• Are Your Goals Mutually Exclusive?

    edited by Alexander Becker

    What are your training objectives? The question highlights the problem. The next one is harder: What is your training objective?

    You want peak performance, beauty, aesthetic body composition with minimal fat and maximum muscle, superior mental sharpness, raw strength and endurance and speed. Overall health and longevity. Me too.

    While those objectives aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, by trying to achieve all these goals simultaneously, you will end up achieving nothing more than average, lowest common demoninator results inspired by too broad objectives and lack of priority.

    Peak performance in what activity exactly? Minimal fat and maximum muscle mass, an ideal for looks, may not be the best foundation for raw strength; more overall mass and, yes, bodyfat, will yield more strength.

    So at the very high end of the scale -- and we're talking about nothing else here -- it is less fat vs. more strength.

    Endurance and speed? Choose one. The two are completely different animals. After establishing a foundation training both endurance and speed you must decide which one to pursue even further.

    Aesthetic and healthy? Sure it's possible but it quickly becomes a compromise; there are various tricks involving water and salt for example that will make you look even better yet, from the perspective of best health and longevity you'll want to leave the tricks alone and eat in moderation, light and balanced.

    Again, the high end decision, even leaner, -- mind you, this is true perfectionism -- is between extreme beauty vs. optimum health.

    Set priorities and determine the pros and cons of the goals in the big picture. You can always have it all today and pay later, the question is: Is it worth it?

    What about drugs? What exactly do you want and how bad? Certain drugs will make you look better in the short term. Certain other drugs will increase you concentration and decrease your need for sleep while making you more alert -- for a short time. If it's necessary, make a decision.

    The more clear your priorities are, the more mutually exclusive the various objectives become. You're not going to be #1 in every game. On the other hand, you can be #1 in any game.

    Choose your game, pay the price, and win.

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  • What do People Love About You?

    edited by Alexander Becker

    This post is part of The Foundations of Your Personal Brand Series.

    Burn the business plan and write a book instead, suggests bypassing the production of an always, almost instantly obsolete business plan in favor of a book that you can still sell, even in case the business fails.

    The article is an interesting read, especially in the context of the added value of long tail versions of online content and its appearance in ebooks, for example. Yet, the inspiration came with questions making it into books, more specifically, I stumbled across one simple question, What do customers love about your product? My answer is equally simple, yet it defines everything I do: My customers love that I make them look good. Discretely. I work behind the scenes to make them look good.

    For now, no book-instead-of-a-plan but a short manifesto to frame the purpose --

    Making You Look Good

    That's all I've ever done and all I ever will. Not that you don't look good in the first place -- the opposite is true -- I will make you look even better. Who wouldn't want to look better, especially when given an exact plan and the means to do it. Why not? On the other hand -- why? The answer is exceedingly simple... because I can. Well, I have to.

    Technically, I make you look good -- conceptually, I make you look even better.

    That's my business and my job, whatever I do, be it technical advice, or conceptual consulting, I am here to make you look good, better, the best you can be. As far as I -- and you, for that matter -- are prepared to go. To me, this means whatever it takes -- why not go all the way if it is almost paved -- but ultimately, you decide.

    I make you look good and you make yourself be seen. How about that?

    Looking good, of course refers to more than visual beauty. Looking good you can on stage to be sure, but you can also do so in marketing, in politics, in a debate, in writing, and in talking, sometimes you can even look good, best that is, in absence. Opportunities to look good are always and all over the place.

    Working from scratch? No. That's pure creation, while, on the other hand, making you look even better is refining and uncovering the divine. I'm not adding anything which is not already there, instead, I bring it out. Think marble and the sculpture hidden within. Nothing more and nothing less.

    Little work could be done to discover the smallest hint, implying a whole world of change to you, or, on the other hand, immensely hard work could be invested, only to emerge the slightest bit wiser. It is worth the effort in either case.

    The beauty of making you look good is that it is an iterative process, it doesn't matter how small the first step -- by definition and comparison, you'll look even better.

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  • Free ebook: Celebrate Your Beauty

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Peer pressure, vanity and behavior, motivation tricks and hacks, success and pain, and how to excel, Celebrate Your Beauty -- whatever it takes.

    Whether you work on stage, or walk the runways, whether you make things real on the big screen, behind the scenes, near a microphone, or in the proximity of a camera, this little book is for you.

    Also, producers, can you hear me? Make your artists happy with this book. Celebrate Your Beauty provides targeted and clustered content, a well-readable, pre-selected set of articles written to help promote beauty and maintain motivation on and off stage. Share it, mail it, give it away, and make them love you even more.

    This book will make you look even better.

    Celebrate Your Beauty is a long tail edition, a small, topical ebook, 26 pages, remixed and arranged from articles appearing on WOW. As much as with a delicious dinner, all the ingredients are readily available -- yet, you still let the chef do the work, don't you?.

    Celebrate Your Beauty will never go out of print -- it doesn't have to. You print it if you want to do so, I may even print it, but no one is going to stock this one.

    With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

    The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

    Like I said before: Everything has its moment.

    Download the free ebook: Celebrate Your Beauty, written to help promote beauty and maintain motivation in the world of looks.

    One last thing -- from now on, comments are open, I invite you to tell me what you think, what you feel, and whether you strive to leap forward and show the world that it is possible.

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  • Maintain Your Beauty

    edited by Alexander Becker

    How do you think are you going to be able to maintain your beauty during the years to come? Your beauty is shining and legendary. What do you think are you doing right now? Why do you think you can do without sleep? You don't eat regularly, you don't eat enough, and what you eat is not worth the mention. Then there is your mood, please watch it, for that you attract exactly what you radiate.

    You play with your life like I used to play with mine...

    You declare your starved look a beauty ideal and others will follow you because you are their idol, you are a role-model. Take responsibility. You work without rest while you postpone your health and your beauty... You expect to get it back after being rewarded. What do you think will be your reward? What do you expect from your reward? What do you plan on doing with your reward?

    What you still mistake for your reward will not satisfy your longing. But you know that. You will receive a thousandfold, yet you will be waiting for happiness. In vain. You will crave even more and try even harder when the only right thing to do is to step back and enjoy the show.

    Don't trade your beauty or your health for something you're not even vaguely able to describe. What you want lies in front of you, within easy reach, day in, day out.

    Let go of everything for the shortest moment of your precious time and feel what is there for you and only for you. Feel what you are missing and what you are neglecting in favor of that fear. Let go and be beautiful. Your reward comes from within.

    Surprised?

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  • A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body?

    edited by Alexander Becker

    I am still not convinced that a healthy body is a prerequisite for a healthy mind or even vice versa. There are too many examples of extremely healthy minds in sick bodies; on the other hand, we all know perfect bodies which don't seem to care too much about their minds. The same goes for beauty; we have beauty without health -- some even explicitely sick -- all around us.

    Sometimes it's about priorities, in order to overwhelmingly succeed in one field, the mind for example, you'd have to neglect the body somewhat along the way. It's just not the most important thing to pursue while heading for that mind-related goal.

    It's not easy nor is it particularly sane to sustain such an imbalance for longer periods of time. On the other hand, it seems to yield more extreme results, neglecting one, mind or body, in favor of the other.

    To conclude, a healthy mind could transform its body into a healthy vehicle but it is not required to do so, as much as a healthy body has no apparent reason to do anything to boost its mind -- except for a steady supply of challenging input, that is.

    Don't get me wrong, I am a renaissance man. I do think that by alternating and escalating between mental and physical activity, we are destined to reach our personal best for a prolonged time, as opposed to short-term heights in either field at the cost of the respective other.

    Mens sana in corpore sano: An ideal to strive for.

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