You Can Only Conquer Yourself
Our goal should not be the mountaintop. It should not be the finish-line. It should not be the presentation. It should not be that raise or promotion or that awards ceremony. If our goal is the mountaintop what do we do once we reach it? Stop?
We should all be aiming to surpass our goals and, in doing so, to surpass ourselves.
Setting a static goal limits our progression. When we aim to attain static goals our mastery becomes finite. When we aim for at a moving target we allow our mastery to become limitless.
“Your life is something to build every day. You must convince yourself that you have surpassed yesterday. And tomorrow you must feel you have surpassed today.”
- Tsunetomo Yamamoto
Thoughts On An Oil Disaster
BP is been running a paid search public relations campaign for various oil spill related phrases. So every time someone runs a Google image search for the phrase “oil spill animal pictures” the destination of the link closest to the search window (also known as the link that impatient people will click) is a BP.com public relations landing page bursting at the seams with press releases, positive imagery and carefully chosen headlines.
There were over 20 million searches for the phrase “oil spill” in May 2010 and every time one of these sponsored ads is clicked BP is going to pay around $2 per click.
That’s a lot of money being spent in order to prove to the people of Earth that BP’s doing a good job. Way too much money. Leroy Stick, the pseudonym used by the guy behind the BP PR parody twitter account, had a few choice words for BP’s actual PR efforts. The biggest take-away from Leroy’s open letter to the media is that burning through money and man-hours trying to manufacture public opinion is a waste- the public will determine the quality of the goods or services you’re providing. In this case the millions of dollars BP is spending on image clean-up would have been better spent researching and preparing for this exact situation.
BP’s failure to respond to this disaster aside its clear that the root cause of the oil spill is our national addiction to fossil fuels. Its convenient (and fun) to blame BP for the oil spill but until we can collectively take a stand against the over-consumption of fossil fuels there will always be a bunch of suits with drills and a checkbook willing to do whatever’s necessary to supply our demand.
What will it take to make renewable energy technologies like wind power or wave power a priority? What will it take to get us to give up our cars and trucks and redesign our civilization’s transportation infrastructure?
They say the oil spill clean up could last years. At the very least I hope it stands as a constant reminder that we, as a people, need to do better.
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