Everything beautiful is inconsistent.

The first time I set my eyes on the lady from Madrid, she was, I believed, just the latest of a long line of celluloid sirens who waltz through our lives, light up the silver screen, fade from the headlines and surface again as aged queens of joint relief infomercials.

I was light years off base. In a series of roles, real life and reel life, she has displayed a rare form of wild, unpredictable and nearly out of control talent that culminated in an Oscar for her star turn in Vicky Christina Barcelona.

Talking about Cruz with a friend, I recognized immediately that she failed to share my enthusiasm, citing the opinion that the actress is “inconsistent.”

And I thought almost instantly, the “inconsisitency” is the majesty. What do you know that is beautiful, extraordinary, successful and consistent? Sunsets? Everyone is wildly different.

Artists? Did we want de Kooning to paint by numbers? Entrepreneurs? They are the ones who are heat seeking missiles programmed to destroy consistency and replace it with a better mousetrap that changes the order of things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “a foolish consistency is the hob goblin of little minds.” It is that and more: it is a recipe for the predictable, the ordinary, the mediocre and the mind numbing. Once we know the outcome before the action commences–because it is consistent–we are locked into intellectual and emotional solitary confinement, watching the paint dry.

Death by consistency.

I have known people who crave order in all they do. No diving into a cold ocean. No drinking so much they pass out on the lawn. No working before the official handbook guide to the time the workday starts and the precise second it ends.

I read a story the other day about a semi-famous writer who always has a bad haircut. He’s too busy trying to define the truth, to connect with God, to have an epiphany, to sit for a perfect haircut. For any haircut.

He made me want to cheer. He is consistently inconsistent. That would make the consistency freaks freak out. Yes!

Penelope wanted to be a ballerina and she launched her career that way. She rode the wave of beauty into the epicenter of the Hollywood firmament and just when she had it nailed as a wicked formulaic dazzler, she took on a series of inconsistent roles and mastered English and played a fiery and dangerously inconsistent and unpredictable woman who made Woody Allen appear unimportant in a Woody Allen film.

Cruz is not Elenore Roosevelt, Marie Curie or Margaret Thatcher. But she is a symbol of the kind of random gene that mutates throughout its life cycle, growing all the way.

Exactly what great companies and the people who make them great do– in spite of the dullards who call out the National Guard every time they see inconsistency.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2.

There is a strange, perplexing and mysterious math to life.

Think of it as lifematics.

We can begin with the fact that virtually all human life has a span of one to one hundred years. Some live for seconds, others a century. But we are all enclosed within a mathematical box that begins and ends within a relatively set time frame.

The question we face is how to maximize the joy life can provide within the mathematics of its limitations.

It is interesting how God chooses to send us this message. Yes, we attend births and funerals and we comprehend the math of life– even if vaguely and reluctantly– through these rituals. But I believe the real messenger is Haley’s comet. This messenger of our mortality streaks through the sky, visible to us once every 76 years. It is unlikely any human will ever witness, with any level of cognizance, its exotically brilliant tail more than once in our lifetime. It hurls through a universe we know nothing about showing up on the scheduled time with the power to awe and inspire us and to make it clear that we have been stamped with a death certificate.

We will never see it again.

The question is, how do we navigate through this lifematics without succumbing completely to the mathematics of it all. You see, in the end, we can defeat it. Yes, the numbers will overtake us and bring us to the end of the 100 years at some point along the continuum.

Or will it really. Some people never die. Is Lincoln really dead? Is Einstein? Elvis? Picasso?

Technically, of course, but there is more to life than the technical. And more to death. Yes, the heart stops beating but Lincoln, Einstein, Elvis, Picasso keep shaping the world, influencing generations, making life richer, towering over others who still walk the streets, take up space, do their jobs in a race to a pension as opposed to an epiphany.

No matter how many times you add it up, 1+1=2. We cannot win an argument with the laws of math. But we can overcome lifematics. By creating a breakthrough, turning a dream into a work of art that moves masses, challenging the conventions of all the “learned ones” and proving them wrong– thus shedding a new light on the way we view the world: E=MC2.

You may not know it, but you are in a race. And Haley’s comet is the stopwatch!

Mark Stevens
CEO

Image courtesy: Flickr.

Everyone knows Bernie Madoff is a putrid excuse for a human being.

But as we are hurling verbal stones at him, we should stop and see that what he did and how he did it, is ingenious.

More than anything else, Madoff was a marketing whiz. He wasn’t a financial engineer, he was a mastermind of perception.
And deception. And manipulation.

Of course, I am not advocating that we imitate the bastard, but there are interesting insights and epiphanies that we can gain from his modus operandi, and, if put in the hands of reputable and ethical business people, can work magic.

Consider the key components of Madoff Marketing:

• Never sell anything. Let other people do the selling for you. When that happens, you appear to be above commerce, a great man, who has no need for anyone to give him anything. People swoon over that kind of apparent independence.
• Don’t position your business as a business: hold it out as a club. Furthermore, a club that is closed to new members. If it makes an exception and finds the goodness to let you in, you will be forever grateful.

While Morgan Stanley was delighted to land fat cats as clients, fat cats were exhilerated that Madoff let them join his club.

(I first witnessed this kind of phenomenon at Studio 54. The once white hot New York disco insulted most of the people who waited on line for hours to get in, and the ruder they were, the longer the lines snaked around the city streets.).

• Establish a credential, let a disciple embellish it and let it take on an aura of its own without the main attraction–in this case Bernie the Swindler– not saying a word.

Madoff knew that other people can do a much better job of bragging about you than you can do on your own. Bernie built a network of a thousand third party endorsements. All he had to do was sit back, feign indifference and watch the machine do its magic.

• Aristotle Onassis once said to always have a tan, always borrow money and always pay it back on time. Madoff never borrowed, he stole, and of course he paid back just enough to keep his scam going.

But there is a part of the Onassis success plan Madoff understood: the tan. The aura of success. The importance of looking like a billion bucks. Bernie knew that success, or in his case the appearance thereof, draws crowds to you for the priviledge of touching your holy cloth.

They want a bit of the spoils to rub off on them.

In the classic film, “Being There,” Peter Sellers plays an ignorant gardner who is deemed to be a genius. Someone starts the myth, others swear to it, Sellers never says a word because he is oblivious to it all. The village idiot winds up in the Pantheon of greatness because the legions who want to believe, to believe in gods and icons and the kind of “greatness” that never visibly promotes itself, cannot be stopped from knighting him.

Madoff understood this strange alchemy. He brewed it all the way to a small cell and ultimately, a first row seat in hell.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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