Category: Daily Life

Today I learned about CrossFit from Peter Shankman, a fitness program built on this principle: “Develop the capacity of a novice 800-meter track athlete, gymnast, and weightlifter and you’ll be fitter than any world-class runner, gymnast, or weightlifter.”

And you’re already asking how this relates to marketing… but it does.

About 5 years ago I first started learning about low carbohydrate diets and it changed my life. Up until that point I had lived the average American life of gaining a pound a year after turning 21. This was even with being more active than average, including a Boston Marathon, over 300 miles with the Boston NikeTown Running club, skiing, golf, blah, blah, blah.

The problem with the low carbohydrate diet is that it goes against everything we have been sold for years. Between filling up the aisles of the supermarket with processed flower and sugar, and getting a food pyramid built by the groups lobbying for the grain industry, there’s been no profit in telling you otherwise (unless you are a guy named Atkins selling books, or you are sharp enough to come up with a brand called South Beach).

Now I can actually affect my weight, something that I was not able to do before that point. My only problem now is my addiction to sugar and baked goods (which weighs heavier on me now because I am making a conscious decision to be a fat slob rather than being able to cry victim of my metabolism, natural weight or whatever excuse is vogue). The good news is that spring is here and it’s time to take off the winter weight, and begin training for the Falmouth Road Race.

As part of that I’ll be setting a new Nike+ group as the race approaches and would be interested in any training stories, and I’m going to try and learn the CrossFit exercises. Hopefully I won’t injure myself doing an inverted hang or some other doofus move. Anyone fatblogging, feel free to step up, or throw down a gauntlet. And check out the CrossFit blog for daily workouts. Yes, that is not an error, averaging over 400 comments per post.

Both low carbohydrate diets and CrossFit started to come together in the 70’s. Both of these brands had a fundamental truth behind them – the ability to get results, but without the Marketing machine of a profitable industry behind them, it’s taken 30 years to get to me. Think about that when you are trying to measure the velocity of word-of-mouth.

Amanda Gravel posted on this insane Firefox plugin. Check it out.

Drew is wondering why he is giving away so much for free. In other words – how can you make it as a consultant when you have to give stuff away for free to get attention and respect.

I had two answers to this that came up – the first is that if you charged for every bit of good advice that would make you a lawyer and you’d know that Satan’s already called “next” on your afterlife. You know that in your heart it’s good to give valuable advice and maybe you believe you’re scoring some karma. A incredibly rare example of a Marketer sleeping better than someone else.

I choose to take a slightly different view – rather than see my advice as a product with a price tag on it, I see my time as the commodity. I give out advice, and if it’s good the demand will grow to the point where I run out of time (my tipping point), at that point I can engage the meter and let the bidding begin. Even if I never reach the point where the advice I share is making the mortgage payment at least I’ve gathered some karma, made some friends, and I’m still not a lawyer.

There’s been a fair amount of discussion about how much time newspapers on print and the 6pm news have left. I’m planning the party for 2/26/13. Yes, 2013 is only 5 years away. Where will you be and what will you be up to?

The big question is: Is Mahalo the next generation search engine? I’m starting to think the answer is yes. I’m already to the point of taking traffic from Wikipedia for granted. For any real search you can presume that there will be a wikipedia page in the top 10. The number one critique of Wikipedia is that eventually the editors that patrol the site will become bored, and since they are volunteers they get tired of doing work for no paycheck eventually.

So, my prediction: As the freetards get bored with wikipedia, the folks who would like to eat and have more extravagant luxuries such as health coverage will go over to Mahalo to get paid for doing the same quality of work. I think the fusion of Digg-type functionality with the distrubuted content generation of Wikipedia is a winning combination.