I am grateful to have many opportunities and great people around me. I have an enormous potential to make things happen or to ‘ship’ as Seth Godin likes to say. The reality is – SO DO YOU! But how come we always stop ourselves from trying to make a dent in this world (a positive dent)? How come so many of us are afraid to stand out and not be average?

Instead many of us are just cogs.

We are afraid to get criticized, to fail, be judged, laughed at, or looked the wrong way. We often think of the bad things that may happen when we undertake an endeavour. This is your lizard brain speaking and we all need to stop listening to it and instead- SHIP!

To tell you the truth, I’ve been battling my lizard brain for some time now; see the last time I posted anything on this blog. Yes, I was busy, yes I was making things happen but we all have time to do something extra that we are truly passionate about and I wasn’t doing it. Instead, I was afraid of what people will think of my grammar or my ideas.

WHAT IF?

A phrase that many of us face… What if what?

You fall flat on your face?

I recently witnessed someone achieve one of their dreams and overcome their fears, quickly being brought down after getting hate mail right after. The reality, people will always laugh, point, and criticize… no matter how successful you become or how nice you are.

You have to do it for yourself and for the people that you inspire to ACT and make a difference in their life. Ignore all others and your lizard brain!

Highly Recommend the video below…

I stumbled upon a great video by the legendary Ira Glass on the importance of storytelling and the utter significance of abandoning crap. He says you have to set aside time for looking for stories, probably just as much time as the rest of the process. He spends a lot of time being exposed to new ideas, stories, imagery and then only picks out the best.

What do you think?

Last year has been filled with soul searching as the pace of our western lifestyle has got me asking myself questions. One question that kept being repeated was – “Who am I?” Not my job title, not the small acronyms after my name on a business card, or the business I run or work for.

I.

My biggest realization this past year has been that we often forget who we are or never knew in the first place. We all have been procrastinators. Not just procrastinating at work but procrastinating pleasure and taking time to think and ask ourselves questions. (Further Reading: Procrastinating Pleasure)

Well, it’s true.

Finding yourself and especially finding your Element (The place where the things you love to do and the things you are good at come together) isn’t easy but the search for these vital elements is required. I believe that if we find ourselves, it will be easier to cope with the present moment and future events that we sometimes can’t control.

Take it easy.

I quickly learned that you cannot find yourself or your element in a day, week, month, or even a year. And you can’t just spend all time lying on the grass asking – “Who am I?” What we can all do is keep an open mind and try new things in life. And only through new experiences will you be able to find your passions and yourself. Don’t stress on finding yourself right away.

Asking questions is important.

As the clock winds down, try asking yourself these questions:

• Who am I if I lose my job/career?
• Who am I if I lose my partner/girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband?
• Who am I behind the small talk conversations I have on a daily basis?

And most importantly:

• When you look back on your life in your death bed, what do you want to have remembered?

These are the questions that I have asked myself in the past year and have quickly realized that life is moving at an ever increasing rate and to fully take charge of it, you have to find out what is important to you and take small daily actions to achieve your dreams.

And don’t forget to dream big! Because dreams do come true.

One of my dreams came true this year. A couple of years ago I dreamed of meeting a woman of my dreams: caring, understanding, beautiful, romantic who accepts me for who I am. This dream came true in 2007, although at that time we already knew each other for sometime but didn’t yet know that we were a perfect match.

And this summer another dream came true. As my most cherished moment the past year has been proposing to my future wife Mimi in Positano, Italy. Maybe you can even say that two dreams came true as I always dreamed of going to Italy, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

Marriage.

Many have asked me:

• Are you excited?
• Why so young?
• Are you sure? Crazy?
• Why are you getting married?
• It will change everything, you know that right?

Excited for marriage – sure. But what I love about our relationship is that we don’t put importance on one date as we are excited about our relationship every day. Marriage is just a way for us to show our love for each other.

Friends and money.

They never mix. This is what I learned this year. A great long friendship came to an end due to this circumstance. The lesson here: friends and money can work but only on the basis that when you lend money you don’t have the expectation of ever seeing that money again or do not rely on that money in the near future.

Expectations and Relationships.

Expectations are a big part of our lives and are very important but they also tend to make things difficult. Many of us always expect others to take us out, call us on our birthdays, give us presents, maintain friendships, or be romantic. Hence, this year I have realized that you have to expect things from yourself first.

Wonder why friends don’t call you? Well, when is the last time you called your friend? Is your boyfriend not being romantic? Well, when is the last time you did something special or romantic for him?

If we want anything to happen in life, we have to take actions ourselves. Call your old friends, give people presents, and send those handwritten greetings cards in the mail.

And don’t expect anything in return!

Don’t expect anything in return? You crazy?

Not really as another realization I had this year is that one of the most effective ways to get people to change or do the things you expect them to do is to be a great example by doing things yourself, not expecting anything in return, or simply inspiring them to act.

Be a man/woman of your actions, not words.

2010.

Looking forward to it.

Toronto is one of the most entrepreneurial cities in the world. In this vibrant city, there are many smart and talented individuals who are taking tremendous steps to make their businesses succeed. I wanted to start a little segment profiling these young entrepreneurs to let the public know their secrets and strategies for success by letting you in on their entrepreneurial mindset.

The first entrepreneur that is being featured is Satish Kanwar, Partner at Jet Cooper, a digital experience agency based in downtown Toronto. Satish launched Jet Cooper earlier this year with his partner Verne Ho. They are quickly expanding and are becoming the go-to agency for technology firms looking for kick-ass web design and application development.

I want to immensely thank Dan Demsky and Justin Smith and the rest of TheBizMedia team for supporting me in this effort to profile entrepreneurs in this great city that we live in by providing the video production and editing services.

Watch the interview below for entrepreneurial insights from Satish and leave your comments below.

If you are or you know someone who is an up-and-coming entrepreneur in the Greater Toronto Area, contact me about being featured in the next segment.

Thank you for reading! If you have not already, why not subscribe to my RSS feed, or you can get the latest updates from me in your Email inbox for free.

Thanks for visiting and keep in touch ~ Alex.

Image Credit: Kendall Helmstetter Gelner

One of my favourite speeches of all time is Ken Robinson’s TED talk on “How School Kills Creativity”. I even have it featured on the top slider above (Yes, it’s that good!). Ken Robinson opened a whole new world to me, a world that made total sense and answered a very important question that I frequently found myself asking throughout high school and university – “Why do I suck at statistics and math in general?”

I’m not horrible and quite frankly very capable of achieving a tolerable mark, got a C+ in my university quantitative methods course. However, solving math problems never felt natural to me. Preset methodology and a complete lack of creativity in following steps to get the one and only answer. And it was this idea that the answer will always be the same without having the ability to re-invent* the set equation or model that made the course and many months in university dreadful. I am not saying that statistics or math cannot be creative, it certainly can. I am just not a creative mathematician.

Back to Ken Robinson and Creativity

Ken Robinson believes that creativity is about having original ideas and that creativity is where you are pushing the boundaries to new and unexplored territories. This can certainly be achieved in statistics but you cannot make anyone learn anything, some are just better at other things.  Even though people may look similar, they still think in very different ways. People also see the world in different ways and people certainly have different strengths. And the problem that lies within our education system is that we are putting everyone through the same mill except for a few in specialty schools.

Definitely not!

Everyone of us has a purpose or a talent they need to discover. And the problem in our society is that many underestimate their intelligence and capacity. The quote right beside my computer is true, “If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”

In the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) commencement speech below, Ken Robinson urges people to follow their passions. He continues says that a life is not a one way street, if you find your passion- your world will transform around you. If you do the things that fulfill you – your life will take on a greater purpose and meaning.

And this is the exact moment, you might say:

I have to agree, it`s not and I`ll be honest with you – I still haven`t found my passion. But what I am doing and what you can still keep doing is to keep searching for it.

Human talent is very deep…

Ken Robinson`s example of Death Valley in Spring 2005 shows the true potential in everyone one of us. “Death Valley is called Death Valley for a reason,” he says, as it seems as there is no life there. But during winter 2005, 6 inches of rain fell onto Death Valley, encouraging flowers to sprout – a once in a lifetime spectacle.

Death Valley was not dead but simply dormant as right beneath what seemed liked dead surface are the seeds of possibility, simply waiting for the right conditions to come. And when the conditions come, life and growth is predestined.

This applies to all of us. Life cannot resist the right conditions. But you have to create these right conditions. Go out, discover, fail, learn, feel, be open, and try new things for your own creative flourishing and your success will be waiting to be discovered. As Ken puts it, always keep your mind alive, feed your imagination, and never take any ideas for granted.

Simply, use everything you have.

Who knows- I may have just discovered my passion for developing people`s talents.

When we think of advertising agencies, we instantly think of traditional print and TV ad campaigns that many of us are no longer paying attention to. And whenever I think of CEO’s of the advertising giants that make these campaigns, I think of old men who are hoarding their advertising profit margins and are resistant to change to the new ‘unsexy’ world of decreased margins in the digital space.

However, I am completely wrong. Industry leaders like Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP Group (2^nd largest advertising group), and Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe (4^th largest), are fully embracing the digital world and are transforming their agencies into digital power houses.

I was really fascinated after I heard Maurice Levy speak in a recent Cambridge University podcast, From National to Global, where he discussed the importance of digital in the future. And Mr. Levy is definitely putting money where his mouth is. Even in horrendous economic times, Publicis Groupe has been able to outperform the industry by a large margin and is currently positioned number one in the industry after raking in $4.8 billion in new business wins for the first nine months of 2009. In a recent interview for EBM after Q3 revenue announcement, Maurice credited this victory to the growing investment in transforming Publicis into an all-digital agency, saying that this investment is already starting to pay off.

Currently, digital accounts for 21.3% of consolidated revenue and Publicis hopes to grow this number to 25% by next year and to 100% by 2015 (the 100% was a joke ). But I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the master plan after-all, as Mr. Levy certainly believes in the power of the internet or as he likes to refer it to as the power of digital. Maurice truly believes that digital is changing our society which can be seen through the tremendous growth of social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and how they have  impacted our culture. At the end of the day, advertising is all about society and if advertising agencies want to succeed, they have to reflect the society through its campaigns and mediums where people absorb information on a daily basis. Like it or not, the future is in digital and this is exactly why Publicis Groupe is slowly being transformed into an all-digital agency.

My only question is- will most agencies follow suit? Or will they keep ignoring the paradigm shift that has already happened?

I would recommend listening to the full Cambridge University podcast featuring Maurice Levy below to fully understand Mr.Levy’s genius.

levy_national

If you are too lazy to read my summary of the Second Circle philosophy or enjoy watching videos instead, then watch Patsy explain it herself at the end of this post (10 min). One word- Awesome!

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”- You might recognize this line as being one of the most famous Shakespeare creations and Patsy Rodenburg explores this exact line in her vocal philosophy of the Second Circle. Patsy explains the three energy states or ‘circles’ that we tend to be in (First, Second, and Third) and further proves that we all have a choice to live in the present in the Second Circle with yourself and others. Patsy Rodenburg’s focuses many aspects of her philosophy on Shakespeare for the reason that“he revealed to us that we can only love unconditionally, find intimacy, be equal with each other, use power well, if we are present to each other and the world.“

According to Patsy, it is very important to be in the right circle of energy as the natural movement of energy runs through you, your body, breath, voice, and it is completely transferrable. The three circles of energy describe the ways that the three basic human energies move. Our natural presence is in the Second Circle and the First and Third Circles only take us away from being fully present. Patsy’s exercises enable us to polish every facet of our presence: “posture, breath, voice, sensory awareness, listening, clear thinking, generosity of heart, and sheer bravery” which enable us to stay in the Second Circle.

The First Circle of energy or the Circle of Self and Withdrawal is all about inwards energy that falls back inside a person. The First Circle absorbs energy from others and draws all outer stimuli inward. Whenever a person is in the First Circle, they are not observant about people or objects outside themselves and their interest in others is only a way to illuminate themselves.

The Third Circle or the Circle of Bluff and Force is full of energy that is pushed out and very energized. It can often be seen in people that are loud and often take others peoples space. The energy in the Third Circle is untargeted and outward-moving as the attention is fully outside them while at the same time lacking focus and detail. People in the Third Circle may “speak eloquently, sound enthusiastic and charming,” but clearly don’t listen well. They look through people, scanning the surface of every interaction rather than being fully present with them.

The Second Circle is all about being engaged, connected, and fully present. We are born in this circle and our survival strongly depends on our ability to stay there. However, we lose many aspects of our natural presence through new learned habits that we pick up from our often never-present society. Your passion and charisma is fully displayed when you are in the Second Circle as you are able to fully focus and connect with an another being. When you are present, there is focus and this allows complete transfer of energy between people and other beings. In the Second Circle, there is equality and this gives room for intimacy and connectedness.

Winston Churchill once said, “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give” and according to Patsy Rodenburg, in order to make our lives meaningful and complete, we have to make a decision to stay present which will enable us to not only make ourselves feel good but to also make others feel good around us.

• If you already have a strategy in place, is it working for you?
• If you haven’t, are you taking the necessary action to put a strategy in place?

These are just some of the questions you may want to ask yourself before continuing to read this post. If everything is fine and peachy with your social media strategy and you are achieving all of your set objectives then keep on top of your game and keep sifting through all the great ideas to really crush it in 2010.

However, if you are in constant search of social media strategy improvement, then read on.

Here are 5 Easy Steps to a Successful Social Media Strategy:

1) Know Your Objectives

Before starting any social media initiative you have to really figure out what the purpose of your social media strategy is and have clear objectives in place. We all want our businesses to succeed and be profitable but that is simply not a clear enough purpose for your social media strategy to succeed.

You have to ask yourself and the team, questions that will drill down to exactly “WHY?” using these tools will contribute to the success of your business.

Do you want create a better customer service experience? Raise brand awareness? Generate 17% more business leads? Or most importantly, increase sales by 34%?  There are tons of other questions you can ask but always make sure you have a clear objective before jumping in and starting to post content on the web.

Watch the video below by Mitch Joel of Twist Image to get more ideas:

2) Fine Tune the Details

After figuring out your objectives for using social media, you have to fine tune your strategy. What tools are the best fit for your social media strategy? Will Twitter allow you to listen to your clients and help you improve customer service? Is Facebook going to help you engage with the fans of your brand and allow you to provide them with great offers? Which tools are you going to use and why?

But most importantly, how are you going to implement the social media strategy? Who will be part of the team? What are the time-lines and set objectives?

To help you fine tune details and pace your success, be sure to use your role models within your industry who had success with their social media strategy. A good example of this is Future Shop following Dell’s lead into social networking by creating a Future Shop (FS_Deals) Twitter account where they offer latest deals and exclusive offers. Dell has a similar profitable Twitter account -(DellOutlet). Do research on your competitors and see how they are using social networking tools.

3) Take Action

At the end of the day, no matter how much knowledge you might have or how many solutions you can provide, it all comes down to action. It is great to have clear objectives but over analyzing can also hurt you. This is exactly why you need to put the social media strategy you developed after asking all those important questions into ACTION.

However, listen first and talk later. Monitoring the conversation that is happening around your brand and your overall business interests should be your first action. After getting the feel of the conversation and the overall environment, start engaging with these people who you’ve been listening to, and build your presence with time.

If you are too small and no one is really talking about you online then listen to what people are saying about competitors and try to learn from those comments to make your business even better than the competitors.

And as Tom Peters said recently at the Art of Management conference:

Image Credit: arbinsky edited by Alex Ikonn

Be sure to always be listening to your clients, employees and competitors.

4) Is It Working?

Using social media tools can be very beneficial for you business but you have to make sure you are not wasting your time and money. Make sure to set evaluation periods for your strategy in order to be able to tell if it is working or not?

Have you achieved your set objectives? Are you getting closer to them? If you are not getting closer to your set objectives, instead of giving up the social media strategy all together and saying this was a total waste of time – Change Your Approach.

5) Change or Tweak Your Strategy

After noticing that your social media strategy is working or not, you have to tweak your strategy accordingly. Social media tools like Twitter empower your business to ask your stakeholders – What are we doing wrong and how can we make it better? Listen and learn from your successes? Mistakes? Your competitors successes/mistakes? And tweak your social media strategy accordingly.

Even if you are having tremendous success with your social media strategy, make sure to look out for emerging trends within the social space and adjust to stay on top of your game.

Image Credit: Verne Ho

Many people ask, how can you monetize social media? Where is the ROI? These are questions with long answers and sometimes with no answers at all. But they don’t have to be, as some companies simply get it and don’t stress over the minor details, always ready to take on a challenge.

One of the best recent social collaborations that I’ve seen is the Pay It Backward event organized by the DailyChallenge with a major sponsor being Second Cup and Silk. It was a special event because I believe everyone turned out a winner at the end of the day – Second Cup probably had the best return on their investment that was probably a fraction of a 30-sec TV Spot, Sick Kids Hospital receiving up to $15,000 in donations, DailyChallenge receiving great coverage on traditional and digital media, and most importantly people who get felt great about their small effort to make a difference and realizing that being a Do Gooder can be contagious.

I wanted to share with you Mimi’s story on that day and how it connected her with not only the Second Cup brand but also with other do gooders in our community. Here is the guest post by Mimi of La Mimi:

Last Wednesday, I was really excited about the Pay It Backward event at Second Cup. If you don’t know what it is then watch the video below to find out.

I told all my family and friends about the event as I truly believe that “ONE” simple act of kindness can create a whole movement of greatness.

On the day of Pay it Backward at Second Cup, I was meeting a friend for a coffee (herbal tea in my case, because I don’t drink coffee). Unfortunately, when I arrived there she had already bought herself a drink and there was nobody behind me, so I couldn’t really pay it backward * SIGH*. In addition, there weren’t any signs about the Pay It Backward event and the staff wasn’t really telling people about it either which is pretty sad.

Later that day, after volunteering at Dress for Success on Bloor and Spadina with another friend of mine, we decided to grab a few drinks at Second Cup there in the hopes of Paying It Backward.  At first there was nobody behind me, and then I noticed a girl about my age with a bright red lipstick who was studying the menu. I asked the Barista who worked there if they participated in Sick Kids Pay It Backward Event and he assured me that they did. So, I turned around and told the girl behind me that I’m getting her a drink. You should have seen the expression on her face. She was like “Whaaat? How come you are buying me a drink?”  So I went on to explain to her that for every pay it backward purchase Second Cup would donate $5 to SickKids Hospital.  Her eyes instantly lit up and she was smiling.  “How about me? “she said. “ There is no one behind me. How can I pay it backward? Perhaps, I can buy you a cookie?”   I refused, because I wanted her to pass on this act of kindness to someone else.

I sat down and started chatting with my friend. Two minutes later, somebody walked into the Second Cup. It was heartwarming to see the delight on the girl’s face when she told some older guy that she was buying him a drink.  My friend and I started observing what seemed like a chain reaction of goodness. It was really touching and actually brought tears to our eyes. As people started buying drinks for each other– an instant connection was established- two strangers exchanged smiles and warm feelings. Perhaps it was the nicest thing that happened to some of them that day. I was just lucky to witness that moment and grateful that I was able to ignite it.

Later that day I got to thinking, do we really need a special occasion to Pay it Backward? Why don’t we make that part of our daily routine? Simple, selfless and maybe random acts of kindness like smiling at strangers, buying someone you don’t know a drink or helping and older person or female with their grocery bags can actually change someone’s outlook on life. Doing GOOD can be contagious? What choice will YOU make today?

Thank you for reading! If you have not already, why not subscribe to my RSS feed, or you can get the latest updates from me in your Email inbox for free.

Thanks for visiting and keep in touch ~ Alex.

The world that we live in is a extremely fast-paced and being up-to-date can give you the ultimate edge. However, keeping track with all the talk isn’t always that simple and I am here to help you become a rock star of current emerging trends and events.  Being a rock star in this field will help you predict the cultural shifts that are constantly happening around us.

Why is this important? Staying up-t0-date will give you the ability to…

• Conduct real-time market research
• Know what people are talking about
• Have a conversation
• Know how to reach the public
• Analyze what works

Here are the tools that will help you achieve all of the above:1. Watch Youtube Most Popular/Most Viewed Videos

(Links: Youtube Most Popular, Youtube Most Viewed)

Why? Because Youtube is the second largest search engine and ranks as the 4^th most popular web site on the web. Take advantage and use it in order to get a glimpse of our current culture.

I know there is a lot of stupid stuff being watched on Youtube but as much as you might hate it – this is the culture. Take advantage and start creating content that is original yet uses similar techniques as these videos.

Also, look at the categories that fit to your own niche and analyze those videos as well.

2. Staying Updated with Twitter’s Trending Topics (Search)

(Links: Twitter Search)

Twitter has become the ultimate marketer’s tool as it lets you know what is popular before it even hits the news. There are many tools that can help you track emerging trends with the main one being Twitter’s homepage.

The hottest tool to stay updated with Twitter’s trending topics is TweetMeMe. What is TweetMeMe?  It “is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme categorizes these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.”

There are also many other tools such as: Trendestic, Monitter, and Twitturly.

3. Keeping up with Google’s Trends

(Links: Google Trends)

Google not wanting to be swept away by Twitter’s trending topics has recently started updating their Google Trends to daily instead of monthly. Google Trends gives you glimpse at the most popular topics by analyzing the searches taking place on Google.

Google Trends is in still early stages of development and will definitely be adding more functionality in order to battle Twitter over being the source for emerging trends.

4. Social Bookmarking Websites

I can’t say it better than Wikipedia- “Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet.” And also a great method for you to analyze what is popular at the moment (may not be as up to date as Twitter). There are a gazilion number of social bookmarking websites but only a few truly deliver. Here is a few names – Mixx, Digg, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon, and  Reddit.

Can you recommend any other ways to help us stay updated with the current pop culture?