Many of us are dream chasers, like kites floating through the Western sky, the dreams captivate and drive us. Running after them, feeling the wind in our face, we are exhilarated. Intoxicated. If we can only catch the kite, grab hold of the dream, we will pass through to another dimension. We will understand the mysteries. It will be our Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone, the dream, will be our prism. Through it we will see the truth. So we run into the wind and chase the kite. Such is the life of a dream chaser.

I am happy to live that life. I would have it no other way. But I know that this is a lie wrapped in a lovely and deceptive package. The kite is simply an illusion dancing in the blue. You can love it but you cannot rely on it. Not to reveal the truth about anything but your own limitless and invaluable imagination.

The real truth is delivered in the hard boiled experiences of the street. Of the nights alone in a laboratory or in front of a blank computer screen, searching for the words or the formulas that don’t come easily. They are embedded in Edison’s revelation that genius is 99% sweat and 1% kites.

The great among us know how to look past the lies we tell ourselves in the midst of our romantic delusions and how the focus on the tedious work of experimenting with compounds delivers the first antibiotic. Ask Alexander Fleming. And how the refusal to accept the lies about vaccines, led to the cure for polio. Look up Jonas Salk. And that the great bulwarks of media could be torn down and humiliated. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

When the lies are pipe dreams we refuse to see through, they are stop signs that thwart our personal achievement. But when they are soaring kites that prompt us to chase the horizon, to look beyond it, to enter states of thought and wonderment that place all of the lies in their proper light and turn them into catalysts for discovering the truth, they are divine. Divine.

Einstein liked to say that his intelligence was a wonderful asset but his sense of imagination enabled him to encircle the globe. It is so interesting to realize that in the right hands, our hands if we allow it, if we adore the kites but see them for what they are, we recognize they are something so strange and so sweet.

They are lies that open windows to the truth.

Mark Stevens
CEO

We are deep in the midst of the holiday season and a lovely time of year it can be.

But I have a question: Isn’t every day a holy day? Do holy days have a season or is life a string of holy days?

Actually, I firmly believe the latter is true. Is there ever a day of our lives that is not a wonder? That we are not blessed by God in the most extraordinary way?

The problem is, so many of our words have lost their meaning. Holidays are no longer thought of as holy days. They are viewed as turkey days and gift buying days. And that is the polar opposite of the original purpose and the true meaning embedded in the words.

This is endemic throughout our society. What do the words trust, faith, love, honor, commitment really mean? Timeless and enduring qualities, of course, but when these words are used without thought, when the holy is buried in holiday, when the thanks in Thanksgiving is simply six letters tacked on to six more, we lose something so rich and deep that can make all of life that more precious.

We lose the honesty that makes things genuine. And by “things,” I mean relationships… The bonds between family members, friends and lovers. Unless these unions are knitted together with words and actions ripe with true meaning, they are mere pretenses. Hollow games people play to try and camouflage the truth. But the truth insists on revealing itself.

All of this is true in business as it is in the ways of the heart. Do we tell our clients and customers we care about them and then treat them as just another set of numbers locked in a server? The answer is almost a universal “yes.” So much so that when a company, a manager, an entrepreneur is determined to treat the people in their world with genuine care, with words that have meaning, then we witness right before our eyes that the holy is the beacon in holiday and we are astounded by it.

It is a mistake to think we live in Balkanized worlds: the personal, the business, the religious. The walls we often think clearly divide these realms are mythical.

When we purchase something from an automobile company or a pharmacy, we no longer believe we are initiating a relationship. We think we are buying something…engaging in a cold and common transaction. So when a company or a pharmacy gives back more than a product but a set of human values along with it, we are touched in a way that makes us customers for life. The business, like the lover, like the friend, that demonstrates that the bonds that bind are true and generous and genuine, are of immense value to all of us. We hold them far above the heads of the pretenders.

There is but one world. The same one where the personal, the business and the religious intersect. This is the crossroads of greatness. Not marked by physical strength or wealth or intellectual power, but more by being the kind of person, the kind of business, that adds meaning to our existence. Do you value anything more? Is there a greater goal?

Happy holy days. Everyday.

Mark Stevens
CEO

It is ironic that from the earliest days of our cognizant lives, we are programmed to fear its end. Especially, the last five minutes.

This entire notion, this ripe fear and in many cases dread, is preposterous. We have no idea where we came from, and why we arrived in the world, but we are certain that in death we are leaving it. That it represents an end. Finality.

How is it that we admit to looking backwards to our arrival on earth with no knowledge but look forward to our departure with great certainty? A certainty that has no basis. No founding. It is mindful of our predecessors who were convinced that if they sailed into the horizon, they would fall off the face of the earth.

Little did they know that the truth was the polar opposite: that they could sail into the horizon for eternity.

The fact is we are preoccupied with living a long life when life as we know it is never long. If we live 100 years, it is but a blip. And to complicate matters, but to introduce an essential reality. Whose life was longer, Mozart’s or Jane Smith, who died at 98 after a 60-year career as an insurance actuary. And who hated her work from the moment she left college and took a seat in her cubicle at Homestead Life Insurance Co.?

We have a monumental choice before us all: to be in the life fulfillment business-meaning we live every day without concern for when it ends, if it does, or to be in the life protection business-meaning we spend nearly every day seeking to postpone or circumvent the inevitable.

All too many people do the latter. And in the process, they waste so much of the joy of being alive on this earth. They seek safety. They run from risk. They make sure not to work too hard. They are sticklers about having balance in their lives, whatever that means. They look askance at those who burn the candles at both ends, walk the high wire without a safety net. Start companies with their life savings. Quit “good” jobs for careers that bring them joy. Abdicate the throne to marry a lover.

The only way to truly live, to achieve success as a manager, artist, factory worker, actor, CEO, mother, father, friend-is to do it with abandon. Without fear of when it will end. The more you try to control the ending, the less control you have over it. It won’t ask for your permission. It won’t ask for your timetable. It will just end. Nothing you can do will stop it.

And that’s the good news. You can let go. It’s out of your hands. And even better, the last five minutes here may be the countdown to forever.

Mark Stevens
CEO

How do you live your life before your five minutes are up?

Guest Blogger Lewis Green from Biz Solutions Plus

-Excerpted from Lead With Your Heart by Lewis Green

Happiness is the driving force behind everything Americans do. It is the key to determining their wants, needs and desires. It is the essence of the American Dream and is as important as the air you breathe. Even our Declaration of Independence calls for the pursuit of happiness. And yet a 2006 study by the Pew Research Center found that only 34 percent of Americans consider themselves “very happy,” 50 percent “pretty happy,” and fifteen percent report that they are “not too happy.”

One of the most popular courses at Harvard University teaches happiness and creating “a fulfilling and flourishing life.” In fact, the course on “Positive Psychology” outdraws “Introductory Economics.” That scares me. Have we have gone so far down the road of work, power, and greed that we need to be taught about happiness?

I believe these examples point to an overactive, overachieving, over-stressed population chasing after broken dreams. On the other hand, this information points to an untapped market your business can penetrate. The savvy businessperson will do everything possible to ensure that his or her business is people-centered and not primarily focused on the bottom line. My belief is that if you do good, your business will do well. Here’s one reason why:

From the various reports I’ve read, it seems that at least 65 percent of all Americans want great business experiences that will help make them happy. Even the “very happy” folks can be moved to a higher happiness level, creating even greater customer-conversion opportunities for business.

Research also tells us that happy people are more productive and they live longer lives. One study on a Catholic religious community concluded that nuns who had a positive outlook in their 20s lived as much as 10 years longer than those who are less positive. Another research project focused on a group of people who kept a daily diary for six months recording only those things that went well on any given day. The conclusion was that these participants were happier and healthier than those participants who did not focus on positive thinking. Both studies imply that businesses could increase productivity and work attendance by focusing on happiness in the work place.

I do not suggest that happiness waits just around the corner and it is easily within our grasp. Happiness defined in the Lead With Your Heart business model looks like this:

• Business is people-centered. People come before profit in every instance.
• Its values talk to making the world a better place to live and work.
• Business understands the wants, needs, and desires of it employees and its customers.
• It creates products, services, value, prices, and most important, experiences that meet or exceed people’s wants, needs, and desires.

Only a blind, dumb, and extremely arrogant business community would ignore the data and the business potential inherent in making people happier—and not just consumers. In fact, I argue, as have a few others before me, that your employees must first feel as sense of happiness about the company they work for and the work they do if a business’s customers and clients are to experience levels of happiness that keep them coming back.

Lewis Green
Founder of L&G Business Solutions

What Are You Doing to Ensure Happiness in Your Business Community?

There is a moment in time that is paradoxically, timeless and fleeting. It is finite and infinite. Like so much of our existence, it is a Rorshach test of sorts, open to whatever we impose upon it. We can view it as the end of the night. We can see it as the dawn of a new day. Or we can treat it as a magical time, a virginal moment, that is a blank page, allowing us to paint our thoughts and dreams on it once we have gone through the night and before we grapple with the day.

For those who crave black and white, this is too much to deal with. It is too poorly defined. It is not about sleeping. It is not about waking. It is, instead, about cultivating the endless possibilities God puts before us and that are so rarely harvested.

All of the great, the astounding ideas in the history of the earth, have come from the “mindless” moments we are free to walk down the street, sit under a tree, lie in a hammock and think freely.

I have always loved the story of Edwin Land walking around Cambridge with his young daughter when she asked “Why does it take so long to see a picture after you photograph it daddy.” Land was about to answer within the confines of current technology when he caught himself and, like the exceptionally intelligent and gifted man he was, asked himself the same question. “Why indeed?” Thus was born Polaroid. And ditto for nearly every extraordinary enterprise and artistic masterpiece through the ages. They are born not when the mind focuses, as conventional wisdom would have you believe, but instead when it floats.

In life, we have but two great possibilities: love and achievement. All else is TV, fast food and cigarettes. If you value the first two, the wondrous two, the divine two, you need to push all else out to sea. And you need to fight for them.

Often, people who don’t know me ask, “What do you do in your free time.” Please tell me what they mean. What is “free time?” Every second carries an opportunity cost. If I don’t spend it well, toward love and achievement, it evaporates forever. Hard on myself? I will accept the charge, admit to it and keep on relishing every moment.

I thought about John Locke today for the first time in many years. When did he first have the epiphany that we are all born with blank sheets of paper, absent of ideas? I know.

When he was alone. When his mind could drift. In the time he chose not to be free.

Before the morning becomes the day.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What are you writing on your sheets of paper?




Click here to read the full interview with blogger Lewis Green.

Everyone wants to go to Hollywood. To make a movie, be a star or tell a story. To get rich and famous and change the world.

Instead, only a handful of people we write off as wanna-bees, unless they actually make it, wind up going anywhere near Sunset and Vine.

No, we just talk and dream of the what if’s and reject the high risk and walk instead to the ticket booth to sit down and watch George Clooney play Michael Clayton. George actually went to Hollywood before he was George Clooney. He doesn’t buy tickets; he sells ideas.

It all boils down to the roles we will all play in the film of our lives, which is being shot right now. Will we be extras, passives, unknowns carried by the script or will we be activists who write and direct and star? Will we be popcorn chomping spectators or the royalty we are watching from the dark of our seats? Will we read John Krakauers’ book, “Into the Wild” and place it back on the library shelf or “Sean Penn” it into a tour de force of a young man who sets out to poke a stick in every life assumption handed to us as gospel?

For every Sean Penn, there are a million passives. For every George Clooney, there are legion of dreamers.

All of my life, I have heard people say “I want to write a children’s book.” “I want to start a business.” “I wish I went to business school.” “I am sorry I never learned to play the drums.” “I want to run a division in my company.”

I used to say, “Why don’t you? What’s in your way?” But I don’t say a word now. I know the answer.

They have a path they ride. They get in their cars, turn on the Sirius, listen to Mayer, Madonna, Matchbox and watch the streets go buy. Alone, driving along, they think of what was and what will be from point A to point B and back again. This is good. This is safe. This is what the people who paint by numbers want us to do.

It is so neat; it is an insult to God.

The map of my life looks like a toddler finger-painted it. It drips all over the floor. It takes detours to Paris. It writes odes to God. But it is always that of an activist, with a gun at my own head, reminding me to find what no one has yet discovered. And once I do that, or fail at it, to search for something else, for another treasure.

Tomorrow, when I cruise down the road, I will look for the sign that reads “Last Exit To Hollywood” I will turn the wheel.

And I will disappear there.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What role do you play in your life?

What’s that you say? Can’t get enough of Mark’s wit, insight and Unconventional Thinking?

Well you’re in luck! Because Mark is BrandWeek Magazine’s latest blogger:

Mark is described by the magazine as :

Mark Stevens is CEO of consulting and marketing firm MSCO in Rye Brook, N.Y., and one of the cadre of new Brandweek Bloggers.

In addition, Mark gave the keynote address at the recent Platinum PR News 2007. Click the link below to watch Mark’s interview about the future of PR.

I just returned from Germany, where Albert Einstein was born. As I walked through the streets of Berlin-a lovely cosmopolitan city that shows no sign of the past, only the future-Albert was on my mind.

Why would Albert Einstein be on my mind in a city blessed with beautiful parks, electric restaurants and dazzling women? Because all of my life I have been in search of life on earth. Not the kind that proves it is alive because it is breathing. No, that’s hardly a test of anything. I mean the kind that is a life force. The kind that sees a high wire and wants to walk across it because it is NOT safe. The kind that imagines that massive change is possible and does more than knows it, but goes out and turns the wheel, knowing the odds against them are nearly impossible. The kind that gives love with every bit of their hearts without an ounce of fear that the love won’t be returned.

Einstein was always a life force. It just took four decades of his existence for the rest of the planet to know that. And related to this, his greatest achievement may have been that he proved it is never too late to rise from obscurity and soar into the Pantheon of true greatness.

Ironically, all of the time Albert was viewed as just another civil servant on the government payroll. He was paying zero attention to what anyone else thought. He was thinking, dreaming, testing, wondering, rejecting, rethinking-taking the puzzle of the universe and remaking it. Einstein always believed in Einstein. Do you believe in you?

When I was a child, Jonas Salk came out of left field and obliterated polio. A life force took on and defeated a life destroyer. He wasn’t a Roosevelt. No one expected much from him. But the children of the world were blessed by a man who gave them the most precious gift we can have: Life.

Like Einstein, Salk was a life force in disguise. As was Martin Luther King, Marie Curie, my third grade social studies teacher, Billy Graham, Jesus, Moses, and Henry David Thoreau.

So yes, there is life in the universe. But we owe God’s universe more than life. We owe it courage. More of that innovation. More than that, the willingness to take the gift of existence and give it depth. Give it meaning. Live up to its promise.

Not in headline ways alone. In ways only you see. Only you understand. Only you are fulfilled by. If others gain the vision, wonderful, but you don’t need them. Live your life without their approval.

Einstein would have been sublime without his Wikipedia page! Greatness is quiet until the world discovers it. And it’s their loss if they don’t.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What did your life force allow you to achieve?

No one writes letters any more. Considering the options, they are cumbersome and reach the other party with glacial speed. So why bother. Zip off an email and move on to your iPod. Next.

Well, not so fast. And not so simple. We don’t write letters, in part, because they impart a sense of permanence, of legitimacy, of the genuine article, of here today and here tomorrow. Of the heart.

We have begun to accept the fact that this Teflon approach is ok because here today and here tomorrow is somehow scary. All the what ifs cloud the thinking. What if I can’t do it for long? What if the passion melts? What if I get hurt? What if, what if. What if you tell a lover of your love and the love disappears? Better off not saying it at all. Not in a letter.

And that’s the real reason people don’t write letters anymore. Because the letters have a feel of permanence. Because there is no delete button. Because once you send it, you have exposed yourself. And today, our culture says, only fools do that. The wise believe they are in the self-protection business. But are they really? Aren’t they protecting themselves from the passions, the vagaries, and the mysteries that make life so majestic?

We don’t want to write a letter to a lover because we don’t want to write a letter to ourselves. Spilling out passion about another is as much about you as it is about them, and that means exposure and fear and why not just send a cute, sly, meaningless text message.

Writing to yourself has to do with your success, or lack of it, in business and in love. Yes in both. For years I promised myself that I would make a radical change in my company’s business model and for years I did nothing of the sort. I sat on the sidelines and watched myself think. I never put my goal in a letter to myself because that would be a promise. The letter would be there staring me in the face. It would be harder to hide. And hide I did.

So often people tell me of frustrations in their careers, jobs changes they are going to make, initiatives they are going to drive, education they are going to get, inventions they are going to create. And when I check back with them, zero. Nothing. They never put it in a letter and they never did it and so often they never will.

Ever see someone blow a kiss? Of course you have. Why do they do that? Why don’t they walk right up and plant their lips on the other person’s? Because it is so intimate. So real. And so many of us are so afraid of that that we lie to ourselves and make secret promises we will never fulfill. That we will never put in a letter.

It is just so much easier to play it safe, to blame the gods, to fall short of our potential, to avoid changing our business models, to refuse to look in the mirror. To avoid risk at all cost.

And what a cost it is.

Mark Stevens
CEO

What are you afraid to put in your letter?