This Time It's Personal!

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I took a break from blogging about empowering people via human motivation, innovation, building better workplaces and whatnot in May of 2012. Since then, I started a business, ended a long term relationship, ended a business, went traveling in Southeast Asia, took a TEFL course, fell in love, moved to Thailand and got a job: teaching blogging to high school students, and fell out of love.

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The Myth of Pursuing Happiness

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Are you trying to find happiness and success? According to Dr. Viktor Frankl, you can’t pursue them directly. You can only find them as a byproduct of other things. Dr. Frankl, a survivor of four Nazi Germany concentration camps, a neurologist and a psychiatrist developed a new field of psychiatry just prior to being sent to the camps. He had travel papers that would have let him leave Germany for the US but since his parents didn’t have a way to leave Germany, he chose to stay.
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Unarticulated Needs

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Filling needs that people don’t know they have is hard. Earlier this week I read a blog post that Seth Godin wrote about: Marketing to the bottom of the pyramid. It got me thinking, that that’s what I’m trying to do, fulfill unarticulated needs. Needs that most folks don’t know they have. The average person doesn’t know that they could have a work life that lifts them up and makes them feel great. For that last 100 years we’ve been programmed to believe that work is a necessary evil, that we need to give up 40-60 hour of our week to purgatory, that being happy, fulfilled and engaged at work is more of a fairy tale than a reality.
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Corporations, our Psychopathic Citizens

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Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct, masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal. In the US, corporations, limited liability corporations, and other types of a business have a clear common goal, to make a profit. That is their primary, and in many cases their sole purpose. While corporations have been assigned many of the rights given to US citizens, such as first and fourteenth amendment rights, they are certainly lacking in empathy and I think it’s fair to say that many corporations act amorally.
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Zappos: Happy People, Delivering Happiness and Shoes.

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Tony Sheih, CEO of Zappos has just written his first book,’Delivering Happiness, a Path to Profits, Passion and Happiness.’ It chronicles Tony’s life, from childhood entrepreneurial efforts, to college and his time at LinkExchange. In some ways it reads like Ricardo Semler’s’Maverick, The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace,‘“Both books talk about lessons learned, mistakes made and happy coincidences that lead them to success.
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