“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me. “That sucks.” Silicon Valley began to look an awful lot like Hollywood.”
Above is an excerpt taken from the popular and fascinating biography titled Elon Musk and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance.
I think Jeff is completely right in his sentiment. The unfortunate truth is that the majority of advertising stems from a morally unstable business model.
Advertising produces a lot of meaningless work, invisible products, and unnecessary services.
It’s also a huge waste of human potential and talent.
Reflection
If a product or service is good enough, it should sell itself. It actually needs zero advertising, beyond the initial release.
Rather than advertising, we should outreach aka talk about the things, services, etc, that we actually use and enjoy every day.
I see marketing differently than advertising too.
Marketing is just that, placing a product or service into the market and spreading the word about it. Talking about tried and tested products is far more effective and sustainable than plastering advertisements all over every place possible.
So why is advertising still so prevalent and still so widely used?
Well, for one, advertising is imposed along with a quota in mind, and structured around that quota. And boy do business love their quotas.
Really good marketing is also completely free. Because again, the product or service should sell itself.
People talk, share their interests, and slowly, with honesty, that product or service grows traction and people support it, not because they are fooled into supporting it, but because they actually intend to use it to better their lives.
Same with production, if a company sells something faster than it can produce, it will fail (or fail, re-coupe, fail again, then slimly succeed someday down the road).
Encouragement
My intention in creating these cute little blog posts is to encourage. Encouragement to live mindful, meaningful lives. Without this, my musings come very, very short of having a purpose. So this is why I share a small, completely voluntary encouragement!
I encourage us to consider what we feed the mind. To illustrate this encouragement, below is an old Cherokee parable:
A grandfather is talking with his grandson.
The grandfather says, “In life, there are two wolves inside of us which are always at battle.
One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love.
The other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed, hatred, and fear”.
The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”
The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”
There is an awful lot of control we forget we have when it comes to what we watch, listen to, read, and spend our hard-earned money on.
I encourage us to write down the ten or so things we buy most daily. If we’re unsure, we can either download a spend tracking app or simply take a small notepad with us everywhere we go and write down everything we spend money on and the amount associated.
I did the latter and got an excellent grasp on where my money was going (cough Amazon cough). And slowly but surely I was able to reduce my dependence on the service and the cost associated with it to zero. That’s right, I completely deleted my Amazon account and haven’t used it for the past year or so.
Thank You
At the very end of each blog post, I also want to thank you, the reader, for tuning in to my cute little tidbits on mindfulness.
Thank you so much for reading or listening to this post, I am so incredibly blessed to have the opportunity and space to write what I love. If you have found any value in my blog, you can support me over at Buy Me A Coffee!
Three Links
And at the very, very end of every blog post here, I want to share just three links that inspired me before, during, or after each post. I will try to have an article, audio bit, and video (for those who learn from different mediums).
