Image “Cold?” courtesy of Allan Foster on Flickr

When you ride the subway in fall, you’re reminded that this is the time of year when people share an invisible gift called The Cold.

There are hundreds of viruses that cause the common cold. All of them have one thing in common, which is that they are good at spreading.

The common cold is relatively harmless from a health perspective. Its impact is cumulative. Millions of people get a cold each year. A cold influences productivity and sociability. The true costs of a cold in most cases are social and economic, not physiological or epidemiological.

Every year, millions of small differences make one big difference. The cold season ends, and the gift exchange attenuates. In the meantime, the common cold feeds the medication industry and accounts for almost half of all the hours spent at home, away from work.

Cold viruses have the simplest of business models. Always be on the move, always adapt, and replicate over and over across a large population.

An idea has “gone viral” when it has met these conditions. It need only have a small, temporary impact on any one individual. If it has the ability to always be on the move, and to adapt across populations and cultures, it will have a cumulative impact.

Make your ideas simple, adaptable, and easy to share. Win over the individual but also consider the cumulative impact of your efforts.

Photo “Shot Put” courtesy of Daniel Wetzel on Flickr

Every success is the culmination of a series of failures. To get it right once you have to get it wrong a hundred, maybe a thousand, times. Then you get it almost-right a thousand times more. The day arrives, at last, when you succeed.

Or it doesn’t, because there are no success guarantees.

Not all visions will come true. Many businesses will fail. For every story of Olympic glory, there are a million stories of dreams unfulfilled.

Giving up on a dead-end strategy or a flawed prospect can be part of a powerful process. The challenge is knowing when to change course. How can we know the time has come to give up on a venture, a product, a career, or a goal?

There are two kinds of success—task success and life success.

Task success. If your goal is to go to Rio de Janeiro and win the 2016 gold medal in shot put, you have one pathway.

Life success. If your goal is to lead a happy, satisfying life in sports, there are infinite pathways: weekend warrior, coach, fan, collector, researcher, writer, historian, trainer, scout.

Task success is clear, discrete, and measurable. Either you win the gold or you don’t. You can assess progress and the likelihood of reaching your specific goals. Emotional success is the desired long-term condition of your life.

Imagine a thousand-mile trip. How do you navigate your way to the destination? By focusing on a visible, short-term point along the horizon that brings you ever closer to an end-point you can’t see.

Have a long-term pathway and a series of short-term pathways that support it.

One is a point on the near horizon, and the other is your final, desired destination. Both speak to the things that will enrich your life.

Photo “Beauty Is Simplicity” courtesy of Reji, on Flickr

We express value, and we hold values. Honesty, authenticity, courage, beauty, integrity. Our values are conceived in the abstract realm and negotiated in the material world of objects. They are subjective but indivisible from our relationships with other living beings.

Value can be measured. Each day on eBay, thousands of bidders answer the question What is it worth?

What about loyalty, truth, or faith? We frown on the idea of putting dollar amounts to values. Loyalty transcends cash. Our values are precious and priceless. Money can’t buy you love.

A skill is an abstraction. So are competence and intelligence and professionalism. No one has an objective number indicating the value per hour of your skill or professional value. Yet, for business to happen, a value must be determined.

Value and values intersect. One of your clients recommends you. She says that you’re honest, reliable, professional, and pleasant. None of these things can be auctioned on eBay. They are values. They are also value.

Your value increases as its intersection with values becomes more clear and compelling in the mind of your customers. This is not a cheap marketing gimmick, it is an insight into value.

You can choose to make a widget, or you can choose to enrich people’s lives by doing something that supports and nourishes their values.

The choice is yours.

Photo “junior detective” courtesy of Jessica Lucia on Flickr

What sets the geniuses apart—in journalism, entrepreneurship, cosmology, business innovation, and the arts?

It’s not the school they went to. Some of the world’s most successful and brilliant people never had a formal education.

It’s not good luck, or connections. It’s not hard work, although hard work helps.

The world’s most effective people use a simple formula. With it, they get powerful insights that they can then use to reach their destination.

Here is the formula:

Ask good questions and have the tenacity to get answers

What is a good question?

A good question is clear, specific, and strategic. It’s a laser-guided missile. The person who asks good questions may not know the answers, but she knows where the answers are. Not just any answer: the true answer.

To get to the true answer, you have to be patient. You may have to ask the question two, three, or more times. You’ll have to knock down doors. Some answers prefer to go undiscovered. Some are shocking, embarrassing, or scandalous. Only the brave and tireless will discover them.

Learn how to ask good questions, and be tenacious.

Photo “Shopping – Despair” courtesy of David Blackwell on Flickr

Newspapers have content, and the business of marketing content is, of course, content marketing.

Content marketing asks What gets and holds a reader’s attention? Then it says Do this, and you’ll get higher conversions.

We know that the news is mostly war, terrorism, political fighting, catastrophe, scandal, and tragedy. Newspapers sell discontent, or they try to. These days it’s not working so well.

The truth is that all marketing presumes discontent.

The worst thing that could happen to the global economy is a world of content people, 100% satisfied with their lives and uninterested in adding or subtracting anything from them.

Universal human satisfaction would be great, but it wouldn’t sell most products. For the economic system to function, we need millions of consumers who have a good life but not a “perfect” one.

What is the perfect life? Your life, plus an iPhone with a slightly larger screen than the iPhone screen you have. Once you have the new iPhone, the definition of perfect changes. The ideal consumer is restless and always wants bigger, brighter, more, newer, and different.

What if we were to practice content marketing in the second sense of the word—using our talents to encourage satisfied, centred, peaceful, and grateful human beings?

Photo “Huge Hole revisit” courtesy of Sam on Flickr.

Down the street, there is an enormous hole. It was a hole one month ago, and it is a hole today. The day is coming when the hole will be a building in which thousands of people are living.

Somewhere there is a drawing of the building. The hole is part of that plan. When the workers look at the hole, they see a foundation.

Everything in life starts as a hole.

I was traveling to a job for a new client. I had $75 in my business account, and nothing in my personal account. I had debts. I wasn’t sure if there was even enough room left on my credit card to pay for my expenses. It was one of the happiest days of my life, because I was building a business of my own. Yes I was in a hole, but I had a plan. The hole was my foundation.

You don’t ever see a building being made. You see workers standing around, smoking. You see men carrying things. You see materials being piled up. You see a lot of apparently random activity. A sky-scraper is made in slow motion. It’s a long-run proposition. It only happens because there’s a plan, and they stick with it.

In the long-run, we’re all dead. In the long-run you find out what you’re really made of. In the long-run, all the facts see the light of day. So whatever you’re doing, get in it for the long-run.

In the day-to-day we have a lot of surprises, failures, tough lessons, and set-backs. Some days are smoking men. Some days feel like nothing but the seemingly pointless activity of a shirking work-crew. You can do anything, but right now the bank account is empty and more bills are on the way.

A hole is just a hole if you don’t have a long-term plan.

Capitalism, entrepreneurship, industry. These terms are often used inter-changeably, but they are not the same.

Capitalism is a system of social, political, and economic governance. It is the rule of capital, of property, of surplus value. In a capitalist society, the rules of the game are determined by capital for the benefit of capital.

To some degree, the interests of the great mass of people—the public—must also be accommodated, or perhaps managed from above. Capitalism and democracy exist in tension, because the interests of the demos do not always align with the interests of capital.

Entrepreneurs create businesses. They deliver goods and services. They build, invest, and produce. You can be a capitalist without ever being an entrepreneur. Capitalism, especially finance capitalism, need never invent a product, start a business, or create a job.

Entrepreneurs make things, capitalists leverage capital in a restless effort to convert nature into capital. Surplus value begets more surplus value, which begets more surplus.

An entrepreneur becomes a capitalist when his chief and overwhelming purpose is to invest capital in order to accumulate greater capital. Eventually he will understand that making things is a poor wealth strategy.

Those who make things earn money. Those who leverage capital to convert the world into capital generate personal wealth. Indeed, those who own productive property are wealth.

Industry can exist without capitalism. Entrepreneurs can, and do, create jobs and factories and goods. From a capitalist perspective, shutting down factories, or substituting capital for labor, can be as lucrative as opening a factory and hiring workers.

Entrepreneurs, capitalism, and industrialism co-exist. They are related. But they are not the same.

Conclusions:

A job is not property. Industry is not capitalism. A capitalist is not necessarily an entrepreneur. Money is not wealth. America is not a democracy.