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THE CARE AND FEEDING OF OUR SPIRITS
When we’re anxious, disconnected, vulnerable, alone, and feeling helpless, the booze and food and work and endless hours online feel like comfort, but in reality they’re only casting their long shadows over our lives. “Shadow comforts can take any form. It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it that makes the difference. You can eat a piece of chocolate as a holy wafer of sweetness—a real comfort—or you can cram an entire chocolate bar into your mouth without even tasting it in a frantic attempt to soothe yourself—a shadow comfort. You can chat on message boards for half an hour and be energized by community and ready to go back to work, or you can chat on message boards because you’re avoiding talking to your partner about how angry he or she made you last night.”
“It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it that makes the difference.”
Are my choices comforting and nourishing my spirit, or are they temporary reprieves from vulnerability and difficult emotions ultimately diminishing my spirit? Are my choices leading to my Wholeheartedness, or do they leave me feeling empty and searching?
As we think about nourishing or diminishing our spirit, we have to consider how our numbing behaviors affect the people around us—even strangers.
When we treat people as objects, we dehumanize them. We do something really terrible to their souls and to our own.
Martin Buber, an Austrian-born philosopher, wrote about the differences between an I-it relationship and an I-you relationship. An I-it relationship is basically what we create when we are in transactions with people whom we treat like objects—people who are simply there to serve us or complete a task. I-you relationships are characterized by human connection and empathy. Buber wrote, “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves—a force grounded in love and compassion.
THE SHIELD: VIKING OR VICTIM
Either you’re a Victim in life—a sucker or a loser who’s always being taken advantage of and can’t hold your own—or you’re a Viking—someone who sees the threat of being victimized as a constant, so you stay in control, you dominate, you exert power over things, and you never show vulnerability.
“The world is divided into assholes and suckers. It’s that simple.”
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Find Your Open Road
At first, people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done— then it is done, and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett
You’ve got a great idea, but someone is already doing it? So what. Do it better. “Someone is doing it” is a monumental illusion imposing as an impassable obstacle. Someone is always already doing it. The bigger question is, can you do it better?
Skip the big idea and go for the big execution.
Unfortunately, the least-traveled Fastlane roads are paved in failure, not smooth asphalt. This means stalls are guaranteed. Everyone fails on the road to success.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions •• Opportunities are rarely about inventing breakthroughs, but about performance gaps, small inconveniences, and pain points. •• Competition should not impede your road. Competition is everywhere, and your objective should be to “do it better.” •• Fastlane success resides in execution, not in the idea. ••The world’s most successful entrepreneurs didn’t have a blockbuster ideas; they just took existing concepts and made them better, or exposed them to more people. •• Opportunity is exposed in your language and your thought processes, as well as other people’s language. •• Failure cracks open new roads. •• Quitting only happens when you give up on your dream.
Give Your Road a Destination
The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. ~ Benjamin Mays
The end of the Fastlane road trip is to crown your happiness with freedom.
The Price of Freedom: Money
Freedom has a price, and that price is money. Big dreams, from materialistic Ferraris to altruistic nonprofit foundations, cost money. You can’t travel the world by swimming in the oceans. You have to pay your way, and if you think money is evil, you’ve already lost.
Set Your Destination: Four Steps to Starting
1) Define the Lifestyle: What do you want? 2) Assess the Cost: How much do your dreams cost? 3) Set the Targets: Set the money system and business income targets. 4) Make It Real: Fund it and open it!
The Rules of the Road: Financial Literacy
Managing a Money System Demands Financial Literacy
You can’t build a financial empire if you’re ignorant of basic finance and economics. These disciplines are the building blocks to a financial empire, and without them the Sidewalk becomes a danger. Remember, more money doesn’t solve money problems. To successfully leverage a money system for passivity, you have to familiarize yourself with financial instruments that fuel the money system.
Live Below Your Means—Slowlane?
The first rule of financial literacy: “Live below your means.” Yes, a pragmatic doctrine echoed from Slowlane dogmaticians that is an affable replacement for its mathematical equivalent of “Keep expenses under your income.” Earn 10 bucks and don’t spend 20. But is it Fastlane relevant? Absolutely, with one distinction: Live below your means with the intent to expand your means.
Slowlaners seek to minimize expenses while the Fastlaner seeks to maximize income and asset values.
“Live below your means” requires above-average discipline.
A Financial Adviser Doesn’t Fix Illiteracy
Literacy gives you the power to evaluate your adviser’s advice. literacy is insurance
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions ••The Fastlane is the means to your end because dreams cost money. •• Conquer big goals by breaking them down to their smallest component. •• Daily saving reinforces your relationship with money; it is your passive system that buys freedom and another soldier added to your army. ••A money system isn’t used to grow wealth but to grow income. Growing wealth should be left to your Fastlane road. ••You will struggle to build a financial empire if you are financially illiterate. ••“Live below your means” is relevant at any income level. •• For the Fastlaner, “Live below your means” means to expand your means. ••A financial adviser doesn’t solve financial illiteracy and literacy is insurance. •• Financial illiteracy dilutes your control, especially when evaluating the advice of a financial adviser.
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In numerous countries and regions around the world, repeated, striking temporally associated reductions in both cases and deaths occurred very soon after either ivermectin was distributed or health ministry ivermectin recommendations were announced. Dr. Fauci and the industry propagandists later attributed the January decline in COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths to their vaccines, which began their rollout in mid-December 2020. However, even mainstream media doctors reluctantly acknowledged that the drop could not possibly be a vaccine effect. By February 1, only 25.2 million, or 7.6 percent of Americans, had received a single vaccine dose. The CDC acknowledges that there is no effect until many weeks after the second COVID jab.
Tony Fauci’s decision to deny early treatments undoubtedly prolonged and intensified the pandemic.
Early treatment does not just prevent hospitalization; it quickly starves pandemics to death by stopping their spread. “Early treatment reduces the infectivity period from 14 days to about four days. It also allows someone to stay in the home so they don’t contaminate people outside the home. And then it has this remarkable effect in reducing the intensity and duration of symptoms so patients don’t get so short of breath, they don’t get into this panic where they feel they have to break containment and go to the hospital.”
Every hospitalization in America—and there’s been millions of them—has been a super-spreader event. Sick patients contaminate their loved ones, paramedics, Uber drivers, people in the clinic and offices. It becomes a total mess.”
By treating COVID-19 at home, doctors actually can extinguish the pandemic.
Dr. Fauci led an effort to deliberately derail America’s access to lifesaving drugs and medicines that might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and dramatically shortened the pandemic. There is no other aspect of the COVID crisis that more clearly reveals the malicious intentions of a powerful vaccine cartel— led by Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates—to prolong the pandemic and amplify its mortal effects in order to promote their mischievous inoculations.
From the outset, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and other therapeutics posed an existential threat to Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates’ $48 billion COVID vaccine project, and particularly to their vanity drug remdesivir, in which Gates has a large stake. Under federal law, new vaccines and medicinescannot quality for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) if any existing FDA-approved drug proves effective against the same malady.
If any FDA-approved drug like hydroxychloroquine (or ivermectin) proved effective against COVID, pharmaceutical companies would no longer be legally allowed to fast-track their billion-dollar vaccines to market under Emergency Use Authorization. Instead, vaccines would have to endure the years-long delays that have always accompanied methodical safety and efficacy testing, and that would mean less profits, more uncertainty, longer runways to market, and a disappointing end to the lucrative COVID-19 vaccine gold rush. Dr. Fauci has invested $6 billion in taxpayer lucre in the Moderna vaccine alone. His agency is co-owner of the patent and stands to collect a fortune in royalties. At least four of Fauci’s hand-picked deputies are in line to collect royalties of $150,000/year based on Moderna’s success, and that’s on top of the salaries already paid by the American public.
HCQ is an analog of the quinine found in the bark of the cinchona tree that George Washington used to protect his troops from malaria. For decades, WHO has listed HCQ as an “essential medicine,” proven effective against a long list of ailments. It is a generally benign prescription medicine, far safer according to the manufacturer’s package inserts—than many popular over-the-counter drugs.
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There is evidence that a preference for things that sound “familiar” is a product of our neurology. Scientists have examined people’s brains as they listen to music, and have tracked which neural regions are involved in comprehending aural stimuli. Listening to music activates numerous areas of the brain, including the auditory cortex, the thalamus, and the superior parietal cortex. These same areas are also associated with pattern recognition and helping the brain decide which inputs to pay attention to and which to ignore.
Scientists at MIT discovered that behavioral habits prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by the endless decisions we would otherwise have to make each day, listening habits exist because, without them, it would be impossible to determine if we should concentrate on our child’s voice, the coach’s whistle, or the noise from a busy street during a Saturday soccer game.
Listening habits allow us to unconsciously separate important noises from those that can be ignored. That’s why songs that sound “familiar”—even if you’ve never heard them before— are sticky. Our brains are designed to prefer auditory patterns that seem similar to what we’ve already heard. Much of the time, we don’t actually choose if we like or dislike a song. It would take too much mental effort. Instead, we react to the cues (“This sounds like all the other songs I’ve ever liked”) and rewards (“It’s fun to hum along!”) and without thinking, we either start singing, or reach over and change the station.
“Soldiers were more likely to eat food, whether familiar or unfamiliar, when it was prepared similar to their prior experiences and served in a familiar fashion.”
Shame enters for those of us who experience anxiety because not only are we feeling fearful, out of control, and incapable of managing our increasingly demanding lives, but eventually our anxiety is compounded and made unbearable by our belief that if we were just smarter, stronger, or better, we’d be able to handle everything.
With disconnection it’s a similar story. We may have a couple of hundred friends on Facebook, plus a slew of colleagues, real-life friends, and neighbors, but we feel alone and unseen.
Because we are hardwired for connection, disconnection always creates pain. 😩 One stop beyond disconnection is isolation, which presents real danger.
“We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.”
Shame often leads to desperation. 😔
For women, setting boundaries is difficult because the shame gremlins are quick to weigh in: “Careful saying no. You’ll really disappoint these folks. Don’t let them down. Be a good girl. Make everyone happy.” For men, the gremlins whisper, “Man up. A real guy could take this on.
We know that daring greatly means engaging with our vulnerability, which can’t happen when shame has the upper hand, and the same is true for dealing with anxiety-fueled disconnection. The two most powerful forms of connection are love and belonging—they are both irreducible needs of men, women, and children. If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.
Connection: Connection is the energy that is created between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment.
Belonging: Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.
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The Commandment of Scale In business, to be a success you only have to be right once. ~ Mark Cuban
When your business road violates the Commandment of Scale, wealth acceleration is incarcerated within constricting speed limits. Drive any road with a speed limit of 15 and you aren’t going to get anywhere fast.
Swing for Home Runs, Not Singles. be in the business of home runs.
The Fastlane Wealth Equation: Disarmed
Wealth = Net Profit + Asset Value
Net Profit = Units Sold × Unit Profit
Tiny habitats create tiny wealth.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions ••Your total pool of customers determines your habitat. The larger the habitat, the greater the potential for wealth. ••A business can be a singles or a home-run-based business. Its strength is determined by scale, which is derived by habitat. ••The Fastlane wealth equation is disarmed when you violate the Commandment of Scale.
•• Scale is achieved in reach (units sold) and/or magnitude (unit profit). ••The Law of Effection is the primary conduit to wealth, which can be roadblocked by scale, magnitude, or source. •• Effection consequences trickle up to owners and producers. Breaking scale or magnitude indirectly in an uncontrolled entity is not a guarantee of wealth. •• To gain access to Effection, you have to break the barrier of scale or magnitude in an entity you control. •• Scale, magnitude, or source deficiencies create governors on the speed of wealth creation.
The Commandment of Time I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live only about a hundred years. ~ Thomas Edison
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions ••A business attached to your time is a job. ••A business that earns income exclusive of your time satisfies the Commandment of Time. •• To satisfy the Commandment of Time, start with a business that uses a money system seedling, or introduce one.
Rapid Wealth: The Interstates You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you. ~ John Wooden
The Three Fastlane Interstates:
1) Internet 2) Innovation 3) Intentional Iteration
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions ••The best Fastlanes satisfy all five Commandments: Control, Entry, Need, Time, and Scale. ••Assuming a need-based premise, the Internet is the fastest interstate, because it overwhelmingly satisfies all Commandments. •• Innovation can be any variety of open roads: authoring, inventing, or services. •• Inventing success needs coupling with distribution. ••A singles-based business is scaled to a home-run business by intentional iteration. With iteration, scale is conquered.
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Repurposed medicines, the record shows, could also have drastically reduced death among hospitalized patients. Using ivermectin and a cocktail of anti-inflammatories, steroids, and anticoagulants since Spring 2020, Dr. Varon lowered hospital mortality among ICU COVID patients to about 4.1 percent, compared to well over 23 percent nationally. “Even in the ICUs where patients were coming in undertreated, we were able to dramatically reduce mortality,” says Dr. Kory. “Almost anything you do in the nursing homes—basically, any combination of the various components of these protocols—reduces mortalities by at least 60 percent,”
The study concludes that even the most modest early medical therapy combinations were associated with 60 percent reductions in mortality. Says Dr. McCullough, “Therapeutic nihilism was the real killer of America’s seniors.”
Early in the pandemic, two Spanish nursing homes simultaneously experimented with early treatment with cheap, available repurposed drugs and achieved 100 percent survival among infected residents and staff.
Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines.” All of these universities (Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke) are deeply dependent on billions of dollars that they receive from NIH. These institutions live in terror of offending Anthony Fauci, and that fear paralyzed them in the midst of the pandemic.
Instead of supporting McCullough’s work, NIH and the other federal regulators began actively censoring information on this range of effective remedies. Doctors who attempted merely to open discussion about the potential benefits of early treatments for COVID found themselves heavily and inexplicably censored. Dr. Fauci worked with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other social media sites to muzzle discussion of any remedies. FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressed IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.
Dr. McCullough used his own money to create a YouTube video showing four slides from his peer-reviewed American Medical Association articles to teach doctors the miraculous benefits of early treatment with HCQ and other remedies. His video went viral, with hundreds of thousands of downloads; YouTube pulled it two days later.
The relentless malpractice of deliberately withholding early effective COVID treatments, of forcing the use of toxic remdesivir, may have unnecessarily killed up to 500,000 Americans in hospitals. ⚰️🏥
“Dr. Fauci’s suppression of early treatments will go down in history as having caused the death of a half a million Americans in the ICU.”
“Never in the history of medicine,” says Dr. Cole, “has early treatment, of any patient with any disease, been so overtly neglected by the medical profession on such a massive scale.” “To not treat, especially in the midst of a highly transmissible, deadly disease, is to do harm.”
“If you are under 70 years of age and have no severe preexisting illness, you can hardly die [from SARS-CoV-2 infection]. So, there is no fatality rate that can be reduced. . . . And for people who are elderly and have preexisting illness,” he adds, “as we know from Dr. Peter McCullough and his colleagues’ work, there are miraculously effective medicines to treat this virus so that the fatality rates go down another 70 to 80 percent, which means there is no ground for emergency use whatsoever. That’s a huge threat to the vaccine cartel and to remdesivir.”
“A swell movie adaptation always sends me to the source material, so Arrival had me pick up Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others: lean, relentless, and incandescent.” —Colson Whitehead, GQ
Ted Chiang has long been known as one of the most powerful science fiction writers working today. Offering readers the dual delights of the very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, Arrival presents characters who must confront sudden change. In “Story of Your Life,” which provides the basis for the film Arrival, alien lifeforms suddenly appear on Earth. When a linguist is brought in to help communicate with them and discern their intentions, her new knowledge of their language and its nonlinear structure allows her to see future events and all the joy and pain they may bring. In each story of this incredible collection, with sharp intelligence and humor, Ted Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by wonder.
What happens when America’s First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales?
When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius—his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There’s only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.
Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations and begs the question: Can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, and the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we learn to let our true colors shine through? Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue proves: true love isn’t always diplomatic. “I took this with me wherever I went and stole every second I had to read! Absorbing, hilarious, tender, sexy—this book had everything I crave. I’m jealous of all the readers out there who still get to experience Red, White & Royal Blue for the first time!” – Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners
From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin’s Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.
The entire course of history is revisited in this unique and unforgettable visual guide.
The most memorable moments and significant events of each year are charted in a definitive timeline that runs throughout the book. From the ancient origins of our earliest African ancestors right up to our modern world today, Timelines of History includes a diverse range of people, cultures, and countries. Ideas, inventions, and innovations come together to provide a truly global view of history. ??
Dramatic photography, eye-catching maps, and supporting graphics bring history to life as never before. The instantly accessible, multi-layered timeline enables you to move effortlessly through the ages. This essential reference strikes a balance between being completely comprehensive, but also ideal for browsing, thanks to the organized structure, chronological order, and bitesize information.??
This celebratory compendium makes an outstanding addition to any family library, enabling you to dip into the past any time you like.
“A lot of fascinating insights . . . an eye-opener worth reading.”—Parents
Highlighting the fascinating link between a child’s neurological development and the way a parent reacts to misbehavior, No-Drama Discipline provides an effective, compassionate road map for dealing with tantrums, tensions, and tears—without causing a scene.
Defining the true meaning of the “d” word (to instruct, not to shout or reprimand), the authors explain how to reach your child, redirect emotions, and turn a meltdown into an opportunity for growth. By doing so, the cycle of negative behavior (and punishment) is essentially brought to a halt, as problem solving becomes a win/win situation. Inside this sanity-saving guide you’ll discover
• strategies that help parents identify their own discipline philosophy—and master the best methods to communicate the lessons they are trying to impart • facts on child brain development—and what kind of discipline is most appropriate and constructive at all ages and stages • the way to calmly and lovingly connect with a child—no matter how extreme the behavior—while still setting clear and consistent limits • tips for navigating your child through a tantrum to achieve insight, empathy, and repair • twenty discipline mistakes even the best parents make—and how to stay focused on the principles of whole-brain parenting and discipline techniques
Complete with candid stories and playful illustrations that bring the authors’ suggestions to life, No-Drama Discipline shows you how to work with your child’s developing mind, peacefully resolve conflicts, and inspire happiness and strengthen resilience in everyone in the family.
From Leviathan Wakes to Leviathan Falls, James S. A. Corey’s Hugo Award-winning Expanse series has redefined modern space opera. Now, available in print for the first time comes the complete collection of short fiction set in the Expanse universe, including both a brand-new novella set after the events of Leviathan Falls and author’s notes on each story.
On Mars, a scientist experiments with a new engine that will one day become the drive that fuels humanity’s journey into the stars.
On an asteroid station, a group of prisoners are oblivious to the catastrophe that awaits them.
On a future Earth beset by overpopulation, pollution, and poverty, a crime boss desperately seeks to find a way off planet.
On an alien world, a human family struggles to establish a colony and make a new home.
All these stories and more are featured in this unmissable collection of short fiction set in the hardscrabble world of The Expanse.
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Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits. In fact, crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose. A company with dysfunctional habits can’t turn around simply because a leader orders it. Rather, wise executives seek out moments of crisis— or create the perception of crisis— and cultivate the sense that something must change, until everyone is finally ready to overhaul the patterns they live with each day.
“This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”
if we start our shopping sprees by loading up on healthy stuff, we’re much more likely to buy Doritos, Oreos, and frozen pizza when we encounter them later on. The burst of subconscious virtuousness that comes from first buying butternut squash makes it easier to later put a pint of ice cream in the cart.
There are thousands of hours of videotapes showing shoppers turning right once they clear the front doors.) As a result of this tendency, retailers fill the right side of the stores with the most profitable products they’re hoping you’ll buy right off the bat.
“Consumers sometimes act like creatures of habit, automatically repeating past behavior with little regard to current goals,” two psychologists at the University of Southern California wrote in 2009.
A firm named Rapleaf sells information on shoppers’ political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, the number of cars they own, and whether they prefer religious news or deals on cigarettes. Other companies analyze photos that consumers post online, cataloging if they are obese or skinny, short or tall, hairy or bald, and what kinds of products they might want to buy as a result.
If you use your Target credit card to purchase a box of Popsicles once a week, usually around 6:30 P.M. on a weekday, and megasized trash bags every July and October, Target’s statisticians and computer programs will determine that you have kids at home, tend to stop for groceries on your way back from work, and have a lawn that needs mowing in the summer and trees that drop leaves in the fall.
People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event. When someone gets married, for example, they’re more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When they move into a new house, they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they get divorced, there’s a higher chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer.
“Changing residence, getting married or divorced, losing or changing a job, having someone enter or leave the household, are life changes that make consumers more “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” And what’s the biggest life event for most people? What causes the greatest disruption and “vulnerability to marketing interventions”? Having a baby. There’s almost no greater upheaval for most customers than the arrival of a child. As a result, new parents’ habits are more flexible at that moment than at almost any other period in an adult’s life.
So for companies, pregnant women are gold mines. 🧈🧈
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THE SHIELD: NUMBING
We are a culture of people who’ve bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough, the truth of our lives won’t catch up with us. Statistics dictate that there are very few people who haven’t been affected by addiction. I believe we all numb our feelings. We may not do it compulsively and chronically, which is addiction, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t numb our sense of vulnerability. And numbing vulnerability is especially debilitating because it doesn’t just deaden the pain of our difficult experiences; numbing vulnerability also dulls our experiences of love, joy, belonging, creativity, and empathy. We can’t selectively numb emotion. Numb the dark and you numb the light. ☀️
Americans today are more debt-ridden, obese, medicated, and addicted than we ever have been. For the first time in history, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced that automobile accidents are now the second leading cause of accidental death in the United States. The leading cause? Drug overdoses. In fact, more people die from prescription drug overdoses than from heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine drug use combined. The dealers today are more likely to be parents, relatives, friends, and physicians.👨🏻⚕️🥼℞☤🩺👩🏻⚕️💊
The primary driver of numbing would be our struggles with worthiness and shame: We numb the pain that comes from feeling inadequate and “less than.” Anxiety and disconnection also emerged as drivers of numbing in addition to shame. The most powerful need for numbing seems to come from combinations of all three—shame, anxiety, and disconnection.
The anxiety described by the research participants appeared to be fueled by uncertainty, overwhelming and competing demands on our time, and (one of the big surprises) social discomfort.
Disconnection includes a range of experiences that encompassed depression but also included loneliness, isolation, disengagement, and emptiness.
Anxiety with shame rising. Disconnection with shame rising. Anxiety and disconnection with shame rising.
Shame enters for those of us who experience anxiety because not only are we feeling fearful, out of control, and incapable of managing our increasingly demanding lives, but eventually our anxiety is compounded and made unbearable by our belief that if we were just smarter, stronger, or better, we’d be able to handle everything. Numbing here becomes a way to take the edge off of both instability and inadequacy.
