These days there’s a big debate over a mosque going up a few blocks from Ground Zero.

Notice that 99% of the chatter is about the emotions surrounding the event.

The debate is about it being “insensitive.” The debate is about whether they “should” do it. The debate is about what kind of message it sends.

But almost everyone, even the people vehemently opposed to the mosque, agrees to a first principle: that everyone in this country has the right to practice his own religion.

Listen to the most hysterical “oh my god, they are so insensitive, this is hallowed ground, etc, etc” rant, and when the person calms down, ask him if everyone in this country has the right to practice his own religion, and the answer will almost always be “yes.”

“Yes, but it’s so insensitive, blah blah blah…”

A first principle is a muscle. To exercise it, you stop the “but.”

Are we so lazy that we can send 18 year old boys to die for our first principles, but back home, between our vanilla lattes and our Saturday afternoons at the mall, we cannot buck up long enough to say, “Build your mosque”?

(By the way, even our own President is hedging his first principles. He says Muslims have a right to build a mosque, but when pressed, he hedges and basically says, “I said they have a right, I didn’t say anything about whether they should or not.” You are our leader, Mr. President, and leaders tell their people to buck up and remember their first principles, even when it hurts. Do your job, Mr. President.)

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Not my real legs

Up until a few months ago, I never liked running. In fact, for years, when people asked me if I ran, I would answer, “Only when chased.”

Instead, to get my exercise, I’d head for the nearest hill. By hiking up nice steep hills, I could work myself into a frothy delirium and never risk the bodily wear and tear of running.

But these days I’m living in a place that’s flat as a board. Freakishly flat, for miles and miles. So to get my exercise, I started running.

Unfortunately, running hurt like crazy. After a while the shin splints faded away, but there was this one small area of my inner calf that hurt no matter what I did.

I tried different kinds of shoes, different orthotics and arch supports, even an insert that you had to bake in the oven before you used it the first time.

But the same pain kept coming back. I gave up running, figuring I’d just have to make do with walking really fast.

Then I heard about running barefoot, and I decided to give it a try. After all, what did I have to lose?

Oh. My. God. I LOVE IT!!!

The muscles used, and the motions made, are completely different than in regular running. Instead of landing on your heel, rolling forward, and pushing off with your toes, you land on the front of your foot, gently touch your heel to the ground, and then lift your entire foot off the ground.

When I first started out, I wore Vibram Fivefingers. But I kept reading that when you are learning how to run barefoot, you should go completely barefoot on the hardest pavement you can find.

I thought that sounded a little extreme. Surely, keeping at least a little bit of rubber between my feet and the ground, and spending most of my time on dirt and grass, would be the best way to ease into it.

But one day, I figured I’d take off my Vibrams and see what happened. And it was amazing.

A hard cement sidewalk is a completely unforgiving environment in which to run barefoot, so you have no choice but to do it right, and your body will give you immediate feedback if you do it wrong.

As a result, from the very first step, running barefoot on cement is amazingly smooth and gentle.

In fact, it’s more gentle than running in shoes. I know, it’s totally counter-intuitive. But it turns out it’s so true.

Muscles I didn’t even know existed are appearing in my feet now, but other than that, at the end of the day my feet feel like they did nothing all day but walk around on padded carpets.

Now, if you run in shoes, and if it’s working for you, don’t lie awake at night wondering if you should try running barefoot. It’s like starting all over again — new muscles, new technique, new everything. Even if you’re a seasoned runner, it’ll be a month before you’re ready to run even one mile barefoot. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But if you want to run, but can’t because it hurts, or if you just want to get back in touch with your inner Kalahari bushman, give it a shot. It’s not just exercise. It’s zen.

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Scarier than a skinhead is the person who remains silent while the skinhead acts out.

“Freedom” does not mean standing by doing nothing when your neighbor acts like a moron. “Fear,” however, does, and you are bigger than that.

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The other day I wrote about an immigration incident in Utah. As we all know, Utah is filled with Mormons.

Mormons are a kooky bunch. They think they found the Word of God buried on a farm in upstate New York. They marry women by the dozen. They wear funny underpants.

But you don’t have to go to Utah to find weird beliefs. You don’t have to go to Utah to find dysfunctional marriages. And you don’t have to go to Utah to find people doing strange things with underpants.

The Mormons do a pretty admirable thing with their kids, and we could all learn from it:

After Mormon kids finish high school, the boys (which means 50% of the population) go away for two years to do their “mission.” Most of them get sent to places like Tulsa, Oklahoma. A lucky few go to exotic places like China or Brazil.

You’ve probably seen these missionaries. Maybe they’ve even come to your door. They’re the clean-cut teenagers wearing clip-on ties and short-sleeve white shirts, roaming around town in pairs, riding bicycles or driving cheap subcompact cars.

On the surface, this is an annoying practice, going around town knocking on people’s doors, trying to sell everyone on your god.

But look at it another way. See what else it means…

Mormons send their 18-year-old kids away to learn how to hold your head high even when you stick out like a sore thumb, how to show up for something even though you’re unpopular, and how to let 100 doors slam shut in your face so you can be there for the one that opens.

We, on the other hand, send our 18-year-old kids away to learn how to do better keg stands and master the art of oversleeping.

You’ve probably heard, or taken part in, plenty of Mormon jokes in your life. I have too. But next time you chuckle at those crazy Mormons, remember that they are doing something better than we are. For every ounce of joking, they deserve a pound of respect.

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In today’s news is a group of people in Utah “outing” illegal immigrants.

If our response to economic hard times is to scapegoat the poorest, most marginal people around us, instead of rolling up our sleeves and fixing the mistakes we helped make, we deserve to get our asses kicked.

Do not allow your neighbors to act like this. Your country is not weak. Do not allow it to act scared.

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Why? Because when you’re “trying” to do something, you are far less likely to take action. Far less likely to make an impact on the world.

Imagine you are sitting in a chair in the corner of a room, facing the center of the room, and you want to cross the room.

“Trying” looks like this: sitting in the chair, thinking about how much you want to cross the room, thinking about the good and the bad things that might happen along the way, tensing the muscles in your body, getting ready to stand up. You can “try” to cross the room and never even get out of the chair.

“Doing” looks like this: simply stand up, and start walking across the room. Maybe someone will shoot you in the middle of the room. Maybe a rock will fall on you. Maybe you’ll never get to the other side. But at least you stood up and started walking. The guy who is “trying” to cross the room, he never even got out of his chair.

Stop trying, and just do. You’ll probably hit your target a hell of a lot sooner.

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The sad thing about this photo isn’t the unemployed people. It’s not even the factory or the town going downhill.

The sad thing about this photo is the guys who wrote the sign were basically telling the world, “We are such bad businessmen, such unimaginative people, that even if someone came up to us who could take $5 and turn it into $10, we are so busy dying that we can’t talk to that person.”

That’s an incredible, and embarrassing, lack of faith in yourself.

For 20 years, we, the United States, have been playing consumer to the world. Now we, and much of the world, are paying the price. What got us here won’t get us where we want to go next, and it will take us a while to figure out what that next is going to look like. In the meantime, we get to have a recession.

The spirit that caused those people to write that sign, I see a lot of that spirit going around these days. It’s the spirit of, “We are so busy dying we don’t have time to live.”

Find that spirit within yourself, and root it out like there’s no tomorrow. You owe it to yourself, and you owe it to your country.

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The other day I heard someone say, “If you see someone who is poor (no money, no family, no soul), it is because you’ve decided that person is not worth your time, your help, or your love.”

In other words, the existence of lack did not begin with the other person. The existence of lack began with you. Lack exists because you allowed it to.

And if you can choose to originate the existence of lack, you can also choose to not originate the existence of lack.

That doesn’t mean you can make poverty in the world go away by simply blinking your eyes. People will still have holes in their shoes, people will still be unemployed, people will still live lonely lives.

But what it does mean is that when you see nothing in another human being, they are not the source of that nothingness. You are the source of that nothingness, and you should ask yourself if being closed off to the world like that is really what you want out of your life.

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Years ago I realized that ideas are dirt cheap. Everyone has at least one.

Actions, now those are hard. For every 100 people who have a great idea, there’s only one person willing to act on it.

As a result, you can freely distribute your ideas. Let everyone steal them, because almost no one will act on them.

And when you give your ideas away, you become known as a giving, inspiring, and charismatic person. People admire your confidence.

As for the few people who not only “steal” your ideas, but act on them too, remember that it is highly unlikely that your idea was truly unique. A hundred other people probably had your idea before you did. No one had to steal it from you, it was already in the public domain.

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Whatever your business, there is a long list of things your customers need. At least one of them is probably something you can make, at very little cost to yourself.

That is your marketing tool. Make it, and give it away for free.

When I was doing presentation training in Istanbul, my customers were all non-native English speakers. They spoke very advanced levels of English, many of them so advanced that they could have easily lived and worked in the US or England.

However, they all lacked that colloquial “native speaker touch.” And I, as a native English speaker, had something they didn’t: I grew up speaking American idioms.

So I sent out a weekly “Business Idiom” email. The email had an idiom used often in business life, along with a definition and two examples.

It was just a short email, something that could be read in a few seconds. In fact, I kept it so short that it could be read in the Microsoft Outlook preview pane. Recipients could read the email without even opening it.

In two years, I grew my list from 20 to 1800 people. Every week, I got to put my name in front of 1800 people in my target market. Not only did they accept the momentary intrusion, they looked forward to it. If I went a week without sending one out, I got dozens of emails asking me if I was okay, and where was the idiom email.

And I never lacked for clients. In fact, I had to turn people away on a regular basis, and I got to charge a premium price, too. I charged 50% more than the market rate, and in fact at one point I was charging three times the normal market rate.

All because of that weekly email.

Other business owners I was friendly with wanted to find out how to tap into that magic, too. So I would tell them why I did it the way I did it, but they would insist that that would never work for them. What they wanted to do instead was send out a wordy, full-page monthly newsletter that talked almost entirely about what they did, and what made them special.

They weren’t coming at it from the angle of, “What can I give my customers that my customers want,” they were coming at it from the angle of, “How can I impress my customers?” And then they would wonder why none of their customers cared.

Think of something your customers really want, something you can supply at almost no cost to yourself, even if it is only tangentially-related to the work you do, and give it away to your customers for free. They will be happy to see you coming. They will make your competitors jump through hoops to prove themselves, while they simply smile and wave you through the door.

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My Grandpa Krause has been building and fixing things longer than I’ve been alive. He’s a farmer by trade, and for decades he used a tractor that was new back in the days of the Korean War. That tractor is still around, and it runs just fine. Half the parts on that thing were made by him, simply because it’s hard to find ready-made parts for a machine that old.

He retired from farming a few years back, and now he teaches 8- to 10-year old kids how to build birdhouses, bookcases, and storage chests. The kids conceive and design their own projects and learn how to use the tools they need to build them. The other day, I went to the graduation ceremony for one of these classes.

Those kids worshipped him, and the parents loved him for teaching their kids a skill and, more so, for being the kind of man their kids could worship.

As soon as I showed up for the ceremony, and the kids and their parents realized I was “Mr. Krause’s grandson,” they worshipped and loved me, too. And I hadn’t even done anything except walk into the room.

For a few hours, I got to feel like a rock star, and I didn’t even know how to play the guitar. The gift my grandpa had given those kids was rippling out and affecting me, too.

When you give a gift to someone, the beneficiary isn’t just the recipient. It’s everyone the recipient will come across in the future.

Related posts:
Take a teacher to lunch
My Grandpa Hofer’s parting gift

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To this post, Ken replies, “But in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

That is absolutely true.

But the kingdoms he used to trade with, they are going to ditch him, because they will prefer trading with the other kingdoms filled with two-eyed men.

The Devil is the king of Hell, but he still lives in Hell.

Related posts:
Benchmarking: a surefire path to mediocrity
On being different
Much better than conventional wisdom

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The linear progression of time is a human construct.

Yes, the earth rotates around its axis every 24 hours, and it revolves around the sun every 365 days or so.

But if we divided the day into 36 hours, or 67 hours, the earth would still rotate at the same speed.

And if we divided the year into 17 days, or 428, the earth would still revolve around the sun at the same speed. We could even make a year equal 1.4 trips around the sun, not 1.0, and Nature wouldn’t be bothered one bit.

Nature is not concerned with time as we’ve defined it.

Nature is like Bill Murray in that movie, “Groundhog Day” – it is reliving the same cycles over and over. But unlike Bill Murray, that fact doesn’t stress Nature out. Nature seems to be cool with it.

So the idea that time progresses linearly, the idea that it starts out on the left side of an X-axis and moves steadily to the right, that’s a human thing.

Now, I’m not saying you should throw away your watch, ditch your 3:00 dentist appointment, and not show up for work tomorrow. The linear progression of time is a perfectly good way to organize the world, and it brings us humans a lot of benefits.

What I am saying is that as you participate in this system today, be aware that we humans have created it. It is opt-in. It is not mandatory.

When you remind yourself on a regular basis that one system you participate in is opt-in, not mandatory, you are a little more comfortable ditching other systems when they aren’t working for you.

By the way, I love philosophical discussions about time, even though they are a complete waste of time (no pun intended). In fact, here’s one of my favorite videos on YouTube…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km89X8zoJH0

In the video, Brian Cox, a British physicist, is trying to answer the question, “What time is it?”

I think he’s asking a very interesting question, but one that cannot be answered.

Maybe the reason time is so hard to figure out is that we humans created time, and when we try to step outside of ourselves to grapple with it, it disappears like a mirage. We can’t wrestle with it outside of our own heads, because it doesn’t exist outside of our own heads.

Perhaps the best answer to his question is just to stop asking the question. Besides, don’t you have a dentist appointment this afternoon?

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If you want to guarantee that you will become mediocre, you should make benchmarking an important part of your business.

Benchmarking ensures you spend more and more of your time staring at your competitors. And every ounce of energy you spend on your competitors is an ounce of energy you don’t spend on the people who give you money, your customers.

Benchmarking ensures that you become just like everyone else, except maybe just a little bit better, if you’re really good at it.

And in a roomful of insane people, being the least insane doesn’t make you sane.

Related posts:
The one-eyed man
On being different
Much better than conventional wisdom

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In high school, almost everyone is focused on being just like everyone else. If you suggest being different to a teenager, he’ll attack you like a cornered animal.

But after high school, it’s like someone flips a switch, and everyone spends the rest of their lives trying to be different.

People start asking, over and over and over, “How can I be different?” “How can I differentiate myself?”

Differentiating yourself is actually extremely easy. All you have to do is do what others don’t.

When an idea occurs to you, don’t first ask things like, “Is this a good idea?” or, “Will this help me?” or, “What will my boss think?”

Instead, make the first question, “Does anyone else do this?” If the answer is “no,” you may be on to something.

Of course, later you’ll have to run it through some other filters, like, “Will this help us?” After all, just because everyone else isn’t jumping off the cliff doesn’t mean you should run headlong over the edge.

But when you start considering “no” a good answer to the question, “Is anyone else doing this,” you’ll realize that finding ways to differentiate yourself is one of the easiest things in the world.

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When I was selling Turkish jewelry via Moda Jewels, I heard about the conversion benefits of putting a toll-free number on your website. All the advice I read said, “Get a toll-free number and make sure all your customers see it”.

So I figured, “Better put a checkmark in that box”, and I got myself a toll-free number.

I was in Istanbul, Turkey, selling mostly to women in the US, so I set up my 800 number to forward to me in Istanbul via Skype. Callers were completely unaware they were talking to someone in Istanbul, unless I told them.

I figured the 800 number would be a very transactional, “my bracelet broke, can I get a replacement” kind of thing. But I was wrong.

Most of the calls I got were old ladies calling just to talk about their cats’ bowel habits. At first, I was privately wondering, “Why are you telling me this stuff?”

But then I realized that from their perspective, a silver Turkish bracelet is cool and all, but if $15 will buy you a friendly and sympathetic ear to listen to stories about your cat’s bowels and your daughter’s love life, that’s a damn good way to spend $15. You’ll tell all your friends about it, too, and while you’ve got that nice young man on the line, can you get 10 more bracelets to give to your sisters and girlfriends?

In your rush to be above average, don’t overlook the conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is, by definition, average, and average actions will get you average results.

But sometimes, when you try something that is conventional wisdom, you’ll find it works for you in an unexpected way.

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I used to sell evil eye bracelets.

When I started out, I thought I was selling “Turkish jewelry”. After all, I was living in Turkey, the jewelry was made in Turkey, and I was buying it from a Turkish wholesaler. Plus, I had never heard of an “evil eye” until I went to Turkey, and all the Turks around me identified with evil eyes as “Turkish”.

Most of my customers, though, were Greeks in Chicago, Iranians and Armenians in California, Latinos in Florida and Texas, and Jews in New York.

It took me a year to realize I wasn’t selling “Turkish jewelry”.

None of my customers were buying “Turkish jewelry”. The Greeks were buying Greek jewelry, the Iranians were buying Iranian jewelry, and the Cubans were buying Cuban jewelry.

Why? Because it turns out the evil eye isn’t just a Turkish thing. It’s all around the Mediterranean, and all around Central and South America.

A few years after I folded the business, I was talking to a guy in the US who also sold evil eye jewelry. He was a Turk originally from Istanbul. He had grown up surrounded by evil eyes. The way he saw it, he was selling “Turkish jewelry”.

In the past, this guy had been one of my competitors. But I had moved on and was doing something else. So I shared with him something I had learned:

You probably don’t know your target market as well as you think you do.

Notice that I didn’t say, “You don’t know your target market”. I said, “You probably don’t know your target market as well as you think you do”.

Whatever business you are in, it is highly likely that your product (whether it’s a tangible product, or an idea, whatever) will resonate with people you wouldn’t have thought of, because your own mind drew the circle too small, or in the wrong place.

In other words, “Don’t listen to your own press”.

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I went to Walmart to pick up some groceries today. When I had everything I needed, I went to the checkout lane, and the cashier started ringing up my stuff.

I was off in my own little world, caught up in my own little self-pity party. It had been kind of a rough week for me. I wasn’t feeling too good about being me at that particular moment.

The cashier started making small talk. She asked if I was having a good Father’s Day. I replied that I was having an excellent Father’s Day, thank you (a little white lie, since actually I was busy thinking about how hard my life was).

She asked me if I was a father, and I smiled and said, “No, but I have one”. She smiled back and replied, “I think we all do”. I said, “Yes, I guess it tends to work that way”.

There was a moment of silence, while she continued ringing up my groceries.

Then I asked her, “How about you, do you have any children?”

And she said, “Well, yes, we had three, but they are in Heaven now”.

This woman was about 25 years old, and she had already buried three children.

No matter how much you might be thinking your current situation sucks, the person standing next to you is probably going through a tough time of their own, too.

And in fact, theirs might be worse than yours.

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When my Grandpa Hofer was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, his doctor gave him three months to live. What my grandpa did with those three months was one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me.

There was no energy spent hoping death wouldn’t come. Every ounce of energy available was spent preparing for what would happen when he was gone.

He went and made his funeral arrangements. He bought a burial plot for himself (and one for his wife, who is still here with us, bless her heart). He sold the house he had built with his own two hands, knowing that he wouldn’t be around to keep it up anymore, and he moved himself and his wife into a retirement home near my folks, where he knew his wife would get the care she needed when he wasn’t there to provide it anymore.

And when his time came, there was no dancing around the reality of what was about to happen. If he had managed to handle his final months the way he did, then the least those of us around him could do was to respect him with the same kind of straightforwardness and frankness. We said our goodbyes to him to his face, while he was still conscious enough to know what was going on.

Everyone’s got a place they go when they need some “buckup inspiration” or some “raise your game inspiration”. That memory is mine. Whenever I need to dig deep for that little extra something, that’s where I go.

By the way, since my grandpa’s not around, I can’t thank him personally. So I have no choice but to go around thanking other people for what they’ve done for me. Like Craig Wight, or Gordon Boggs.

Turns out that’s been another gift my grandpa gave me, too.

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I’ve had a number of bosses in my career. And I’ve liked all but one of them. In fact, even years later, my other bosses are some of my best friends, and they are my best professional references.

But that one boss, he and I didn’t get along too well. After a short time he got fired for a multitude of reasons. But while he was there, he did something I wasn’t too fond of.

He publicly hung me out to dry in a meeting.

He and I were working on a large interdepartmental project. There was going to be a problem in our area of responsibility. I began bringing it to his attention well ahead of time, but he had his mind set on something else. So we went with that, and I eventually shut up about the matter.

A few weeks later, in one of the interdepartmental meetings, one of the other departments foresaw the problem too, and got angry at us for not seeing it before they did. They looked at my boss with a look of disbelief that we would let something like this fall through the cracks. I guess my boss didn’t know what to say, so he looked at me. Then they looked at me too, with the same look of disbelief.

I looked at my boss, realized I was alone on this one, and swallowed hard and stammered, “That’s a good point, I’m glad you thought of it. We will take care of it”.

Now, I wasn’t happy to take the fall. I felt embarrassed and humiliated. At the time, I didn’t see the experience as an opportunity.

But years later, I look back on that moment and thank him for delivering a gift to me.

When others in the room see you taking the fall, they often sense what’s going on. And they’ll wonder why you are keeping your mouth shut.

But over time, that kind of action will strengthen their trust in you. They will see you as someone who never hangs someone out to dry, someone who takes responsibility even when he doesn’t have to.

And in the future, when you need those people to follow you on a difficult path, they will go with you, because they will trust you to stay there in the foxhole with them if things go bad.

True, you’ve got to build your overall reputation within the company as a dependable thinker who anticipates problems and solves them before they happen. You can’t build a reputation as a doormat, or people won’t respect you.

But if a person in authority ever hangs you out to dry, and there are others around to watch it, you might want to let it happen. That boss doesn’t know it yet, but it is highly likely he is falling on his own sword.

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