Today’s blog format is a slight change from the normal (yes... sometimes change is good)...
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I was driving around town the other day when I noticed a large billboard sign for a local fast-food restaurant.
The sign read... "Four tacos - One dollar"...
My first reaction was... I’ve eaten those tacos before and although that might be a good financial deal... it’s a bad deal in most other respects...
At one point in time, I came to realize that when it came to fast-food tacos... more isn’t necessarily better. In fact... less was actually better.
Somewhere between Costco, Wal-Mart and the slew of 99¢ stores, we seem to have taken a loss of our senses.
Just because we get more for our money... it doesn’t make it better...
Today, there are over 200 channels of cable TV... plus hundreds of internet series... plus millions of homemade YouTube videos...
There is so much media content in fact, that if a person were to plant themselves in front of an Internet / Cable connected television and watch it for 18 hours a day / 365 days / 75 years, there is not enough time in one’s lifetime to watch all of the current content currently available.
The problem is that most (if not nearly all) of the content is simply unwatchable.
We have purchased clothing that we have never worn... we buy food stuff that spoils before we eat it... we have books, magazines and newspapers that we’ll never read...
I suspect we do this because somewhere we truly believe that we would wear those clothes, eat that food or read more... but that’s not reality.
We need bigger closets... larger refrigerators... and off-site storage spaces to keep all our books, dishes, furniture, toys and other items that we really don’t need or even want...
Somewhere down the road, perhaps we’ll all discover that a little bit of great usually trumps a lot of bad... and that goes for most things in life...
... just don’t tell that to big business marketeers or the government... they just want us to keep spending on things that we really don’t need or want...
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I was having a discussion with a friend a couple of days ago about this latest budget debacle in Washington...
He concluded that the politicians just needed to put aside their ideological differences and learn to compromise to get something done...
I suggested to him that perhaps compromise wasn’t necessarily the way to go at all... instead of compromise... maybe we should look at trade-offs...
My friend looked at me somewhat dumbfounded...
"What’s the difference?" he asked.
I explained that there is a big difference between trade-offs and compromise... with trade-offs... you get something that you want... and the other person gets something they want...
Compromise, on the other hand, means that neither party gets what they want...
He still looked confused, so I gave him the following example:
Suppose you and your wife wanted to go on vacation...
Your perfect vacation is to relax on a warm sunny beach with your nose in a good book...
Your wife, on the other hand, wants to go on a week-long bicycle wine-tasting tour in France...
A compromise would be for you both to take a vacation to New York City... something that neither of you wanted to do but can tolerate...
However, a trade-off would be that one year you both go to Hawaii and one year you both go cycling in Bordeaux...
With compromise, no one gets what they want... while trade-offs allow you to get exactly what you want... only part of the time...
What we end up doing at home, business and government... is trying to appease everyone at once so everything we do gets moved to the bland center... one-size-fits-all...
Take a look at the cars on the road today... they are almost indistinguishable from one another (can you imagine if there were no logos bolted on... how would anyone know one car from another?)...
Very few companies take risks to make something truly remarkable... rather they play it safe by dumbing it down to the lowest denominator for the masses...
Government is the worst offender... make one box and put everyone in it... but take a poll first...
The world today allows for customization and personalization like never in history... no longer should we subjugated to the tyranny of the "OR" (do this OR that)... when we can have the freedom of the "AND" (do this AND that)...
We no longer need to compromise... maybe Baskin-Robbin’s 31 Flavors is on to something...
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My old friend Rudy stopped by my office to pick up some football tickets. I wasn’t able to go to the game, so I offered the tickets to Rudy.
As we spent a few minutes catching up with each other’s lives, he mentioned that he was an avid reader of the OptiFuse blog each week.
Overall he thought I did a decent job each week but wondered how I could keep coming up with fresh ideas week after week.
I admitted to him that after nearly four years of writing my weekly Friday blog, I was actually beginning to run out of interesting topics... (granted... interesting to me... not necessarily interesting to every one of my readers).
Rudy mentioned that he too wanted to write a blog, but he feared the same thing would happen to him... quickly running out of ideas...
"I’m not sure I could come up with that many interesting things to say", he confessed, "I’m not sure I’m committed enough to do it each and every week".
That’s when the idea hit us both... almost simultaneously.
I need to have a few "guest bloggers", like Rudy, who have some interesting points to talk about and can write well enough to make it readable to the audience...
Heck... if radio and TV talk shows can have guest hosts... why can’t I do it as well?
I floated the idea by several of my close friends and advisers... and they all thought it was a great idea...
So here’s my challenge to my readers... maybe you have it in you to be a guest blogger... if so... I’d love to hear from you... e-mail me at jimk@optifuse.com
Here are my basic rules:
1) You need to have something interesting to share...
2) You need to be able to say it in 800-1000 words..
3) The topic should not be political, religious, and/or too controversial (this is NOT conservative AM talk radio or liberal Public Broadcasting)...
4) I reserve the right to edit content where I deem it to be inappropriate for the audience...
Guest blogging won’t occur more than once a month... but I thought it might be fun to read what others are thinking about... and hopefully we will all be able to learn something new and interesting.
I hope you enjoyed the format today... and I hope you’ll like some of our guests writers in the future (maybe it’ll be you)...
...and thank you very much for your support of OptiFuse, where we believe that trying new things is what life is all about.
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