Still Very Broken...Seth's Blog

For me and my more spartan lifestyle, the most frustrating design I can think of at the moment is that of the Mynthon mint sweets/breath fresheners. A smoker's must-have, naturally you are not going to eat an entire packet in one go, so the box contains a lid which is supposed to click shut. However being made of flimsy cardboard and in general badly designed, it's only a matter of time before a mint explosion goes off in your pocket, leaving the shrapnel of more or less all of the mints, coated in dust and bits of crap that lurk in the pockets of even the most particular of folks, and thus inedible (washing in water just has the effect of reducing them in size, then sticking together in on glutinous morass once dried)...

...but any way I'll be avoiding a Subaru for the time being.

Seth's Blog - Ignorance Is No Longer Simply Not An Excuse, It's A Disgrace..

I'm so glad we live in these times...there's no excuse not to know shit nowadays - not for any of us - and that's great when one thinks that a few centuries ago the bulk of the people in Europe were illiterate.

This post by Seth Godin explains with a bit more panache...

Busy-ness ≠ Business - Seth's Blog

Great post from my big brother, and I have to say offering a certain degree of reassurance; that feeling of sanctimoniousness that seems to arise when one is busy (especially in feeling superior to those who are lazing around) is in fact misplaced, and has little or no bearing on productivity. This had occured to me before, but this gives it at least some degree of veritas..

A New Take On Laziness - Seth's Blog..

...Seth Godin's little brother Sethie Godiney writes..

Great post about laziness...time was when it simply meant shirking physical duties, which meant that it was fairly obvious who was being lazy and when, much to the chagrin and disgust of those who had their noses to the grindstone. However, since most of us don't work in the fields any more, the new way of being lazy is very different and not so much of a no-brainer. It consists of 'emotional laziness' - that is, being too lazy to make that cold call (or any type of call), to disagree with someone superior to you or to innovate. The good news is you don't need to get sweating to rectify the situation if you fall into it..

Can You Be Pro-Business And Still Be 'Alright'? - Seth's Blog

It's official - it's ok to be pro-business and yet not a heartless, polluting, labour-exploiting, cigar-chooing, call-girl patronizing shit, at least nowadays.

Check out this excellent post by my big brother Seth Godin. You see, paradigms have changed. Whilst minimum wages, environmental laws and the like USED to be something of a hindrance to business (when businesses were largely factory-based) this is no longer the case. This is because business needs people, first and foremost, and more to the point healthy, cooperative people, not downtrodden drones.

So unless you're in Russia or something, you can sleep easy whilst you vote for a business-friendly party (like IRL, in Estonia, for example) - they're not the enemy any more and you have an excuse to do the decent thing and chuck the Pete Seeger records at last!

Seth's Blog - The Roush Effect

Gerald Roush, who recently died at the age of 68, was a long time Ferrari enthusiast. Nothing too interesting in that you might think, but as my big brother Seth Godin explains, this obsession led to a very nice little earner indeed, simply by compiling lists of information on Ferraris around the world and selling this info on a subscription basis to a few hundred people.

This is it, I feel. Find a tribe which has a passion for something, and provide everything that that group of individuals want to know about their passion (and sod the rest) and charge them a little bit of money for it...

....of course, it helps if you yourself have a passion for the same thing, and Roush's obssession started in his teens when these things tend to take root. But for those of us in our 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond, I don't for a minute believe all is lost. It's just a question of hitting on something that works; even in a small country like Estonia, we have the internet.

Or maybe you prefer giving a huge amount of your life that you'll never retrieve to employers who don't care if you live or die, performing a task that anyone else could do just as well, donating twenty something per cent of your hard earned money to incompetent Governments to piss up the wall (it's salutary to reflect that the Islamic faith demands as zakat, one of its five pillars, that an adherent  gives just 2.5 per cent of their income to the poor, not ten times that, and this for an unequivocally worthy cause) and having nothing to show for it at the end.

Anyway, it's a good post.

Time Is Much More Valuable Than Money - Seth's Blog

A useful post here where Seth applies one area of unnecessary measures which just serve to generate more fear, waste time and fail to solve the problems they claim to address, in airport security, to the much wider picture.

Imagine a world without bullshit, it would be great, wouldn't it?!?

Don't Be Afraid Of Shadows - Seth's Blog

A great post from my big brother Seth Godin - just look a monster in the eye, you'll find it's just the shadow it casts that makes it seem formidable. That goes for the monster that tells you to smoke, drink more or do whatever else that you really don't want to...

How To Run A Sugar Company - Or Any Company - Seth's Blog

Great post from my big brother, how a company should be. Would that it were..

Unnecessary Sign To The Nth Degree

My big brother Seth Godin has posted a poor quality pic, but we'll forgive him as he must've just snapped it on his mobile (or whatever much more sophisticated device that he has instead of the mobile that we Mr Gumby's here at the PMC use) as he was rushing through boarding at an airport.

Anyway, the picture is funny enough, a prohibition on 'snowglobes', those small, liquid filled nick nacks that you shaked and this white stuff makes a kind of winter wonderland scene. Never knew what they were called but now I do.

But how many people take snowglobes with them on to a plane? Like about three. "Oh, I knew there was something we forgot to buy on our trip, those little nick nacks that you shake and it goes all snowy...". Nah.

His bigger point is, everyone still reads this sign and thus loses a few seconds of their life, at a time when they are likely to be pressed anyway, reading something completely irrelevant. Yet how often we all do this - asking a question we already know the answer to, copying in people on emails they have no reason in the slightest to need, inventing new 'rules' which everyone has to abide by just because of one person's slight misdemeanour...

Just stop wasting people's time!

Deadlines - Seth's Blog

Great post from my older brother concerning deadlines, why they work, what happens when they don't work, what effect they have on people...could be good reading for some of the little-seen contributors to the PMC, naming no names but thought at this point I'd mention the deadline-dodging Benedict Francis-Kentigern for good measure..

Forced Inspiration Doesn't Work

As good an indictment of the coroporate brainstrorming meeting as I've heard and everything I ever wanted to say when I was "working" in the corporate world; Seth should be working at Skype.
Quote: "Uninvite (is that a word?) the devil's advocate, since the devil doesn't need one, he's doing fine". Ha!

The Silent 'b' Must Be There To Make It A Four Letter Word

Hooray, someone says something sensible about debt, the use of credit cards in particular with reference to cars (surely the source of some of the worst examples of debt, paying later for something that's started depreciating the moment you turn the key) .

Here at the PMC we're seriously getting rid of our 10 year old car and not replacing it at all, in part because it's not used very much, and just taking the equivalent amount of money per month (including depreciation costs, plus also the faffing around time changing tyres, doing this that and the other, which you can't put a price on) and using that as the budget for taxis and car rental.

Anyway Seth puts it better.

Even He Gets Blanked Sometimes...

Nice post from my big brother Seth Godin, on being unintentionally snubbed by David Byrne from Talking Heads, and a response full of equanimity, largely unwarranted after that dancing when he moved his shoulders in a really odd fashion.

Thought For the Day No. 14 - With His Eminence Sethie Godiney

"Just because you have someone's email address doesn't mean you have the right to email them".

Seth Godin

Buying a House - Seth's Blog

A long post from my big brother Seth Godin on home ownership in the US (see, he's a real estate expert as well!) which is well worth checking out...

My response to it would be: he's got the nail on the head with the idea that buying a house is a decision which tends to be accompanied by much more emotion and other trappings than any other purchase, this is how it can sometimes go awry. But I'd seek to get away from the emphasis on capital gains, something that seemed to have the UK in a fever-like grip when I was living there ('you bought at the right time'...oh yeah? How do you know?).

As he indicates there are different types of people and if you're a play-it-safe employee then a mortgage presumably goes with the territory (it did when I was anyway); however, if you're a freelancer, entrepreneur or investor without a guaranteed income, it's much riskier (the banks know this all too well I expect). Lose your job and there are all sorts of checks and balances in place (like getting another job in the same field) which can mean that foreclsoure's far from inevitable. If you don't have a job in the first place you don't have that luxury.

One possibility is to consider renting; It ain't necessarily throwing away good money after bad; depending on the downpayment you make and the nature of your mortgage it can potentially be cheaper month on month than buying these days with a lot of legislation aimed at protecting the tenant (notably in the UK as another PMC contributor has been finding out) and managing agents if things do go wrong. There's that old paradox, the monthly payments for buying can be less than renting (though I guess that's all changed now) and yet you can afford to rent somewhere that is nicer than you can afford to buy...if you want quality of life then why stake everything on somewhere that's not as nice?

Doesn't mean you shouldn't have a mortgage, but the mortgage should be on something that is a real asset, ie something that generates some sort of income, however small. Unless you wanna take on a lodger, it means buying to let of course.

B2L investors are well known for paying less for a property than many homeowners (perhaps 'cos it's not an emotional decision for them) so your mortgage may end up being smaller for a comparable property, if you're patient.

But in any case, don't bank on capital appreciation, that's called gambling, and if you do make anything on a sale, treat it as the icing on the proverbial cake.

So there you have it, rent your own home and have a mortgage on an investment property...not quite was Seth was saying but we both agree that property ownership ain't a bad thing..


Disclaimer: the PMC knows nothing at all about real estate investing and was merely thinking out loud with this piece. 

What Would Happen if Someone I Didn't Know Actually Ever Read This?

A question that's often popped up and then been dismissed on the grounds that, with more blogs in the world than there are people it's unlikely to happen. But supposing it did, that one little post I'd knocked off at breakfast time might be the one chance the PMC is gonna get to make any kind of impression.

This is something my big brother Seth Godin has already posted about, and he's even seen strangers looking at his blog in a cafe, oblivious to the fact that the blog's author was sitting but metres away from them. How cool is that?! Maybe one day it'll happen to us at the PMC (if we can sneak in and type in the URL on someone's laptop whilst they're distracted).

It's Not a Competition - Seth's Blog

Good post from my older brother the other day - essentially that all these 'average person does x, y and z' is not really relevant. There isn't really such thing as an average person. As he points out, even if the average american supposedly only buys one book per year, there are plenty that don't; then he himself buys about 400! The PMC is a little way behind, though in our defence we say that we also read all the books we buy, all the way through! Though as we said, it's not a competition - we're all different.

How to Pronouce Seth's Name Finally Revealed

Since I started posting regurgitations of my big brother Seth Godin's blog here at the P'maja Crew we've been agonizing, or at least thinking, about the correct pronunciation of his name. Well, here he is now to clear everything up. Those émigrés..tchah.
 
And a worthwhile quote 'Just because it's important to YOU that I see your press release [or blog!] doesn't mean it's important to me. And even though it costs you nothing to send to me, doesn't mean you have the right to do so". Hear, hear, as they say in the House of Lords.

The Genius From Dunfermline

The Puumaja Crew is today feeling reassured that it's ok to like Andrew Carnegie, the emigre Scot who effectively WAS the US steel industry there for a good while and was the second richest man in history according to some reports (Rockefeller was the richest). The moderator's mother had in fact told him that he was 'horrible to his workers' without elaborating.

The seal of approval comes from our older brother Seth Godin who tells us today that Carnegie realised the value of people over infrastructure, capital, process, culture etc. something that in our experience has been lacking in every place we've worked, big or small. And we guess, unless your name's Rockefeller you're not in much of a position to question that!