collective of marketers and brand guardians are creating and encouraging content consumption at all times, it becomes a serious problem indeed.

 

Sometime back, the ex-CMO of Coca Cola Sergio Zyman had quoted “the goal of marketing was to sell more stuff, to more people, more often, for more money.” So, when every social media marketer is creating addiction and profiting from it, the cumulative effort is the root of the global problem. In fact, marketers are the entire problem because the purpose of creating addiction is to sell more stuff to more people, more often, for more money.

 

In summarising, social media marketing is directly contributing to social media addiction. The domino effect of it is the role of the catalyst its playing in the rampant mental health crisis. Perhaps I am playing my part(if one can call it that) of contributing to the crisis. I would be candid and confess that I do not have a solution for this. But, rather than look the other way, we all can start a conversation that attempts to find one.

 

Some relevant reading on social media and healthy habits can be found on these links below:-

 

https://www.brandknewmag.com/these14principles/

https://www.brandknewmag.com/social-media-is-ruining-our-minds-it-also-might-save-them/

How Evolutionary Biology Explains Smartphone Addiction

Ready?

 

ENDS

 

THE BIG QUESTION IS THIS – In a world made numb by digital noise, what can any business or brand do to make itself relevant again? Why should anyone care?

 

Yes, I know the caption of this blog sounds audacious. Especially considering the speed, dynamism and unpredictability that surrounds us at all times. So, if you see this is hazarding a guess, you are spot on. Sticking my neck out, nonethless, and it is that time of the year where everyone is empowered to make predictions and forecasts. Here goes.

 

• One of the strongest aspects of the future of marketing is something that we can easily borrow from the past viz the need for a solid product or service. That is a given. Blue Ocean or Green Swan can be your strategy picks while doing so.

 

• It may sound contrarian but the conventional rote method of finding customers for your product or service will need to be relooked at. The better way would be to find products or services or solutions for your customers. You are welcome to see a detailed rant on this in the video on this link https://www.brandknewmag.com/dont-find-customers-for-your-products-find-products-for-your-customers/ 

 

• ARE YOU WORTH A SPECIAL TRIP? It’s an era of Online upending – Now that more and more is ordered online or experienced online, the only trips that we take are special trips. If your brand | service or your place isn’t worth a special trip, it’s unlikely that the customer would be coming by any time soon!

• WE ARE ALL NOMADS HERE. The best ideas come from outside your core vertical – something that we can define as ‘analogous inspiration’. To transform your industry, look at someone else’s. We would have thought that Hilton or IHG or Marriott would have lunched AirbNB or that Spotify or an ITunes would have been created by HMV or subscription would have remained the prerogative of media platforms- cars have been offered on subscription by Volvo for the past few years and the trend will continue.

• CREATIVITY IS FUTURE PROOF – Creativity is human, it is global, it is technology-agnostic, it doesn’t discriminate. From people working at the bleeding edge of their fields to those others who bring humanity to technology and industry. The call to action in times to come will be for creatives to take control of our tomorrow. It helps recapture the feeling of optimism, not fear for the future. Because in the hands of creatives, we potentially have a future that is bright, progressive, diverse and equitable.

 

• CAUTION: THE VALUE OF MARKETING IS NOT WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN TOLD IT IS – Marketing isn’t the act of getting people to buy what you’re paid to sell them . Time to reconsider your tired email lists, sneaky retargeting and costly pre-roll ads –Instead, reach for next-generation experiences that touch people’s hearts and move their minds. Give your audience genuine human emotions: goosebumps — quicken pulses, and they’ll never forget you.

• Leading in from the above point- AI driven content and experiences will play a significant role in the times to come. The sheer speed and accuracy with which content can be curated, created, aggregated and articulated using AI while keeping personalisation in view will be manna for heaven for marketers and brand owners. It will also align beautifully with an economy that is migrating from ownership to usership at a furious clip.

 

• The Metaverse and such other new ecosystems to have fun- From the Physical, Digital, Phygital and now the meta will offer inspiration to consumers and brands to explore, experiment and deliver | receive great experiences. Avatars that are either homogenous to existing real life personas or completely heterogenous to it will be the order of the day creating a zeitgeist of awe, surprise and the unexpected. The meta will offer the right crutch to address the opportunity as the brain remembers what it least expects, it will be able to deliver the unexpected and create lasting memories.

 

• Yours truly or the personal brand will become the heroines and heroes in the times to come. Augmented and validated by consistency, authenticity and relatability across platforms be it mainstream, digital, phygital or the meta. So, build and they should come.

 

• THE CASTING OUCH – Your audience is|will be the hero. Let’s call them AWEdience!  You are only the sidekick. They want to know how you can help them (WIIFM-WHAT’s IN IT FOR THEM?).. NOT how great you are!

• Speed will be a strategy: Organisations and brands that are leaden footed will get caught like a deer in the headlights. As boardrooms, debate, analyse and ascertain, there are others who are already walking the talk and engaging with their customers. Agility and speed in thinking , planning & executing will serve brands and organisations well.

 

These were some of the aspects of marketing that most interests me going forward. Happy to hear your thoughts. Thank you.

 

ENDS

 

Glennon Doyle writes, “Our next life will always cost us this one. If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true.” The change that we seek and want to see will require you to die before you die. And here dying is not the end. It is a beginning.

 

Moving upwards would mean going downwards. Steps forward often require steps down. Our old self becomes the fertiliser for our new self. Our old truths becomes the torchlight for new discoveries. The paths once trodden by us become the GPS for our new destinations. Life owes a lot to death. The seed dies to give life to a plant. Wheat becomes bread.

 

Stopping to hang onto the coat tails of the past doesn’t mean forgetting. As we emerge out of our default, we begin to see endless possibilities and the potential to fly in a multiple directions. The metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly comes with letting go.

 

 

Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives, lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. If your exiting life is too comfortable, one will stop learning and growing.

 

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
― Pico Iyer

 

ENDS

 

What are the ingredients of a ‘good life‘?

 

Is it money? An important job? A beautiful house? Leisure time? These metrics seem to be at the receiving end of our obsessive focus, leading us astray without us either realising or wanting to acknowledge it. Work contributes to our anxiety and pressure and the fall back of our free time is immersed in a backyard called blue screens.

 

“If we really want to live, we’d better start at once to try..if we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start to die”- W. H Auden

 

The choice is simple. Between now and the end of our lives we can choose either to live or to die. Biological life is an automatic process, as long as we take care of the needs of the body. But to live in the sense that poet Auden refers to above is not something that will happen by itself. In fact, everything conspires against it. If we don’t take charge of its direction, our life will be controlled by the outside which will ensure that we are marching to a different beat, nothing of which is our own. Biologically programmed instincts will use it to replace the genetic material we carry, the culture will ensure that we will propagate its values and institutions and other people will use as much of our energy to further their own agenda- with no compunction on how all these would affect us. We cannot expect anyone to help us live. We must discover how to do it ourselves.

 

‘To live‘ is NOT just biological survival. It must mean to live in fullness, without waste of time and potential, expressing one’s own uniqueness, yet participating intimately in the complexity of the cosmos.

 

Life will mean what we experience from morning to night, seven days a week, for about seventy years if we are lucky or more if we are very fortunate. So, the best strategy is to assume that these seventy odd years are our best chance to experience the cosmos and that we should make the fullest use of it. For, if we don’t, we might lose everything; whereas if we are wrong and there is life beyond the grave, we lose nothing.

 

Finding flow will be at the sweet spot where one is not restrained by the accident called ‘birth’ and the accompanying allies in the script called gender, social hierarchies.

 

As James Clear puts it “Life is harder when you expect a lot of the world and little of yourself. Life is easier when you expect a lot of yourself and little of the world “.

 

Ready to engage with everyday life?

 

ENDS