“Ask me about the monkey?”

 

 

 

“Did you walk to work or carry a lunch?”

Huh?

 

My father asked me that question more than 25 years ago. I still remember it. Why? Because it’s a ridiculous question.

A famous comedian in the 1950s used to ask people, “Got a banana?” The question might make sense if asked in the right situation, but he asked it everywhere. I’ve forgotten the name of the comedian, but I still recall his question. Why? Because it’s strange.

As I write this, I am creating new business cards for myself. I decided to add a confusing line to it. After some fun brainstorming with my girlfriend, I settled on, “Ask me about the monkey.”

Why is “Ask me about the monkey?” worth putting on my business card? As with my father’s question and the comedian’s question, it stops your brain in its tracks. It makes you pause. It makes you focus on ME. The theory is that once you stop someone with a confusing line, you can then implant a hypnotic command right after it.

In other words, if I write something like, “Apples desk fly dirt,” and then follow it with, “Read my new ebook,” the chances are very high that you are going to want to read my new ebook.

Why? Because the first line jammed your mind, and the second line slipped into your brain while you weren’t looking. I’ve just upped the odds that you will buy my new e-book. And if you don’t, of course, it doesn’t matter because I never really told you to go buy it. See?

The same thing will happen on my new business cards. Since I’m now known as “The World’s First Hypnotic Marketer,” I wanted a strange, confusing line on my new card. When someone sees, “Ask me about the monkey,” and then asks me about the monkey, I can simply point out that I practice hypnotic selling and I just got them to do what I wanted.

The Japanese practice this “hypnotic confusion,” but probably unknowingly. A friend of mine who flew to Japan reported to me that the English phrases on all the Japanese products were bizarre. A tube of toothpaste might say, “Green days you not sing.” A box of cookies might say, “Wood above fish.”

How can you use this secret right now? Don’t be afraid to be confusing. People tend to sort out whatever you say anyway and make sense out of it using their own terms. If you are describing your product in great detail, be willing to toss in something odd. It may increase sales.

 

By Joe Vitale / Source: The Code of Influence

 

 

 

 

 

Brainwashed to Be Broke?

 

 

 

Think about your life for a moment. Are you exactly where you want to be? Are you doing work that you love? Are you free to travel when and where you wish? Are your relationships fulfilling? Are you financially free or are you tied to a job you hate?

Now answer this question for me: Do you want to know exactly why you are not living a life of ease, comfort, and happiness? Yes, of course you do. Pay close attention:

“The only reason you are not living the life of your dreams is because unconstructive beliefs were programmed into your mind as a child.”

 

Let me say it in a way that might be easier to understand: “The only reason you don’t have enough money is because you still believe the bullshit they taught you as a kid.”

That’s it… When you were young, you learned certain “facts” about life that became a part of your subconscious operating system. This system now automatically creates the life you are living. If you are not living exactly the life that you desire, then these beliefs need to be changed… it’s as simple as that.

Do you realize that you have been brainwashed?

 

Most people don’t want to hear this “inconvenient truth.” But most people are also living hopeless lives of quiet desperation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… but I know that you are not like that. I doubt you would still be reading if you didn’t realize that you are capable of much, much more.

In fact, you HAVE been brainwashed. Of course, we are all brainwashed. Every single person on the planet is brainwashed with a certain set of beliefs which automatically operates his or her life.

Your parents, your teachers, your leaders, your culture, and your friends and family have all had a hand in creating exactly the set of beliefs you use to operate in your world.

Is this bad? Only if the beliefs you accepted as a child are not helping you now. Of course, if you are happy, healthy and successful then you have a subconscious operating system that works. Count your blessings and enjoy your life.

However, if there is some area of your life which you would like to change, then it is vital that you learn how to.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The REAL reason you don’t have enough money is because you believe something you learned as a child which is keeping you from having enough money. Perhaps your father told you that rich people are crooks. Well, of course you don’t want to be considered a crook in your father’s eyes, so you will never be rich. Your subconscious programming will make sure that you are never able to make money.

Or perhaps your parents always fought about money. What did your young mind learn? You learned that money causes trouble. You don’t want trouble, so you avoid money.

Or maybe you are spiritually inclined. But you were probably taught that “money is the root of all evil.” And you don’t want to be evil, do you? So what happens in your inner programming? It will automatically sabotage your attempts to get money, in order to “protect” you from being evil.

 

By Ilya Alexi, Author of Mind Over Money: How to Program Your Mind for Wealth

 

Studies have recently found that the use of sanitizer may be less effective at protecting health and preventing the spread of disease than previously believed.

 

 

Frequent hand washing, along with the use of effective sanitizer, is important for staying healthy. However, some studies have recently found that the use of sanitizer may be less effective at protecting health and preventing the spread of disease than previously believed. According to a “Sanitizer Alert” published in the November 2006 Journal of Environmental Health, some products marketed to the public as antimicrobial hand sanitizer are simply not effective in reducing bacterial counts on hands.

Prior to the alert, researchers purchased alcohol-based sanitizer with approximately 40% ethanol as the active ingredient at a local retail store. Although the sanitizer’ labels claimed that the products reduce germs and bacteria by nearly 100%, researchers reported that they “observed an apparent increase (emphasis added) in the concentration of bacteria in handprints impressed on agar plates after cleansing [with sanitizer].”

Subsequent and more formal hand hygiene tests were conducted to verify – or disprove – the initial findings. The researchers observed similar results in the follow-up tests and concluded that alcohol-based sanitizer with less than 60 to 62% ethanol did not necessarily reduce – nor were they effective against – a variety of germs and bacteria.

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS IMPORTANT ISSUE SO OFTEN NEGLECTED

http://www.liquidgloves.co.za/index.html

 

Liquid Gloves have built in ANTIBACTERIAL properties. This means that the product doesn’t just clean your hands but also protects against almost all types of germs and bacteria.  Ordinary hygiene soaps only has an initial cleaning action but the moment you touch any contaminated surface your hands are once again exposed to germs and bacteria.  Liquid Gloves is different.  It continues protecting your skin for up to 7 hours and more after correct application.  Thus there is a continuous germ blocking shield on you hands that prevents germs and bacteria adhering onto you skin, helping you remain healthy.

 

 

Only a matter of time before the hand grenade explodes – Wealth creation – MOELETSI MBEKI

 

 

 

 

MOELETSI MBEKI: Wealth creation

 

Only a matter of time before the hand grenade explodes

 

 

I CAN predict when SA’s “Tunisia Day” will arrive. Tunisia Day is when the masses rise against the powers that be, as happened recently in Tunisia. The year will be 2020, give or take a couple of years. The year 2020 is when China estimates that its current minerals-intensive industrialisation phase will be concluded.

 

For SA, this will mean the African National Congress (ANC) government will have to cut back on social grants, which it uses to placate the black poor and to get their votes. China’s current industrialisation phase has forced up the prices of SA’s minerals, which has enabled the government to finance social welfare programmes.

 

The ANC inherited a flawed, complex society it barely understood; its tinkering s with it are turning it into an explosive cocktail. The ANC leaders are like a group of children playing with a hand grenade. One day one of them will figure out how to pull out the pin and everyone will be killed.

 

 A famous African liberation movement, the National Liberation Front of Algeria, after tinkering for 30 years, pulled the grenade pin by cancelling an election in 1991 that was won by the opposition Islamic Salvation Front. In the civil war that ensued, 200,000 people were killed.

 

The former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, once commented that whoever thought that the ANC could rule SA was living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Why was Thatcher right? In the 16 years of ANC rule, all the symptoms of a government out of its depth have grown worse.

 

– Life expectancy has declined from 65 years to 53 years since the ANC came to power;

 

– In 2007, SA became a net food importer for the first time in its history;

 

 

 – The elimination of agricultural subsidies by the government led to the loss of 600,000 farm workers’ jobs and the eviction from the commercial farming sector of about 2,4-million people between 1997 and 2007; and

 

– The ANC stopped controlling the borders, leading to a flood of poor people into SA, which has led to conflicts between SA’s poor and foreign African migrants.

 

What should the ANC have done, or be doing? The answer is quite straightforward. When they took control of the government in 1994, ANC leaders should have: identified what SA’s strengths were; identified what SA’s weaknesses were; and decided how to use the strengths to minimise and/or rectify the weaknesses.

 

A wise government would have persuaded the skilled white and Indian population to devote some of their time — even an hour a week — to train the black and coloured population to raise their skill levels.

 

What the ANC did instead when it came to power was to identify what its leaders and supporters wanted. It then used SA’s strengths to satisfy the short-term consumption demands of its supporters. In essence, this is what is called black economic empowerment (BEE).

 

BEE promotes a number of extremely negative socioeconomic trends in our country. It promotes a class of politicians dependent on big business and therefore promotes big business’s interests in the upper echelons of government. Second, BEE promotes an anti-entrepreneurial culture among the black middle class by legitimising an environment of entitlement. Third, affirmative action, a subset of BEE, promotes incompetence and corruption in the public sector by using ruling party allegiance and connections as the criteria for entry and promotion in the public service, instead of having tough public service entry examinations.

 

Let’s see where BEE, as we know it today, actually comes from. I first came across the concept of BEE from a company, which no longer exists, called Sankor. Sankor was the industrial division of Sanlam and it invented the concept of BEE.

 

The first purpose of BEE was to create a buffer group among the black political class that would become an ally of big business in SA. This buffer group would use its newfound power as controllers of the government to protect the assets of big business.

 

The buffer group would also protect the modus operandi of big business and thereby maintain the status quo in which South African business operates.. That was the design of the big conglomerates.

 

Sanlam was soon followed by Anglo American. Sanlam established BEE vehicle Nail; Anglo established Real Africa, Johnnic and so forth. The conglomerates took their marginal assets, and gave them to politically influential black people, with the purpose, in my view, not to transform the economy but to create a black political class that is in alliance with the conglomerates and therefore wants to maintain the status quo of our economy and the way in which it operates.

 

But what is wrong with protecting SA’s conglomerates? Well, there are many things wrong with how conglomerates operate and how they have structured our economy.

 

– The economy has a strong built- in dependence on cheap labour;

 

– It has a strong built-in dependence on the exploitation of primary resources;

 

– It is strongly unfavourable to the development of skills in our general population;

 

– It has a strong bias towards importing technology and economic solutions; and

 

– It promotes inequality between citizens by creating a large, marginalised underclass.

 

Conglomerates are a vehicle, not for creating development in SA but for exploiting natural resources without creating in-depth, inclusive social and economic development, which is what SA needs. That is what is wrong with protecting conglomerates.

 

The second problem with the formula of BEE is that it does not create entrepreneurs. You are taking political leaders and politically connected people and giving them assets which, in the first instance, they don’t know how to manage. So you are not adding value. You are faced with the threat of undermining value by taking assets from people who were managing them and giving them to people who cannot manage them. BEE thus creates a class of idle rich ANC politicos.

 

My quarrel with BEE is that what the conglomerates are doing is developing a new culture in SA — not a culture of entrepreneurship, but an entitlement culture, whereby black people who want to go into business think that they should acquire assets free, and that somebody is there to make them rich, rather than that they should build enterprises from the ground.

 

But we cannot build black companies if what black entrepreneurs look forward to is the distribution of already existing assets from the conglomerates in return for becoming lobbyists for the conglomerates.

 

The third worrying trend is that the ANC- controlled state has now internalised the BEE model. We are now seeing the state trying to implement the same model that the conglomerates have developed.

 

What is the state distributing? It is distributing jobs to party faithful and social welfare to the poor. This is a recipe for incompetence and corruption, both of which are endemic in SA. This is what explains the service delivery upheavals that are becoming a normal part of our environment.

 

So what is the correct road SA should be travelling? We all accept that a socialist model, along the lines of the Soviet Union, is not workable for SA today. The creation of a state-owned economy is not a formula that is an option for SA or for many parts of the world. Therefore, if we want to develop SA instead of shuffling pre-existing wealth, we have to create new entrepreneurs, and we need to support existing entrepreneurs to diversify into new economic sectors.

 

– Mbeki is the author of Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing.

 

This article forms part of a series on transformation supplied by the Centre for Development and Enterprise.

 

Thank you Annalise for this contribution.