Curious about Confusion - The Plethora of Meanings and Approaches Are Confusing

“Here's to the confusion of our enemies!” - Frank Sinatra

“The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.” - James Agee

“I pretty much try to stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it leaves on my face.” - Johnny Depp

I chose the theme of “Confusion” for this week’s blog, because I have recently been involved with and in many discussions about selling and marketing. These focused on “Confusion.” We don’t want to confuse our clients and/or our potential clients. Someone who is confused by a website, a sales letter, a presentation, etc. will not buy.

So, you can imagine that when I looked up quotations using the word “confusion” and found a huge variety of uses - far from my perception - how surprised I was. I was not only taken by the wide range of centuries from which they originated, but also my confusion over what many meant.

My goal now is to share many of these unusual quotations with you to see what they mean to you.

The closest they came to selling and advertising (marketing) are the two that follow:

• “An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.” - Fred Allen
• “Rarely have I seen any really great advertising created without a certain amount of confusion, throw-aways, bent noses, irritation and downright cursedness.” - Leo Burnett

In many of the quotations, the word “order” or method appears:

• “When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.” - Herbert Spencer
• "Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.” - Henry Miller
• “Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.” - George Santayana
• “Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope.” - William Penn
• “The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.” - Archibald Macleish

Taking a completely different approach to confusion are those that speak of nature and art:

• “Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.” - Edward Steichen
• “Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.” - Katherine Anne Porter
• “Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.” - Paul Klee
• “I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.” - Baruch Spinoza

And, what about the philosophy of living?

• “Let's face it, confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day.” - Paul Muldoon
• “The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.” - Doris Lessing
• “I don't want to add to the confusion by imposing Beverly Hills standards on my kids.” - Linda Gray
• “I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death... I think... peace and tranquility will return again.” - Anne Frank
• “She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.” - Clive James

Finally, let’s not forget technology and science:

• “A gross and palpable error of the era that is just closing has been the confusion of mechanical and material progress with moral progress.” - Irving Babbitt
• “The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.” - Aldrich Ames
• “The proving power of the intellect or the senses was questioned by the skeptics more than two thousand years ago; but they were browbeaten into confusion by the glory of Newtonian physics.” - Imre Lakatos
• “A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.” - Albert Einstein
• “On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” - Charles Babbage

Here are a couple to think about this coming week:

• “Grief is perhaps an unknown territory for you. You might feel both helpless and hopeless without a sense of a ‘map’ for the journey. Confusion is the hallmark of a transition. To rebuild both your inner and outer world is a major project.” - Anne Grant
• “It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.” - Rene Daumal

Curious about Criticism - How Much Is Part of Your Life?

In yesterday’s Michael Masterson’s ETR newsletter, Matt Furey wrote the following, “Do your best to avoid personal attacks on yourself and others. Start observing yourself a little more closely. Take note of when you get sucked into discussions about others that are nothing more than personal attacks. And when you find yourself in such a situation, say to yourself, "Wait a minute. I'm wasting my time. Instead of attacking this person, I should be making MY life better."

Actually, he wrote a full article about how he once was very critical, but now realizes that it is a “major waste of time.”

I submit to you that it is even more than that - it can and often is an enemy builder.

I used to teach a class called, Breaking the Conversation Barrier, and referred to Dale Carnegie’s suggestion to avoid the “three Cs.” They are:

• Complaining - no one wants to stay for long around someone who complains all of the time.
• Condemning - this is someone who pre-judges others, which, of course leads to the third,
• Criticizing

Carnegie even gave an example from his past. A man wrote him an uncalled-for critical letter which Carnegie never forgot or forgave.

Winston Churchill gave criticism importance by stating, “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”

However, I agree that in some cases it may be necessary, but in most, it doesn’t work to advantage. When we are critical of ourselves - how often have you let your “monkey mind” dictate? - we can be stopped in our tracks from any kind of accomplishment and/or risk that will have a huge payoff.

In my usual quest for quotations, I found many that dealt with softening or avoiding criticism:

• “Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man's growth without destroying his roots.” - Frank A. Clark
• “The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.” - Norman Vincent Peale
• “I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.” - Charles Schwab
• “We protest against unjust criticism, but we accept unearned applause.” - Jose Narosky
• “People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.” - W. Somerset Maugham

Yet, I did find many thought provoking and pushing to action quotations:

• “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” - Elbert Hubbard
• “The dread of criticism is the death of genius.” - William Gilmore Simms
• “Time and time again I was told that I would never make the film on time and never make it on budget. That kind of criticism tends to turn me into a great big motor of efficiency.” - Richard E. Grant
• “To silence criticism is to silence freedom.” - Sidney Hook

And then there are the politically expressed quotations:

• “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president... is morally treasonable to the American public.” - Theodore Roosevelt
• “Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive.” - Donald Rumsfeld

I will leave you with an interesting thought from Henry David Thoreau, “I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.”

Curious about Speed: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly!

How speedy are you? Is speed important to you? Should it be?

The following two successful business people agree:

“The speed of the leader is the speed of the gang.” - Mary Kay Ash
“The speed of the boss is the speed of the team.” - Lee Iacocca

Another business leader who finds speed to be important is Michael Masterson of the Early to Rise e-newsletter. As a matter of fact, it was in a recent issue where Masterson was writing about speed and excellence that I got the idea for this blog’s topic. He admitted how important speed is to him. Excellence is also important, but without speed it won’t sustain a business.

I can relate to that completely. I have always moved fast, talked fast, worked fast, driven fast, and responded to phone messages and e-mails fast. As a webmaster I am also known to be fast to update clients’ websites when sent a maintenance request. And, the sites I design are developed with speed of download time in mind, consideration and execution.

Because everything seems to be moving toward more and more speed today, we do need, however, to be reminded to slow down and take the extra time to enjoy life, think/plan more and produce quality. The beginning of this year, I experienced a bad fall which led to a hip fracture, surgery and seven weeks of no driving or putting weight on that leg. Talk about moving slowly - everything took twice the usual time. I was forced to slow down, reconsider my frenetic life style, strategize my business and marketing goals - and relax.

Consider the following quotations that speak to the downsides of speed:

• “What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way.” - St. Jerome
• “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” - Mohandas Gandhi
• “The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.” - Carl Bernstein
• “The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.” - Edward R. Murrow
• “Futurism: This was a movement of intellectuals who wanted to replace tradition with the modern world of machinery, speed, violence, and public relations. It proves that we should be careful what intellectuals wish for, because we might get it.” - Brad Holland

When I looked up quotations using the word “speed” there were many that applied to athletes, but also interesting and thoughtful statements for the rest of us:

• “When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water... If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.” - Constantin Brancusi
• “Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.” - James Thurber
• “A well-run restaurant is like a winning baseball team. It makes the most of every crew member's talent and takes advantage of every split-second opportunity to speed up service.” - David Ogilvy (note: having worked in a restaurant for many years, I’ll “second” that!)
• “Throughout my career I swam for form. Speed came as a result of it.” - Johnny Weissmuller

And, we mustn’t ignore ideas:

• “It's hard to regulate the speed at which you can achieve something creative and emotional.” - Carol Kane
• “A meeting moves at the speed of the slowest mind in the room. In other words, all but one participant will be bored, all but one mind underused.” - Dale Dauten
• “Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.” - Jose Marti

To think about and consider during this upcoming week:

• “Speed is a great asset; but it's greater when it's combined with quickness - and there's a big difference.” - Ty Cobb
• “Explore changing your speed one day per week.” - Bill Rodgers
• “Life is like a ten speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.” - Charles M. Schulz

How do you feel about “speed?” Send me your thoughts. I love getting your feedback!

Curious about Storytelling: Do You Know and Use Its Power?

Paul Lansky wrote, “Storytelling captures an aspect of childhood experience when being told a story was a common ritual. It's a warm place for most of us and in some ways represents our first experience in really listening.”

I just returned from our O.O.P.S! (Ohio Order for the Preservation of Storytelling) Annual Conference and am riding high on the power I derive from stories - hearing them, telling them, reading them and working on them.

Many of you already know that I am a Professional Storyteller. What doe that mean? It may be hard to believe, but people and groups hire me and other Professional Storytellers to perform, entertain, inspire, motivate and teach by sharing all kinds of stories, orally. We tell to all ages and have repertoires of many kinds of stories - traditional tales, folk and fairy tales, personal stories, original stories, business stories, leadership stories, and more.

For a plethora of free articles about storytelling, visit my storytelling information site, visit www.storytellingpower.com .

A good storyteller creates word pictures and narrative that brings the stories to life for the listeners.

• “All of my paintings are about stories and language. Storytelling always comes first. And in particular, I'm a storyteller working with folkloric and mythic materials.” - Terri Windling
• “Artists should always think of themselves as cosmic instruments for storytelling.” - Ted Lange
• “Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.” - Frank Darabont
• “I love the possibilities of language, the gracefulness and suppleness of English, so while storytelling is - make no mistake - hard work, it is also a form of play.” - Dean Koontz

Stories grab our attention. Everyone loves a good story. We truly listen to stories, internalize them and remember them. Stories make us laugh and make us cry. They enrich our life and our art.

• Well-known professional teller, Donald Davis, said, “Storytelling is not what I do for a living - it is how I do all that I do while I am living.”
• “Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.” - Russell Banks
• “It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.” - Tom Brokaw
• “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.” - Robert McAfee Brown

When I speak about the Power of Storytelling, I mean “across the board.” If we use stories in our press releases, both the editors and the readers will read them with interest. If we use stories in our marketing and sales materials, potential clients will sit up and take notice. If we write our business’ case studies people will enjoy and remember them. Use stories when you are presenting - whether or not it is a speech or a sales presentation.

As you get used to using stories daily, you will become more and more prepared, your stories will become more polished and interesting and people will be drawn to you and your stories.

Let me leave you with a couple of storytelling quotations for you to consider during this upcoming week.

• “Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.” - Jeremy Northam
• "The disciplines of storytelling require that I shape, out of the monotony and everyday life of espionage, something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That's already contrary to the reality." - John Le Carre

Have a great week! And, do work on at least one story and then tell it to friends and family members.