It’s time to act, Day 4, implementation Day, moving beyond words

04 October 2009

This is the last day of the Engage Today 2009 conference and what a spectacular event this has been. I applaud Simple Wealth on running such an incredible event with a speaker line up that was simply superstar quality.

You get a funny mixture of feelings after a great event like this, something inside stirs up emotions of relief, sorrow and excitement all in one. Relief that the long days and concentration is over, sorrow at leaving new friends made, and excitement about the future and applying the knowledge into action.

The last day was full of surprises, just when I thought there would be no more real information to be learnt, I am stunned once more with excellent presentations from Michael Drew and Vishen Lakhiani. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the synchronised singing and dancing to Bohemian Rhapsody for a long time.

Michael Drews’ presentation was another complete eye opener. He addressed an interesting topic about the cyclic nature of generational history, and it’s impact on marketing! It discussed notions of civic and idealist ages, indicating that these lasted approximately 40 years and works in cycles kind of like a pendulum swinging. The last civic age started in 1920s and the last idealist age started in the 1960s, which indicates that as of around 2000-2003, the next civic age has started.

In a civic age, community, trust, truth and honesty were vitally important to societal consciousness, whereas in an idealistic age, it was more about individualism, striking out at the norm, superficiality and the pursuit of selfish goals. Many examples were given to illustrate this move over time and it would take me an entire blog post to explain this, so I’ll do this at a later stage. For now you’ll just have to take my word that this was absolutely incredible information that anyone who is a marketer should know. To find out more for yourself, read the book “Generations” by William Strauss.

I’m again energised with even more ideas now and it’s a case of organising the information so that I can efficiently integrate these into my life and my projects. I am sure that this is going to propel me forward even more and I can’t wait to get started!

Living a successful life is really the pursuit of ultimate fulfilment and there is no nobler pursuit than that. It may sound selfish, but that is the nature of man, if you can’t take care of yourself first, how do you expect to be able to inspire or help others? In an airplane, they will always tell you to put the oxygen mask on yourself first before helping others.

If you are on a pilgrimage to find your true purpose, then be a little selfish first and ensure you take care of what YOU want before you consider your friends or family. If you are not happy in your life, or you do not have a vision of where you are heading, get these cemented in your mind first before you go about other external things.

In the end, life is about taking action and leaving all your excuses behind you. If you ever feel like making an excuse that life isn’t fair towards you or you never had the chances, or the time, or the money or literally ANY excuse, then I urge you to go read about Sean Stephenson here: http://www.timetostand.com, and then reconsider your excuses.