Alpha Mind Blog

The first casualty in the war over water? Was it the guy in Sydney, or the truth?

Truth is the first casualty of war.

My fine Aussie friend Lee Hopkins has a slogan with which he ends the episodes of his podcast. “Communicate with passion!” he chirps.

Okay, Lee, I’m about to do just that.

Lee grabbed me with his short post this week, “There will be more blood shed yet.”

I knew that Lee would be paying attention. For many months he’s been noticing, out loud, Australian politicians’ state of denial over dwindling water supplies.

Is Australia’s drought part of a natural cycle or a symptom of AGW (anthropogenic global warming)? We can’t know for sure, but if warming continues and freak weather gets freakier, history’s verdict will most likely be that we, not unassisted nature, caused it.

Lee didn’t mention AGW, but as to violence, he is surely right. It has only begun.

Under nearly every scenario in which global warming kills people, we would be desperately naïve to think that all of those people will die without a fuss or a fight.

Climate change denial is the first act of the next great war (and I mean really great, war by comparison to which USA-on-Iraq is a mere mugging.) It’s a murdering of truth and a murdering of many, many people, of whom those already born probably make up only a small minority. Real skepticism is a fine thing and I respect it and practice it. But only a few points I’ve ever heard made by AGW deniers are honest skepticism; the greatest bulk by far are outright lies.

Being myself a skeptic, I even doubt whether Sydney’s lawn-watering killing is the first such event caused by climate change, if indeed that is what it is. But my best guess is that future history books will name it just that way. (In both respects: related to AGW, and the first murder thus related.)

Truth is also the last casualty of war.

Besides several hundred blog posts, my reading this week included Praise of Folly, by Desiderius Erasmus. This led me to read some literature about the man. I had known little about him except that he influenced the King James Bible. And that Luther called him “an eel whom only Christ can catch.”

In that literature, what struck me most is how little respect Erasmus gets in the Christian world.

The reason, I think, is that he simply refused to participate, on either side, in the Protestant schism.

Here’s what the online Catholic Encyclopedia has to say about him. I’ve emphasized the sentences I think are crucial.

Opinions concerning Erasmus will vary greatly. No one has defended him without reserve, his defects of character being too striking to make this possible. His vanity and egotism were boundless… he lacked straightforward speech and decision in just those moments when both were necessary. His religious ideal was entirely humanistic[:] reform of the Church on the basis of her traditional constitution, the introduction of humanistic “enlightenment” into ecclesiastical doctrine, without, however, breaking with Rome. … Devoid of any power of practical initiative he was constitutionally unfitted for a more active part in the violent religious movements of his day…

I believe what is actually meant here is that Erasmus’ profound pacifism was A Bad Thing. And make no mistake, Erasmus consistently opposed not only war, but the schism which would necessarily bring war with it.

Luther was spiteful, malevolent, and fond of violence. He took joy in the burning of synagogues and Anabaptists. (Erasmus opposed the killing of heretics.) Johann Eck, who opposed Luther after the publication of the 95 theses, was spiteful, malevolent, and fond of violence. His purpose in “debating” Luther was not to sort truth from falsehood, but to find some way of painting Luther into the heretic’s corner, where the full bludgeon of papal authority could be used against him.

For the occurrence of schism instead of reformation, Eck was as responsible as Luther was.

Meanwhile, Erasmus disagreed with Luther but refused to condemn him.

And while the motivations of Luther and Eck dominated both sides in the schism…

while Catholic and Lutheran vilified and killed each other…

while both sides gleefully murdered anyone who dared to live by true Christian convictions…

Erasmus simply tried to stay out of harm’s way long enough to finish a few scholarly projects, including a trustworthy translation of scripture.

The author of the quoted article believes, perhaps, that this desire demonstrates bad character. That Luther and Eck were true solid men and Erasmus wasn’t.

Even in reconciliation, the lying goes on.

The Catholic Encyclopedia was originally published in the seven years up to 1914. Yes, it’s old, and Catholic-Protestant reconciliation hadn’t gone very far in that day. But even now, when the two sides seek as much common ground as they can, who in this movement of unity is singing the praises of Erasmus?

After a bitter war, when the two sides reconcile, they still assume that what matters is the two sides. Catholic-Protestant reconciliation tends to riff on the theme “of course the other side was right in their way, from their point of view.” The two opposing points of view are now reconciled, but also validated.

Which is a great lie.

A better reconciliation would be of both sides to the truth. To the truth that they should never have been sides at war. The truth which would say “we were both wrong and Erasmus has chosen the better part.”

I’m reminded of an account I read some years ago of an early 20^th-century event. Some still-living veterans from both sides of the civil war got together and shook hands and adulated each other for their equal valor.

And there wasn’t a black face in the crowd. None had been invited.

War, born of lies, leads to a lying form of peace. One which says “My!, weren’t we both brave and principled, even if our principles were different!” Not a truthful peace, which would say, “In our thirst for a paltry mastery, we made pawns, we made non-persons, we made carrion of countless other souls whom God loves. May He forgive us. May we learn a better way and teach it to our children.”

In each such lying peace, the smiles and hugs and mutual congratulations are only dirt overlying the seeds of the next war.

The deniers of AGW count on a lying peace, even if the worst scenarios come about. They count on a forgiveness arising out of humanity’s perversity. Humanity’s way of paying attention to the power-wielders on the “sides” of a war, and ignoring the simply dead who never wanted to take a side but wanted to simply live.

Paying attention to global warming isn’t about saving the planet. The planet is a big wet rock. It will do fine even if we leave fewer than ten species to squirm their way out of the deuterordial soup.

No, it’s not about the planet.

It’s about all those other species.

But more…

it’s about our own species, the one that, rightfully, is dearest to us.

It’s about our great-grandchildren.

But more yet…

it’s about war, which God hates and we should, too…

And it’s about saving our souls.

Looks like I’ve got the scoop: this is the first publication of this press release:
———————————————–
POLITICIAN LOBBIES BUSINESS ON BEHALF OF THE EARTH
How Loni Hancock’s Green Passion May Influence California Small Business Strategy

Richmond, California – October 1, 2007. California Assembly Member Loni Hancock’s choice for Small Business of the Year in Legislative District 14 has been invited to help the California Small Business Roundtable (SBR) formulate strategy. Excellent Packaging & Supply, a producer and distributor of earth-friendly food packaging, was selected by Assembly Member Hancock for its green credentials, and now has received the call from SBR on the basis of its dynamic, proactive management. Yet, if not for some coaxing by Hancock, none of it would have happened.

Excellent Packaging, represented by co-owners Steve Levine and Allen King, is one of five small companies invited by SBR to its yearly retreat, which will be held on October 7 and 8 in Half Moon Bay, on the San Francisco peninsula. The five firms were selected from the seventy-five small businesses honored by their local Assembly Members at this year’s annual Small Business Day in Sacramento.

The relationship between the company and the legislator started slowly. King, the firm’s president, recalls that when Hancock’s office first called and asked Excellent Packaging to be part of a Town Hall meeting on the environment in Berkeley, he declined. But Hancock wouldn’t accept that answer, and the invitation was repeated. Here’s how Hancock explains why she pressed the issue: “With over 40% growth in the past two years, and no signs of slowing down, EPS has demonstrated that it is possible to be a successful small business while at the same time doing its part to contribute to the sustainability of the planet.”

The environment is no new concern on Hancock’s part. Her web site proudly announces that hers was the first Assembly District Office in California to be certified as a green business. She chairs the Assembly Committee on Natural Resources, and does all she can to be a green influence well beyond the legislative sphere. For example, she actively collaborates with the Green Chamber of Commerce to educate businesses in how to become green-certified. “So our asking Excellent Packaging a second time was consistent with everything Assemblywoman Hancock does,” said an aide in Hancock’s office.

“When she asked us again,” says King, “I realized she was right.” At first, he explains, he’d thought that EPS had little to contribute. “But then it hit me that since we care about making a real difference, we have a duty to raise our profile a little, and let others see how a green business can succeed.” EPS participated in the Berkeley event, which Hancock considered a success. She went on to name Excellent Packaging the Small Business of the Year for her district.

When King received the award at Small Business Day in May, his brief acceptance message made a strong impression on leaders of the Small Business Roundtable. “We are looking for talented new blood,” says Betty Jo Toccoli, Chair of the Roundtable, “and Allen impressed several of us as a dynamic, proactive thinker.” From that impression came the invitation the Roundtable extended to King and Levine.

The Small Business Roundtable was created to develop strategy for the advocacy program of the California Small Business Association, which represents over 203,000 small business owners statewide. The company has a voice as far away as Washington, through its delegates to the White House Conference on Small Business, as well as, of course, a strong presence in Sacramento. So if, through the presence of King and Levine at the SBR retreat, the Small Business Association’s lobbying has a bit more green to it next year than in the past, Loni Hancock will know that the influence began in her office and is simply coming full circle.

Before I start talking about ancient Greek literature, let me assure you that I’m talking to you. Not only that, but I’m talking about you, and about your life. I’m talking about how you can win friends and influence people, how you can be an Alpha Mind, and how you can realize your dreams.

Promise. Cross my heart. That’s what I’m talking about here. Just bear with me while I go back a few millennia. I’ll bring it back to you. Really.

Okay. Ahem. I draw a deep breath and begin.

There are two kinds of people in the world. There’s a very large group who have never read Herodotus. Then there is a smaller group who are in love with Herodotus.

Oh, all right, then, I suppose there are a few who have read Herodotus and haven’t fallen in love, but I think these are people who lack the capacity to understand something essential about him:

Herodotus was writing about us, about our age, about our lives.

Every good storyteller does that. And every good story does that.

Now, I’ll admit Herodotus didn’t always clearly signal that he was writing about the future, about us. That’s why I chose not to make his mistake. That’s why I told you up front that, even though I’m going far back in time and far away in space, I’m talking about you and your life.

Because not everybody has the same capacity to understand this for themselves. In consequence, not everybody has the same capacity to be bowled over by great storytelling. Or more importantly, to be taught by it. That’s why some need help.

Okay, now a story from Herotodus. A very old story. But wait! Wait! I can bring this much closer to home because this very story was in a movie not too long ago.

In “The English Patient,” Katherine Clifton reads our story from Herodotus, aloud, around a campfire. The story is the one about Candaules and how he lost the kingdom of Lydia to Gyges.

To put it briefly, Candaules goes crazy for his wife, and having decided she’s the most beautiful woman in existence, decides he also needs to prove this to someone else. So he arranges for Gyges, his right-hand man, to see her naked. She learns of it, is outraged, and gives Gyges a choice: either kill Candaules and take the throne, or else be killed himself. Choosing to live, he kills his boss and takes the wife and the kingdom.

(Yes, Herodotus tells it better. I’m hurrying up to get to my own point.)

That is the story within the story. The story of the English Patient is this: Geoffrey Clifton, husband of Katharine, has half an insight (alas only half!) about this tale. He knows that Candaules’ obsession with his wife parallels his own obsession with Katherine.

What he fails to understand is how parallel the parallel actually is. He sees that he suffers the same uxorious daftness, but fails to hear the cautionary tale. He brags about his own excessive adoration for Katherine, but also about Katherine herself. And in the midst of this inane display, Almásy (the “English Patient”) falls in love with her. All of which results in death for all three, with gruesome injuries and horrid, lingering storytelling for Almásy.

Who can know how much Geoffrey’s silly spotlighting of Katherine contributed to the dreadful outcome? But it clearly did nothing to prevent it.

Geoffrey Clifton, alas, had only a partial capacity to understand that Herodotus, 2400 years earlier and without knowing a thing about airplanes or World War II, was writing about Geoffrey Clifton.

In the same way, I think, those few scholars and artists who sneer at Herodotus have failed to grasp how, in “The Fox and the Grapes,” Aesop, that other ancient Grecian, was writing about them. After all, here they are, living about 2600 years after the invention of literature…

Here they are, looking on a man who lived within a fewscore decades of that invention, and was making up a whole genre as he went along, and doing it masterfully…

Here they are, utterly incapable of rising to anything like the level of that old long-dead talebearer…

And so of course they are forced to say, “ah, those grapes couldn’t be any good anyway.”

Which only shows them to be particularly, especially, notably dense. Because, unlike Herodotus, Aesop tacked onto the end of each of his stories a big sign, in block capitals, underlined, saying “Here’s how this story is about you and your future.”

A very sad fact about humanity is that not only are many people so dense that they can’t read the big, underlined, block-caps signs plastered over a great story, but, oh worse! …

All of us are that dense, at least in places. In our blind spots.

Those of us who aspire to thought leadership face many choices. Once we know what point we want to make, we face a multitude of ways we might go about making it. Each decision we make leads to other decisions. Once we have chosen a particular story to convey our point, we still face a question as fundamental as: “After the story, do I tell them what I told them, like Aesop, or leave them to figure it out for themselves, like Herodotus?”

In this one instance, I’m going to be as obvious as Aesop. I’m going to make explicit what this post has implicitly assumed:

If thou wouldst influence the thoughts of others, thou shalt tell stories.

Why? Because people instinctively know that every good story is about the future. Is about their future. That’s why they listen to stories, remember them, tell and retell them.

The question for the would-be Alpha Mind is how to use the natural human interest in stories, not merely to say what we want to say, but to convey it into the part of the hearer’s brain, wherever it may be, where it will make a difference.

We’ll begin exploring this by looking at how people really feel about the six Ws. Hint: they don’t teach it in journalism school, but every good journalist understands it, even if only at the instinctive, know-it-so-well-we-don’t-know-we-know-it level. The level at which all of us understand grammar.

The six Ws: that’s where we’ll pick this up in the next post.

The very charming Kami Huyse blogged about the 10 Most Irritating Words on the ‘Net and so sent me on a journey that has now gone 8 hours (with two major computer glitches and a pastoral visit sandwiched in.)

Based on Kami’s partial list and this article, it looks like the full list is probably:

1. folksonomy
2. blogosphere
3. blog
4. netiquette
5. blook
6. webinar
7. vlog
8. social networking
9. cookie
10. wiki

My vote is for “meme.” Yuck. It’s as bad as kudo, almost, but kudo antedates the Internet, while meme, I believe, got currency on the ‘net way back when The Well was new.

Dave Winer (in 2005) on professional journalists: “They take longer to get it wronger.”

Here’s the proof:

NPR : Bloggers Debate Code of Conduct. Nothing wrong in the audio, but the written intro has Kathy Sierra calling for a code of conduct that, as 100 blogs have told me over the past many days, she has come out against.

And, folks, this whole story is as stale as last week’s tuna sandwich. I have several good excuses why I was late picking up on it. But it’s now 17 days later than that, and NPR, with resources vastly greater than mine, is just getting around to stating Kathy’s opinion 180 degrees wrong.

One of the many things I’ve appreciated about Kathy Sierra is that she’s not the least bit interested in making “victim” part of her identity.

And so…

After I got tired of being frustrated that I can’t do anything for Kathy, I realized there’s something I can do, and I will.

I’m going to make it Kathy Sierra Week on the Alpha Mind blog.

Here’s the concept. Having spent more than two weeks miserable about Kathy’s recent trials, I’ve decided I’ve had enough of gnashing my teeth over them. I also feel they’ve gotten more than enough coverage on other people’s blogs. So, this week, I’m going to leave all that alone, and I’m going to celebrate Kathy for what I believe she wants to be celebrated for: providing a blog which offered knowledge, wisdom, and good whole-wheat substance. (And which I hope will offer it anew, before too long.)

The Genesis of Kathy Sierra Week

Last week it occurred to me that, since Kathy’s stopped blogging, at least for the time being, her blog is a completed product. So I have a chance, foolish as the idea is, of catching up.

I printed out all the posts on her blog. I formatted them in Word first, and made the graphics all uncommonly shrunk so I could get the whole thing under 600 pages. I finished out a toner cartridge and made a bit of a dent in another.

And now I have this unbound more-than-a-ream on my shelf, called Creating Passionate Users, which has become one of my favorite books.

I haven’t finished reading it, and in truth I probably won’t. It’s a boatload of pages, and was never intended to be a book. (I do hope Kathy will edit what’s there into a book, some day. Some day soon.)

One reason I won’t finish reading it soon is that the first quarter of it set off so many explosions in my brain that it’ll take me several weeks to act on the great wealth of ideas it generated.

KSW: a Preview

This week I hope to write about what Kathy has done for my thinking. It’s not exactly the same as saying why Kathy’s wonderful, which I can’t do without the standard caveat that “your mileage may vary.” I can’t say that Kathy is or can be wonderful for everybody, but I can say what she’s done for me. I also can and will invite others to share their own experiences of having grown by reading Kathy’s blog and using her ideas.

My topics are already lined up, and here they are–a short list of the most important things Kathy Sierra has contributed to my life:

• Tuesday: The Alpha Mind Map. Kathy got me to try mind mapping where several others had failed. I’m pretty sure it’ll mean an order-of-magnitude improvement in my blog.
• Wednesday: Getting Seth Godin. I’ve been a fan of Seth’s for years. In fact I’m rather in awe of the man. But KS helped me grasp Seth’s thought in a way that had previously eluded me.
• Thursday: Every Graphic Is a Rebus Only Better. Reading CPU, a light bulb went on about the relationships between–
  • words and pictures
  • the several minds we are of, all of us, and
  • teacher and learner when the teacher understands co-creation.
• Friday: Consultants Rock. Based on those last three lessons, I have a much clearer idea of what I’ll be offering my clients when my church unleashes me on the world in my consultant suit.
• Saturday: The Suck Threshold In Personal Relationships. Why I intimidate Rock Star Daughter and what I can do about it.
• Double-Dip Super Sunday:
  • The Gospel According to Kathy Sierra. I have five sermons left to give at church before I retire. One of them comes from KS. Did you catch her thing about how to read sacred texts? Even she might not be aware she wrote about that, but I, for one, caught the lesson, and I’ll try to convey it on Sunday. I’ll post the audio on my other blog.
  • What Kathy Did Right. I printed out that monster tome in order to study how a blogger succeeds. I’ll summarize what I found. (On this blog.)

Has Kathy Helped You Grow?

I’m hoping some of you will leave comments during the week about how reading Kathy’s blog has helped you grow (as bloggers, tech writers, programmers, teachers, communicators generally, human beings…)

And, BTW, I’ve done my best to fix some problems that have recently made it hard to leave comments. I’ve put in a captcha doohicky and have turned off moderation. (I do reserve the right to delete offensive comments.) Please let me know if you have any problems.

And please contribute!

We live and die by ideas. Thinking is an endeavor of the highest importance.

Not only every person, but every social grouping lives and dies by ideas. Families, communities, non-profits and churches, business enterprises, nation-states, and even, when the stakes are global, all humankind, must originate, evaluate, accept or reject, and act upon ideas. As every problem whose stakes are large is a problem that will be thought about, effective thinking is as urgent a craft as any we engage in together. Thinking is a social endeavor of the highest importance.

This book concerns itself with how ideas are realized. It is a book about thinking, but its focus is not every kind of thought, but that sort of thought which aims toward an idea’s realization in the world outside its originator’s mind. In studying this matter I have, like many before me, found it to be immense. It is as if, wanting to explore the Azores, I had set out from Lisbon and discovered the Americas. The subject contains worlds; whole, well-established arts and sciences are encompassed within it. This, I believe, is why it is so little studied: academics by the nature of their work must go deep, so that each of them can necessarily study only part of a field so vast. Yet as a subject of keen interest to many people in many stations, thoughtcraft deserves, if possible, to be made manageable.

My model for this effort is a military document which, in two editions, has been made public. It is the small book Warfighting, and it treats warfare at a high conceptual level. At around twenty thousand words, it is a small book on a vast topic, yet, by staying above details, it conveys considerable wisdom in a short read. Like many war manuals, it has become standard reading for business executives. Its design is to establish for its readers (U.S. Marines) a common understanding of what is undertaken when a war is fought. My aims are similar, and so I use Warfighting as a model for this essay: “short and easily read.” My goal has been to discern the most important twenty thousand words that can be said about thoughtcraft and say them.
I borrow from Warfighting not only its brevity but its style, because those who need and will engage with my ideas are those for whom thinking is done in warlike environments, where much as at stake and thinking can seldom be allowed to become reverie. (I treat reverie seriously, as a legitimate and valuable form of thought, but those engaged in it will find little motivation to seek out my advice as to how it should be done.) Also, Warfighting is a very cold book about an art, and legitimately so. War encompasses many engineering problems, but is not itself such a problem. The warrior deals in too many uncertainties, and must make too many judgments in unclear circumstances, to succeed only through engineering. And so it is with thoughtcraft.

The quest of an idea for realization is in some sense a quest for territory. In most cases, that territory is other human minds. Even if an idea’s realization will be in a physical object, it must, in most cases, need to find its champions and defeat its opponents. At the heart of this book, then, lies the relationships between the thought and its thinker, and between the communicated idea and its receiver. Crucial, too, is the idea’s fate at the hands of multiple hearers, who will reject, adopt, or adapt it.

The highest duty of any leader in any group is to think clearly, creatively, flexibly, and effectively, and to help their organization to do so. And the highest duty of anyone who originates an idea is to give that idea its best opportunity to be realized and of benefit. This book is intended to provide practical guidance for both. It is not, however, a book of procedures and techniques. Rather, it provides a framework for discerning and understanding the challenges which face ideas and thinkers. Despite a certain arrogance in taking on so vast a subject in so few words, I offer it humbly, in hopes that it will be of help.

After quite some time blogging, I’m now pretty comfortable with it.

So I can see no further excuse not to get this blog onto its topic, which I have neglected for a while.

The premise of “The Alpha Mind” is that thought leadership needn’t always remain a nice-sounding, meaning-free buzzphrase. Quite the contrary, I believe it is worth taking very seriously, which means it is worth defining.

It makes sense to say that a thought leader leads thought. Fair enough. But, as we normally use the words, there’s already an inherent contradiction, or at least a tension.

Our normal thinking about thinking is that it is an individual endeavor. Our normal thinking about leadership is that leaders lead more than one person at a time—that is, leaders lead groups. Then the phrase “thought leader” seems to depict a person who leads a group in a process that is an individual not a group process.

Then the key to taking “thought leadership” seriously, and to understanding it, is to start thinking of thinking as a social activity. It has taken me only a few minutes of this effort to realize that, while we’re unused to conceiving it that way, thinking is a social activity. This is so in two ways:

First, even individual thought is informed by one’s social environment, and in fact a great deal of human thought is about how to negotiate the social environment.

Second, every act of communication between people is an act of corporate, communal thinking.

Clear as this seems to me as I write it, still the prejudice against seeing thought as anything a group can do is deeply held. It’s embedded in our language—notice we have a word “groupthink” which denotes flawed thinking. When we use this term, we use it in some assurance that groups cannot think.

Ah, but there’s precisely why I think the effort I’ve embarked on has begun to look valuable to me.

Because groups really can’t think.

And yet they must.

And so “thought leader” must morph from meaning someone who’s publicly opinionated and who wields opinions as a tool for self-advancement, to someone who is undertaking one of the most crucial human endeavors.

I named this blog a long time ago, so you might guess that I’ve done more thinking about this than I’ve posted. And I have. And tomorrow I begin sharing it.

I’m writing a book called Thoughtcraft. Tomorrow its chapters will begin appearing serially here on the blog.

I hope for feedback.

And I hope you enjoy the book.

…Shel Israel needs a nap. And maybe blogging is wee bit tired, too.

This page on Shel’s blog is a study in what I wrote about in Unfashionably Late. Read the comments.

Shel wants people to respond to his book ideas as they come out, and he’s not getting enough response. And we who commented are saying that maybe a blog isn’t the place to write a book any more. Shelley Powers is especially succinct:

Weblogging really has pushed the limits of ADD–creating it where it didn’t exist before. The medium doesn’t translate well into longer efforts requiring more work or analysis.

And Ted Koterwas chips in with this:

so, if blog posts are getting shorter, fewer people are taking the time to read and comment thoughtfully on long meaty posts, and the twitter hype is true, it would seem that for many people, the ability to broadcast and be social is much more important than having anything meaningful to say.

I appreciate Ted’s mentioning twitter. If blogging has shortened the attention spans of its practitioners, what will twitter do? Or perhaps, what is it already doing?

And maybe it’s not just twitter. There’s also the overabundance of all social media. Some of the best bloggers are getting positively lost to us as they explore Second Life.

I’m not sure I have the nerve to disagree with Seth Godin, but…

Nathan asks Seth how to get a marketing job with no marketing background. Seth says, in essence, forget the job, just market.

Even if you’re 12 years old, start a store on eBay. You’ll learn just about everything you need to learn about digital marketing by building an electronic storefront, doing permission-based email campaigns, writing a blog, etc.

Is this brilliant advice? Or only advice for the brilliant? In other words, has Seth forgotten that not everybody is Seth?

There are many kinds of marketers, but the ones who succeed at all fall into two classes. There are the capable marketers, and there are the brilliant marketers. The latter are precisely the ones Seth is speaking to. These are the entrepreneurial ones, who have no need for the comfort of a big company, who just market because they love it, and who take to it like fish to water.

They are also the ones who tend toward Seth’s brand of brilliance, who figure out the world around them by native ability, not by having it explained to them. They do, as Seth implies everybody can, learn far faster by unaided experience than by classes or apprenticeships. They will, as Seth promises, have folks beating down doors to hire them.

There is a vast need, though, for capable marketers. They aren’t out in the long skinny tail of the bell curve. They learn by being taught. They they aren’t necessarily consumed by the hankering to market. They need a job while they learn to market, and so they find marketing jobs, as Nathan was hoping to do.

And they have one advantage even over Seth: they can empathize with the non-brilliant, who make up the vast bulk of most markets.

Notice that Seth prefaces the advice to start an eBay store with “Even if you’re 12 years old.” Better to have said, “If you’re lucky enough to be 12 years old.” Because a twelve-year-old is far better placed to follow Seth’s advice than a twenty-something or beyond. At twelve years old, you don’t have school loans to pay, a spouse to please, kids underfoot or on the way. Some folks need a job, and if they want to market, it should be a marketing job.

So, aren’t I disagreeing with Seth?

Not really. Because for someone who has the potential to be one of the brilliant marketers, Seth’s path is the quicker way to demonstrate it. And of course, if you’re passionate and single-minded, you should get a marketing job and start your own business.