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?

We live our lives believing there are sharply defined and crystal clear moments of truth. Moments when we are struck with an epiphany and have to change something in our worlds. And myth has it that these earth shattering slices of time prompt us to dramatically change who and what we are.

But the fact is, we tend to camouflage the epiphanies, tuck them away in the recesses of our minds, and even deny their veracity or their very existence.

We convince ourselves that all will be fine. And so often we do nothing, turning the moments of truth into moments of lies. We do this in our business lives, our personal lives and the lives that are a fusion of both because:

• What was once good, was so good, we don’t want to admit that it no longer holds that high ground. So we just don’t face it.
• The strategy we created before taking a new product to market seemed so brilliant on the drawing board but failed in the real world. But, we say, something may change tomorrow. Magic may happen. The strategy was too ingenious to fail. But in the fleeting moment of truth, it did fail. And in the moment of lies, we just don’t face it.
• The investments we make in anything- a marketing campaign, a new technology, a sister company- may look like a sure thing at the outset. A slam-dunk. And then the champagne goes flat and the losses accumulate and it’s that moment of truth time to take our hit and sell, but we just don’t face it. Moment of truth to moment of lies.
• We haven’t had a new idea in years, and our company or our career trajectory reflects this. So it’s time to think and dream and come up with that new insight that will effect real change. Unless we do, we are hopelessly sliding down the arc of a has been. Painful moment of truth. But, hey, I still have my job and people still buy from my company, so…I’ll get to it. Moment of lies.

There are no paint by numbers instructions to living a great life. To making a difference. The whole chain of neutrons and protons is too complex for that. But, we can make a difference by keeping the moments of truth from turning to the moments of lies:

• Recognize that these moments of truth are pathways to change.
• Don’t fear change. It will happen to you no matter how much you seek to avoid it. It is simply whether you control the agenda or you blow in the wind.
• Use the change you engage in to exceed anything you have ever done before. To be wiser and tougher and more creative.

James Taylor wrote, “The secret to life is enjoying the passage of time.” And learning from it. And turning the learning into action.

Mark Stevens
CEO

How have you kept your moments of truth from turning into moments of lies?

By Chris Kieff Sr. Blog Editor for Unconventional Thinking

As most of you know, Mark is currently writing 2 blogs, Unconventional Thinking (this one), and the Digital PR News Online Blog. However, what many of you may not know is that he’s been writing blogs as a companion to his new book “God Is A Salesman” (Shameless plug: Pre-order your own copy today online.) So Mark is now writing 3 weekly blogs in addition to his normal duties of running MSCO.

On Monday you will receive the first blog post with an invitation to subscribe. If you would like to receive the God Is A Salesman blog via email YOU MUST RESPOND TO THE MESSAGE or you will not be subscribed to the blog. This will be your only chance to become a Charter Subscriber to the God Is A Salesman Blog.

MSCO is proud to announce the brand new blog:

God Is A Salesman

You are invited to become a Charter Subscriber.

I’ll leave the explanations of the principles in God is a Salesman up to Mark, you can learn all about it here: www.GodIsASalesman.com. As one who has read the book I’ll tell you that it can be a life changing experience. (And those of you who know me, know that I didn’t have to say that.)

Back here at Unconventional Headquarters we’ve been doing a lot of work getting ready for the launch of the book and some new business ventures for MSCO. We are going to offer several new products and services based on the principles in God is a Salesman in addition to the new blog. So exciting things are a-foot here and we know that you will find them interesting. We will be making announcements about the new products and services as soon as they are available.

One thing I want to say as the UberGeek, to those of you who read the blog only via email; You are missing half of the action! Most blog entires get several people writing in comments or observations as comments. Unfortunately you can’t see the comments in the email version of the blog. So don’t hesitate to click on the blog button in the email and go to the online version of the blog where you can check out the comments and leave one of your own www.MSCO.com/blog

That’s all for now. We at Unconventional HQ (aka MSCO) want to thank you for your time and support in reading and frequently commenting on the blog. Don’t ever hesitate to let us know what you think.

Sincerely,

Chris Kieff, Director of Internet Marketing, MSCO
Sr. Blog Editor, Unconventional Thinking, God Is A Salesman Blog
UberGeek of MSCO

I watched an interview with former world figure skating Dorothy Hamill, who I remember so well for her electric style and breezy great looks on the ice, now revealing the unknown story of a life pocked with depression. Yesterday, I watched old men sob, remembering vicious battlefields and the horrendous loss of buddies, all 19 years old, in The War in the Pacific, more than a half century ago. A week ago I read of Owen Wilson’s near suicide.

Dorothy said she would cry for hours at a time. Wail out loud. And then it turned worse when Dino Martin, the love of her life, walked out the door, no rhyme or reason. There never is in love.

The gray soldiers admitted they’ve never been really happy since their pre-War youth, poisoned as they’ve been by nightmare visions.

And Wilson had everyone fooled but himself. The joy free persona; the aching heart.

At times Hamill, the boys in uniform and the Wedding Crasher experienced heaven. The gold medals, the swimming holes, the first box office hits. And when the hellish times set in, the view of heaven played games with their brains. How had they have fallen? How could they climb back?

You don’t have to be famous to experience these poles of life. We all do, every single one of us. I was mentoring a young man today, one struggling with some of the barbed wire of adolescence. And I was telling him of my time in hell and how I called on the memories of heaven as a ladder to pull myself out. And he understood. He understood.

Today, thousands of people lost their jobs. An equal number or more lost their businesses. And still more lost sales they were working on for months or years, or were demoted in a Management shuffle or walked away from a house, from an American dream, they could no longer afford.

For all it felt like hell. And it was truly miserable. But if you remember that time you had in heaven, or the mere glimpse of it, it is the fuel you can use to soar back to the place you want to be.

In business, in life, there is always, thank God, the opportunity for redemption. Every great career, every great life, has moved through the heaven to hell to heaven journey. Through courage and determination and a stubborn refusal to remain on the dark side of the moon.

Just how you respond when you look into the abyss is the true measure of who you are as a person. That snapshot of heaven you carry around in your pocket is the best assurance that you will walk through the gates again.

Hamill found her center and has a beautiful daughter. The boys of war came home and found jobs and love. And Wilson will walk on stage to win an Academy Award one day. He will.

Because the view of heaven is always best from hell.

Mark Stevens
CEO

How was your climb from Hell to Heaven?