Today was also part of my long weekend, so I started to learn about blockchain, using a project in Hyperledger, and I also started to learn about the Go language. Because I started programming when I was about 10 years old, at one time, I used quite a few programming languages. So, I'm pretty excited to learn another one. Some say that you have to grab the opportunity by the forelock. It means that you can't be late. In that sense, you have to be ready and willing to catch the opportunity when it comes. If you don't know whether the opportunity is there or not, or if you don't have the skills to take it, you're in trouble.
To have a bit of space in my mind, I'm also trying to sort out what I've been doing. I'm trying to start something new, and I think I'm going to have to do some marketing, and I was saying that I'm going to need some "pancakes with a lot of creams", so I'm going to summarise that a bit.
All of a sudden, the trend to "make your life look better than it is" is going to continue. I think that's true not only for personal social media but also for marketing through social media. This is because of five processes.
1) Globalization, efficiency and other factors make it harder for people to make money because of constant competition.
2) We are busy because we are not making money and we have to work harder.
3) I don't have time.
4) So I don't research.
5) Because I don't do research, I believe whatever I see, and I don't want to see average things coming in from all over the world.
In this process, the information tends to get more and more exaggerated.
The whipped cream is a bit of marketing puffery, and the pancakes are the actual benefit of the purchase. You order a pancake with a big dollop of whipped cream, take a picture of it and leave without eating the pancake. I guess that's how the business works, but there are no repeat customers. It's easy to understand. It's former President Trump who was elected the first time for saying radical, simple exaggerated things but failed the second time.
Because of the process described above, no matter how good your pancakes are, if they don't look good, people won't buy the pancakes. That's why you need to have a lot of whipped cream. And if the pancakes are good too, customers will come back.
I was following a guy who gave me a little lecture. According to his website, he teaches languages at top universities in America and has a company in a famous building in Tokyo. So he's marketing a lot of cream. The problem is that this cream-filled situation is not related to the taste of the pancakes. He's serving whipped cream because he had a good Japanese teaching job at a top university, and he has an office in a famous building. But this information has nothing to do with that he can teach anything. A bit, I guess, over-exaggerated and the whipped cream deviated from the pancakes. His actual office was just a co-working space, as well.
On a tsukubai at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto it says "I know that I have enough". If you overdo the hyperbole and go too far away from your own expertise, you end up with the example above. Maybe he fought too far away from Japanese language education and couldn't answer the students' questions well when they asked him. In fact, I felt this way because I heard his lecture during my one month of training when I became a JICA expert. In the first place, education is 1) a theory, 2) a context, and 3) a methodology to investigate it. I don't think it's possible to teach just one thing at a time.
If you're a painter, you might understand the beauty of this croquis sketch. I think he is very good, but if you look closely, you can see that the human form is very different from the real one. What he is doing is simplifying and exaggerating. But he captures the essence. He exaggerates the shape of the legs, the cream, but he captures the essence of the human body as a croquis, and that's why the pancakes were so good.
The person who I explained this said it was difficult to understand (lol).
I wanted to say that we live in a society that needs more and more exaggeration, but at the same time, if we easily step into areas where we can't offer the real thing, that's bad too.
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