For some weird reason, they feel printed. As a sort of grand statement by the author to the world.

The internet has made it that there is little experiential difference in reading a rando's blog and the New York Times. Add to that the constant decrease in quality and journalistic integrity by such formerly highly respected outlets and we get a generalized return to the mean.

Substacks have somewhat filled the void of independent, principled journalism. As an outlet. The merit for the actual content still is completely with the individuals doing the hard work of journalism uncorrupted.

Perhaps an institution can never be more principled than its most unprincipled individual that is part of it. Perhaps media outlets should have never been allowed to present themselves as institutions.

The guard dog of democracy has not been institutional-level media. It was always the many individuals who, many times in spite of their employers, managed to break stories of historic significance.

Perhaps the last two decades of the internet's permeation into society has brought us closer to the ideals of democracy. Cracks are visible now whereas in the past they would be spinned as mirages. Gaslighting and redirecting the public. Such tactics become increasingly obvious to an increasingly calloused and distrustful citizenry.

It might be that we are not ready for a much more honest world. But nobody really was ready for the tempests of their times.

Let's hope the pendulum of centralization does not swing all the way in the opposite direction.

The Wild West made for excellent movies, though.

And this is yet another rando's blog.

As the British Empire unravelled, the United States expanded its strength across the western hemisphere. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US found itself the sole superpower and, arguably, the world's de facto empire.

The generations that managed the growth of the USA up until 1991 were many things but standing out above everything else was that they were competent. With all its flaws and debacles and civil strife, the US had seriously competent people that understood the heavy task of defending western ideals. United in their appreciation of the principles enshrined in their Constitution and Bill of Rights, products of the Enlightenment's best, they embodied what the rest of the world called American exceptionalism.

You might feel differently. I can understand why. There are plenty of reasons to call this a nice packaging of a world that never actually existed except in nice speaches.

I see it as both. Many things are both, including each one of us. On net, it's probably closer to the ideals of the Enlightenment than not.

Yes. It's complicated.

As trust in institutions continues to decline with each passing crisis and lies uncovered, everyone is forced to turn to independent thinkers. Looking back in history it really was a long string of independent thinkers going against their time's consensus that got us the world we live in today. In fact, the founders of the USA were the rebels and contrarians of their day, for good and bad. The examples of such independents are countless and you already know many of them.

As the bureaucracies that manage the current empire rested on the previous generation's laurels they seem to only mimic competence. When they're proven incompetent, they lie and deflect. Their purpose is to maintain and continue to expand their power. It's the contrarians and underdogs that need to fight an uphill battle to temporarily force the bureucrats to solve problems. The examples of such bureaucrats are countless and you already know many of them.

As the public at large starts to lose trust in the bureaucracy, they increasingly look to outsiders. Many are not much better alternatives. But some are worthy of trust and consistently prove it through their actions.

As outsiders with loud, empty characters are proven to be fakes, it will increasingly become more apparent who are the independent outsiders worthy of the heavy task of continuing to reach for the ideals of the Enlightenment in the wake of a rusty, neglected, possibly pointless empire.

Perhaps pointless because the Soviet Union's highly centralized model crumbled not only through the competent strategy of the West but perhaps equaly through culture. Long before it collapsed in reality, it collapsed in the minds and hearts of its people. The blue jeans and American movies sold in the black markets all across the Soviet world showed its people a world where individual freedom, freedom of speech and agency over your own life can bring prosperity beyond what they could see even at the most oppulent communist events.

The gray communist bureaucracy was defeated by the blue jeans. They were the ultimate symbol of independence, worn in defiance of the Party. Each jeans wearer was a beacon signaling to their community that they were at the precipice of a new era.

Culture is the weapon that does not destroy.

What are the blue jeans of today?

I have a good idea.

But that requires a whole separate article.

A Virtual Reality game where everything is built just as the gamer is exploring their environment. By applying Machine Learning–situations, characters and objects are being created using a mix of randomness and the gamer’s choices, in a way that maximizes pleasant surprises and builds a story that, every time you progress, it gets better (as in tailored to your likes). On top of everything, the currency unlocked inside the game through increasingly complex challenges is a coin traded on cryptocurrency markets and can be exchanged for real value in the real world.

Just imagine how cool this would be, the millions of people playing it, the phenomenon it would create.

We will be rich!

It took me exactly 5 minutes to think this up.

And this is how most new ideas show up.

Let’s call it brute-force ideation.

You take a hammer (e.g. a trend) and smash it into whatever is closest to your area of knowledge. Sometimes not even your area, but something you think you understand. In the example above: gaming.

I’ve played some games. That doesn’t even remotely qualify me as understanding gaming. It just feels you understand it.

And this is one of the many reasons most start-ups fail.

In fact, it depends on when you label something as “failed.” The idea above has already failed because it will never be built by any rational person (hopefully).

While the story can be fine-tuned to sound believable and at a certain point of complexity receive investment (angel, venture, crowdfunding), it has some deep flaws:

• The first experiences with it would be bad. It would take several playthroughs until the Machine Learning Algorithm would understand what you like. This means a decent amount of time spent up-front by the gamer just to start having a half-decent experience playing.

• VR games aren’t that good right now and it would take a few more years of both market adoption and technological advancement (including the slower, market dependent, hardware part).

• There would have to be a limited amount of cryptocurrency.

Now, if you take all the smartest and experienced people you can find from all the different fields above, you might have an increased chance of building something that would work.

But for all these experts, the underlying element should be a deep knowledge of what needs the end-customer has. Without this deep knowledge about needs, only about technical aspects (which is very common), the whole process becomes a missed shot.

Let’s validate there’s a need that can fuel our crazy ideas first. – Your mind, from now on.

I’ve seen lightning high risers and blazing low descenders.

I still can’t certainly say what paved the way for either. But I’ve got some guesses.

First, a bit of a back-story.

On the street where I grew up, there were quite some different types of people. Some hard-working, some hedonistic lazies and some in between. Among all of them, lots of good and lots of bad in random proportions.

It was then, at a young age, I somehow realized that you can more or less choose who you want to be.

I saw it as a pretty simple to understand fact. When I was around one or the other group I started behaving like them. Mostly because I wanted to fit in but also unconsciously picking up their language and beliefs.

At a certain point I mildly panicked, seeing how easily I could change gears. I thought that maybe there was something wrong with me. Everybody seemed so fixed in their behavior.

But nobody is fixed, really. It was all a decision they took sometime in their life. And stuck with it.

I just hadn’t decided on that yet.

The choices were right there in my immediate proximity. Looking back, I didn’t have many choices.

Two to be exact:

• The hard-working parent-pleaser. Which meant high grades in school and going to university.

• The lazy hedonist. Which meant wasting time outside and get money doing illegal things.

I didn’t feel sold by either.

What I liked was wasting time understanding how gadgets work and tinkering with my computer. An old Pentium 166MMX with a whopping 16mb of RAM.

Pretty soon my choice was that I would do only what I like. School never really bothered me with my plan since just paying attention in class was enough to get good grades.

My plan was to just wing it until I had better choices.

And better choices presented to me once I went to university.

I chose the passionate hard-workers who focus on improving the world.

This simple phrase is the core of who I chose to be. This brings us to the first ingredient for a good life.

1. Choose who you are

Sure, you’re born with a preset of traits and possibilities. But you can move away and choose something that’s not available right away.

You need to wait a bit? Surely that sounds better than choosing a dull (or dangerous) immediate path.

You need to improve some traits? Surely that sound better than losing opportunity after opportunity to live a good life.

I waited and I chose to improve things that kept me from reaching where I wanted to be. Was it worth it? Well, I’ve never had to deal drugs and steal in order to have money to do things I enjoy.

All I had to do was what I’ve decided I love: improve the word by helping one person at a time.

And you know what? That core drive to help people around me did 3 things:

• It pushed me to learn how to do new things. This eventually got me into Marketing.

• It created a network of people around me that enabled me to grow and access opportunities I would otherwise not have.

• It reinforced my drive to be and do more following the core mission I set for myself.

Choose.

2. Ride the wave before jumping in the water

For your big life decisions, don’t listen to your parents or friends.

Or anyone, for that matter. People give advice from their perspective and in fact that only applies to them. Not you.

It took me a long time to understand that. Very few people can give advice from an unbiased standpoint. That doesn’t mean you block any people from imparting their wisdom to you. Wisdom is something to be pursued.

What I mean is: listen to as many people as you feel comfortable and translate that into your unique point of view. If the principle behind it doesn’t apply – ignore it. If it does, consider it and see how it fits the puzzle of what you already know first-hand.

The only person in the world that is qualified to answer the question to your big life decision is yourself.

Riding the wave before jumping into water means that you imagine the full experience of a decision as vividly as possible and see where that leads you.

It’s important to imagine all possibilities until their end. What is the ultimate goal you’re going to reach.

If you don’t, you won’t be fully committed and you’ll be stuck or wish you had decided differently.

Once you’ve reached a decision, count backwards from three

two

one

And simply do it.

3. Switch gears properly

So many times I forgot to change gears that I consider this skill (yes, skill) one of the most important for living a good life. Not just a good work life or sex life or fun life or – you get the point.

When I first heard “live your life in moderation” I scoffed.

I don’t want a moderate life, I want an amazing one.

The thing I didn’t know then was that life isn’t the sum of its parts. Just like an orchestra is so much more than the sum of all instruments.

Sure, all instruments must play nicely but not continuously nor as loud as possible.

It’s all about properly changing gears of all instruments and pausing from time to time in order to have an orchestra that plays beautifully. Bringing audiences ecstatic experiences.

Now, all things in moderation means for me that you’re careful to play the orchestra not individual instruments.

Every part of your life needs attention. Learning the skill of dosing that attention and being present in each part as a conductor – with passion and dedication – is overall one of the important skills we oftentimes forget about.

Suddenly a homeless-looking old man passed behind me and pressed the button to cross. I did the same thing a minute ago. So we were now two strangers waiting for the light to turn green.

An eternity passed once more and the light was still unchanged.

The old man, possibly irritated, crossed over and I was thinking of being late as a definite possibility. I didn’t give any thought to anything else.

Suddenly the light turns green.

But only for the simple reason that he thought of me and pressed the button on the other side. Surprised, I couldn’t help but simile like a kid on Christmas day.

He waved, I waved and for a brief moment we connected as fellow human beings. We were no longer strangers, comfortably ignoring the existence of one another. He became real to me.

I never saw him again.

This was a few years ago. But in my mind, it’s as fresh as the day it happened.

Since then, I constantly remind myself of the realness of people that my work touches. As a marketer it’s easy to forget that the leads in your funnel are as real as that old man at the traffic light.

Sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

At the time I was working for a startup, about 5–6 hours a day. But I was still so absorbed in my work that it was like I was living in a theater play. With a handful of main characters and hundreds of quickly drawn colorless drafts of people.

That moment snowballed into an idea that profoundly changed me.

I was woken up.

I looked around me acknowledging the fact that everyone around was living a life just as complex and detailed as my own. It was a moment of revelation enabled by my narrow focus, suddenly expanded.

The “sacrifice” of 12+ hour work days.

I was at an AIESEC event talking about careers and how I got to work at a great company in a field that I’m really passionate about.

I did my thing and at the end I had a question that really caught me off-guard.

In my speech I talked a lot about working hard, dreaming big and making something people want. Obviously, if you look at the three elements there, they mostly directly refer to work.

The question was: “How do you balance life and work”

Simple right?

The classical work-life balance challenge.

My answer swiftly ended any follow-up questions.

I said that it’s all life.

Work is inextricably part of life so you should enjoy it just as much as any other part of life.

I still hold this as a personal truth but with some more essential details to the puzzle.

I would have never been in my position today without a decent amount of work. Definitely more than the average for my age. Work has enabled me to find the right questions to ask and to connect them with the right answers.

And right answers are nothing short of gold.

They have enabled me to carve up a path that has the potential to lead me to a place where I can greatly expand the impact I can have on the world.

It’s a sacrifice I’m doing fully aware of the path’s potential. Right now, I get precious little time for other things.

The most important part?

The more common things I used to do, now give me much more satisfaction.

Going out on a Friday night? Amazingly fun.

Drinking good coffee at a favorite coffee shop? A great experience every time.

Meeting people for chats in cool bars? Immense fun and breed deep conversations.

In a way, less has actually become more.

Going out on dates? Well, this one has been put on hold. The amount of mind-bandwidth this one takes has inevitably gotten it to be paused. For a while.

Putting in 8 hours per day at my proper job and another 3 or 4 hours for other personal projects with weekends mostly fully allocated to the latter has made me happier.

Is my work-life balance OK?

In terms of hours, definitely not. But in terms of satisfaction it’s a definitive yes. Especially since I won’t be doing it forever. It will naturally become more balanced as the work begins bearing fruit.

“Work ennobles man”

I have found this to be true since an early age. It’s something I saw in my parents and grand-parents.

And fun has always been part of it all. You only need to look at it from the right perspective and it all becomes immensely fun and rewarding.

Becoming a better person through work is real.

• You offer value to others and the world.

• You appreciate people’s character better.

• You learn things and solve problems better and faster.

• Your self esteem grows.

• You appreciate simple pleasures more.

• Your perspective can widen considerably.

• You can find fun in anything.

• You get freedom to do more and enjoy more.

What else?

Suffering has been a catalyst of our transformation. A type of pressure that brought diamonds into existence and people into the truth. A simple truth, that we are here for a brief moment only.

The days are long but the years are short.

While life’s meaning is nowhere to be found except inside our own hearts, and while many lives don’t offer the luxury of producing such words.

While I’m humbled by the privilege, and while I’m haunted by the constant burden this brings with it, I acknowledge the simple fact that my heart has given the biggest importance to one thing.

Just one impossibly hard, endless and of singular ultimate importance: helping others.

Now, this statement demands a sincere confession.

I am not as brave as others who leap out of their chairs to go to places of conflict and suffering and offer help to people who go through the darkest of what humanity is capable of. Those people are heroes.

I’ve given up on that battle to do my part in winning the war. And it’s ultimately not a war of bodies but a war of the mind. Something that goes deeper than bombs going off, it goes to the essence of the choices we are offered as humans.

Fear or love.

Fear tricks us into believing we’re worthless without winning, being in total control, perfect and powerful. It even tricks us into believing that we can live forever and that we know the ultimate truth of why we’re here and how we should live. It puts us on a path of destruction, control and ultimately total disappointment.

Love of everything ennobles our souls and enables us to truly enjoy life. To find the fine glimmers of beauty even in the most darkest of places. And ultimately to live a life that feels as an accomplishment not as a disappointment.

The choice between fear and love is always there. At every step of our lives we are confronted with it.

It’s a pill we have to take daily. One or the other. One pill poisons and the other sets us free.

This is what I do around me. I remind people of the choices.

As the only child of factory workers who have made huge sacrifices, I’m truly grateful. My parents are nothing short of heroes. I can only wish to be as they are moving forward. And while most of the year all three of us live apart, in different cities we feel as close and united towards our goals as ever.

I can name the exact moments when my life could have gone sideways in a spiralling hell.

But it hasn’t.

I’d like to say it was because of some grand conscious decision but it was truly luck. The type of luck that emerges out of thousands upon thousands unconscious decisions made daily. A majority out of love.

I’ve been stupid with a lot of things. But I’ve learned from most of them. Some lessons I’ll have to revise and some I’ll keep forever fresh in my mind.

Being born is in and of itself a miracle. There’s such an impossible probability of being born as “you” that living your entire life constantly laughing of joy could be a reasonable way to go about your life. We’re all incredibly lucky to even exist in the first place.

I think remembering that we’re going to die is the most important way to see the big picture of life while in the midst of it. Always seeing the big picture is hard.

But crucial.

Can you remember how you were before you were born?

Well, that’s the exact state you’re going to be in after you die. In a sense, you’re going back to how “you” were before.

In fact, we’ve been non-existent for far longer and will non-exist for even more than we actually will be alive. This should be a comforting thought. And all the more, make the most out of our life while helping it be a decent place for those living after us.

I’m a skinny, big nosed, funny looking, privileged, grateful, east-European, white, male. This is more than enough for a good life. Endlessly grateful, looking forward to being with you on the path of life and making things better.

Like our parents and grand-parents before us.

The days are long but the years are short.

But don’t go just yet.

We’re only just beginning the ride deep into the mind of most online marketers today.

Let me tell you what has become a sort of cocaine for me since I’ve started working in Online Marketing: numbers.

How can numbers have effects similar to cocaine?

Numbers are boring.

Well, they stop being boring when tied to their growth are a set of actions.

While most actions are known good case practices, you always need to put them in just the right combination down to minute details.

Down there is where the magic happens.

If you do things right, numbers grow. And you’re suddenly high.

Surely that’s a metaphor, right?

Well, let’s look at the effects felt by people on cocaine:

• an increasing sense of energy and alertness

• an extremely elevated mood

• a feeling of supremacy

Especially as a solo marketer, the brain’s response to growing numbers is almost always all of the above.

You’ve become a rainmaker, baby!

In business, a rainmaker is a person who brings in new business and wins new accounts almost by magic, since it is often not readily apparent how this new business activity is caused.
Wikipedia.

Don’t get me wrong, you expect growth. You’ve planned for it. But actually seeing it go — it feels like magic.

And you can get addicted pretty easily.

You’re off searching for you next hit. This is where the professionals get separated from the amateurs.

The professionals put in place processes to slowly and consistently improve and sustain growth over a long period of time.

Things need to move fast from poking tiny holes into the market towards capturing as much of the rain as possible.

Numbers don’t get you high any more, they feed you, guide you and keep you alive and well.

If you read them properly, that is.

The amateur would be long gone to another place where the high would have the potential to be as strong or stronger than before.

They’re looking for that new magic combination of actions that will unlock a high.

The amateurs gave birth to shameless click-bait titles that we all hate. They only live for the high. They don’t care about anything else.

And if they can’t get their hit soon enough they get the reverse of the coin:

• irritability

• paranoia

• restlessness

• anxiety

Anxiety is the worst of all. It pushes you into a sort of gambling state where you stop thinking rationally and just go with actions that are preying on human vulnerabilities.

You reach into scare tactics, gross exaggerations, utterly fake information just to see the numbers finally grow.

Black-hat tactics are just a few clicks away from you. Exploiting the system suddenly sounds like a great idea.

At a certain point you have to stop.

The only way to do that is to fully recognize that you’re addicted to numbers. And then starting to use that natural drive for growth and the brain’s capacity for dopamine secretion to do real work.

Realize that those numbers are actual human beings with expectations and a life as rich and complex as your own.

You’re doing marketing to address human needs not to grow that number by any means for your own pleasure receptors.

Most quit online marketing after they reach their darkest point.

Some take the real marketing route out of sheer love for the profession.

While a college degree in Marketing will not guarantee anything at all, one definitely must move away from the quick-fix of the “21 step to online marketing” article and treat Marketing as the beautifully complex profession it is.

Obviously always keep this in mind:

Don’t be afraid to get creative and experiment with your marketing.
 Mike Volpe

Reaching a balance between the high of growth and the investment of nurturing is not only healthy but brings a more deep sense of achievement in time.