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A new study tells us we should stop worrying about worrying as if we didn’t already know. It all started when some group of research pointy heads found out that worrying about paying health insurance premiums was causing people to get sick. Their conclusions were the patient was going to be sick anyway so may as well jack up the premiums.

Now we are told if one worries about having a heart attack, one more than likely will have the Big One than if one does not worry about having the Big One. So now we have a worry about a worry, if that makes sense. But of course it does.

It’s simply a matter of civilized visualization. If the baseball player visualizes himself striking out, well, that most likely will be the result. We do know that in the end the survival of the fittest strategy may come down to who can worry less about worrying. Or as my good pal Clem Oakley used to say, ‘it’s time for some very, very hard liquor right now.’

Good old Clem, rest in peace. Clem always knew what to do when things seemed darkest. Clem knew how to deal with things like worry. Clem always saw the mug as half filled which for him meant he had just chugged the other half.

But Clem aside, one should worry a lot about having a heart attack, no? Don’t you just hate to visualize all that chest clenching and pain and loss of awareness and sensitivity for others? Those having heart attacks almost always are focused on their own needs and entirely ignore the needs of others that are most likely becoming stressed as well.

So now, thanks to folks like you, we have not one but two things to worry about; 1) the Big One and 2) the worry about the Big One. As a consequence we now must spend our days thinking through all our worries and our difficulty remembering them all, which could be a plus or a minus.

Not to cheer too soon, because all this eventually causes new anxiety and probably new worry as well. You know what they say; one little worry leads right to another and nine days later out pops a brand new little baby worry crying its heart out. It’s a cultural thing and an element of pride. Once you really learn how to seriously worry, amateurism simply will not do.

As a sideshow, a whole entire industry will pop up over night teaching everybody and his brother how to cope with worry; ‘we don’t get rid of it, we just dull the pain.’ Sounds like fun. Sounds like another thing to worry about. Somehow we just can’t wait to attend all those worry capacity building workshops. As a group, we have found that group worry brings us closer to each other and our common worries. We also recommend it for families with rude and crude teenagers. Talk about worry…bring me the bottle, Clem.

What this all means in the final net net is that we just have to learn to deal with more worry if we want to get the full benefits of a worry based existence. What me worry? Why not, it’s good for you, no?

Well, yes and no. If one worries enough about having a heart attack, maybe one will also change one’s diet and adopt an exercise plan. Or not. So the positive aspect of doing positive things that help prevent a heart attack may in fact offset the negative aspect of worrying about the big one.

So be it. But just because it is, should we worry about it? The unpopular truth is probably so. That’s life. Like the jaguar in the jungle, what you worry obsessively over won’t sneak up on you in the middle of the night, right? Who wants to wake up in the middle of the night having the Big One? It’s enough to spoil the entire evening…

No worries for the real worry pro though, adding a worry or two presents no problem. Worries need room to expand and grow if they are to become healthy and vigorous and mesh into the melting pot of full blown anxieties and neuroses. And subsequently aid in the increased dysfunction of both individuals and tribes. What’s not to like about that?

Just remember that things are never as bad as they seem and never seem as they truly are; your problems emanate solely from your peculiarly skewed perceptions. You are somewhat strange. Don’t try to blame it on nature or nurture; be a real man or a real woman and simply take the blame yourself. In the long run it’s less painful and certainly less confusing.

Whatever you do, don’t blame me. Just remember you were told worry is us and that’s all you really need to know, right? Right?

Jack Deal is worry tolerant owner of Deal Business Consulting. Related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/business and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com

You know who they are. They wear a tool belt for all their phones and gadgets. They look like a telephone line repairman. They waddle when they walk. They can speak but like all good children they only speak when spoken to. You might try texting them because it’s quicker. Besides, they will tell you they just don’t listen very well. They hear just fine, but don’t listen. It’s not what they do.

They have been called gadget addicts and worse. You know the argument, video games and virtual reality are the equivalent of drugs. However, drugs only affect the brain and do not actually become part of the neural network, unlike gadgets. Gadgets become part of the flow of the parsed bits and bytes and therefore become indispensable. Take out the gadget and the neural network crashes.

So with the New Techies, the gadgets have become part of the Extended Neural Network or ENN. Taking away these gadgets is like taking away whole sections of the ENN. It’s like surgically removing a chunk of brain; well, sort of.

As a consequence anything and everything that is connected with this gadget simply disappears when the gadget disappears. This can cause a problem since all data of significance run through this device’s chips. This data includes such non-essentials as family, school and other community and personal experiences not including friends.

Adults who don’t care about how they look often wear a dumbing down earphone headset and can be seen in public gesturing and talking to themselves. The question is, does this make them feel important or just look more stupid? It sure hurts any chances for finding a date; who wants their conversation played out to everyone in the fruit and veggie section at the local Trader Joe’s? Is this the type of behavior young people should emulate? Is this the type of behavior one should be exposed to while shopping for basil and artichokes?

Needless to say this New Techie withdrawal from the human race and real time relationships means that the New Techies will become even goofier than their nerdy and goofy predecessors. Staring at a terminal too long used to cause goofiness and now this syndrome has simply coded seamlessly over to cell phones and handhelds of all shapes and colors. How about a little pink one in the shape of a heart for someone you really despise?

It’s easier so subsequently there is little reason for the New Techie to become interested in things like hiking, surfing, football or even dancing. Dancing is especially worrisome as it sometimes creates relationships and relationships are clearly problematic for the permanently sanitized and wired.

As the Greeks said, beware excess. Unfortunately chronic usage of add on devices results in the New Techies’ mental circuitry becoming fried. Offshore research has shown the neurons en masse begin to fray and melt into a sort of soft goo paste. This goo or anti-brain matter causes dysfunctional withdrawal from the real world into the safer and less threatening virtual world where nobody gets punched, insulted or called nasty ethnic names. After all, like the Super Bowl, World Cup and Presidential Election, at the end of the day it’s still just a game.

We certainly make it harder on ourselves since we humans are messy creatures creating a lot of fuss and bother and then leaving a bunch of garbage. It’s so much easier just to wire directly into that Extended Neural Network ENN and not have to deal with all the other parts of human bodies that are quite frankly embarrassing to most New Techies. Part of the advantage of being wired is avoidance of physical contact. No icky germs…

But the question remains of just how is elevated art and culture to be transplanted from the worldly wise into a pea sized cerebrum that is constantly bombarded by low-end, sleaze ball digital stimuli? The short answer is it isn’t because it can’t. The wired brain is not free and inquiring; the wired brain is bored, boring and stuffed with spam. Mostly spam. All irrelevant input and no relevant output. That and gooey anti-brain matter.

But in the net net, it doesn’t matter. The inconvenient truth is we are what we think. Or put another way a bit more pessimistically, we are only what little we think. Does it matter that we plug and play into the only conscious freethinking organ we have? How many independently generated new ideas did your liver and kidneys come up with this week? But in the end, if you really think about it long and hard, who really needs those smelly, ugly old frontal lobes anyway?

BTW, did you get my text message about your text message?

Jack Deal is the owner of Deal Business Consulting and a technology advocate. Related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/business and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com

That’s it. No more sad stories. No more long faces. We just can’t take it anymore. We, the moral supporters, staff and affiliates are on strike.

We are on strike against doom and gloomers. We are on strike against those that continue insisting the sky is falling.

There is no joy in Mudville. Nor in Cupertino or Thousand Oaks. Let us hang our collective heads and knash our designer teeth.

Most employees are not happy campers. It really doesn’t take much intellect to see if someone is happy and smiling or sad and frowning. It is one of the first things we learn as babies. Duh?

See for yourself in the next business you go into. Simply look and observe if the folks you see are smiling or not. Then, look at the customers present and see if they are smiling or not.

That’s all the effort you need to spend in this portion of your corporate culture analysis.

Then go back to your office or the nearest coffee shop and sit down and analyze your results. Odds are if the employees are smiling, the customers are smiling. If the employees are frowning, the customers are frowning.

Some psychologists call this the mirror effect or the idea that we reflect the behaviors we observe. This is true for most monkeys and probably for most humans since we are genetically 98% alike. At least most of you are…

Imagine going into your favorite pub and the waitress has a long face. Your mind frantically searches through your cerebral database to come up with reasons for the long face.

You stall on ‘bad food’ and decide it is perhaps best to have a beer now and eat somewhere else later.

Somewhere else where you won’t get sick like the waitress.

The truth of the matter is the waitress’ four year old poured all of daddy’s cement into the toilet and the sitter wants to know what to do since it is starting to harden. But that is no excuse.

You missed the special of the day, missed the winning touchdown on the widescreen and your favorite pub went bankrupt the next day because your waitress was wearing a long face and all you could think about was E. coli.

Anyway, none of it matters in a gloom and doom world. We need to bottle and sell happiness; who would pay for doom? You may laugh and think it’s stupid and what kind of company creates and sells happiness since we can’t even define it?

And just how does one become a joy agent?

Jesting aside you probably know how collective melancholy can kill your business but did you also know it eats into the neurons of your hippocampus thus explaining why all people that constantly frown are perpetual losers?

It’s that simple: frown and your hippocampus turns to mush. That’s what we tell people. Not all of them believe us but that’s our company line.

We also very firmly believe that if we say it enough times even we will start to believe it.

But the honest truth is we just don’t like frowners and losers. We strongly suggest you get them out of your workplace before they poison your whole work environment.

Send them on a business trip with a one way ticket.

However if you have been noticing a funny odor for the last several days you may want to check the source out.

Most likely it will be a rotting rat inside a wall but sometimes employees have been known to pass away and not be missed for weeks.

Sometimes management attention span is short and they neglect to check up on their people. It’s always good to keep the thing light by using tricky campaign style buttons that say “We Check Our Employees’ Oil Each and Every Day.”

So the next time one of your customers asks “Who died?” take it as a constructive criticism and not a perverted death wish or personal grooming insult.

So until then, check your oil every day, keep the faith and don’t forget that beautiful smile!

Jack Deal is the owner of Jack D. Deal Business Consulting and finds business humor wherever he can. Related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/humor and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com

It’s always better to avoid being downwind from pigs. My Maya friend Poot had our permission to put a couple of pigs in back of our village hut. Somehow Poot took couple to mean six. A smelly six at that…especially downwind.

The bad news is the pigs he bought are of the ‘Americano’ variety and not the Mexican variety. The Americano pigs eat a special feed that Poot later found out make his pigs more costly to raise and so subsequently he will make nothing.

Bad business. The good news is that when they grow a bit more he will sell them and get out of the pig business; forever, we do all sincerely hope.

The bad news too is he can’t let them out of their pig pen and he has to clean the pen twice daily. The other bad news is we all have to smell what he cleans up.

He laughs that only the Americano pigs smell bad; the Mexican pigs smell sweet. He says they smell sweet but that is not the case.

Better yes, but sweet no. The Maya do have a sardonic sense of humor and living amongst them one occasionally has to bear the brunt.

In Mexico there is a dark skinned pig that can still be seen in many rural villages and ranchos. These pigs eat corn but mostly roots and weeds and garbage. In fact, these pigs will actually clean up a weedy lot and keep it clean.

And because they are not kept in confined pens, they really don’t smell that bad or have to have their pens cleaned twice daily.

The owners keep giving them corn so they won’t walk away to another village. Pigs aren’t stupid; they follow the corn.

Recently we drove to several Maya villages deep in the jungle with these free range pigs running throughout the village. Even though these pigs aren’t marked everyone knows whose pigs they are.

We even remarked how cute the little ones looked if loose pigs in the streets can indeed be called cute. Actually no one pays them any attention except for the senoras that are always shooing them away.

No matter what pigs are dirty and make a mess. It’s a pig thing.

My first night many years back in rural Veracruz was spent inside a hut with a dirt floor. In back there was another ‘room’ which must have contained farm tools or such. Later the truth was revealed.

At about 2:00 in the morning there was a very loud noise. Pigs. A bunch of them. Maybe ten little ones and four or five big ones. What a ruckus!

If you have never had the pleasure of sleeping with pigs then you probably don’t know they sleep in a pile at night. It’s a pig thing.

Several times a night they get up and run around in circles and change positions. And make quite a bit of noise in this social bonding process.

No need to try and figure out what’s going on because it happens to be a pig thing.

To make matters more perplexing the next morning it was clear someone had smeared my motorcycle with mud. In broken Spanish I questioned why someone would do that?

The answer was ‘puercos’ or pigs which I misinterpreted as thieves or bandidos. They all had a good laugh. Silly Gringo. What kinds of thieves go around smearing mud on motorcycles?

Of course the pigs had wallowed in the mud as pigs like to do and found my motorcycle a good place to scratch themselves, hence the mud.

That skinny Gringo ended up marrying that family’s oldest daughter and to this day they love to tell the story of the skinny Gringo teenager who thought thieves came at night and covered his motorcycle in mud. Silly Gringos.

Needless to say when considering what types of animals to put on my jungle ranch pigs were not a consideration.

They smell, get sick, get stolen and my resident jaguar would kill them off with great regularity. Domestic pigs are so much easier to catch and eat than wild pigs. No match for Mr. Jaguar.

Besides, it might be tempting to just give up on them and have a barbecue. Good eating but not much of a ranching business.

Yet there really is no doubt our paths will cross again. It’s inevitable and it’s fate…along with an occasional BLT or barbecue ribs with the ball game.

It’s a human thing.

Jack Deal is the owner of Jack D. Deal Business Consulting and still eats pig. Related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/humor and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com

Non-dairy creamer or NDC has to rank as the greatest marketing coup of all time. There really isn’t another scam that can quite match up to it’s simplicity, beauty and power.

All other great marketing scams descend linearly in some manner directly from NDC.

From every marketing standpoint non-dairy creamer makes sense. From the consumer’ standpoint it is a big fake out but since the consumer is paying the tab he can do what he likes. Did anyone say visualized fake out?

The premise is many fat folks like to put fatty cream in their coffee or tea or even drink it straight up in the bathroom.

Some water it down and call it half and half so they will feel half as guilty when they guzzle it. But they aren’t fooling themselves and therein resides the problem.

To confuse everyone the experts call it lactose intolerant but it still means one’s insides not being able to handle cow products.

As a community service and kind gesture to humanity, these savvy marketers want to save the allergic, guilty and obese from the evils of lactose intolerant consumption.

In other words, they saw a market and jumped right in.

Think of these dynamics and do a mental role play: one coffee or tea lover can’t use cream because they are hypersensitive to dairy products or weigh 480 pounds or most likely both.

This depressed and distraught individual takes a small container of non-dairy creamer and picks it up examining it carefully. Actually it could be the half gallon size since even the big cartons look alike.

What, you didn’t know you could buy a half gallon economy carton of NDC? And just what rock have you been living under all this time?

Visualize this happening in a restaurant while also looking wistfully at a bowl of those little tiny containers marked ‘Half n’ Half’ and not being able to participate so to speak.

Envision that the doctor told you the day before that one more half and half and you would start to grow an udder. Now visualize NDC.

NDC looks and feels just the same. It’s very important to pass that look and feel test so that a bona fide marketing coup is possible.

Without that look and feel there is little credibility; consumers aren’t that stupid, right? Pass the look and feel test and the marketing possibilities become very interesting.

Let’s not even get into the saccharin analogy and consider that all those NDC chemicals might indeed cause metabolic disturbances with a subsequent weight gain.

For the self esteem of millions it is best not to mention that consuming NDC actually might cause weight gain by causing trauma to the gastrointestinal tract.

The really important point is that non-dairy creamer does not taste or smell like cream but folks pour it in their cups anyway…chemicals and all. Why? Let’s look at the real reasons.

We use NDC because some marketer says it looks like cream if we visualize it while stirring our coffee; go ahead, be bold and visualize it turning white. And it actually does, or at least sort of does.

With correct envisioning we can see we have something in our coffee and the odds are it has to be cream, right?

Of course, what else could it be? By using the principles of envisioning and visualization and marketing scam theory we have very adroitly just faked ourselves out. Congratulations!

Even if you happen to be one of those literalists that see everything as it is you can trick your auto-suggestion cognition into actually knowing it is not cream but think you’re happy about it anyway! The human mind is a very powerful thing.

In the end we all must acknowledge the real service contribution NDC makes to modern society; we need all the help we can get.

So the next time you have coffee visualize yourself pouring non-dairy creamer chemicals into your cup. Visualize pouring some chemicals that may in fact be dairy derivatives causing irreversible damage to your metabolism resulting in sudden weight gain.

The marketers and engineers are certainly planning it that way and they are working around the clock to develop new and innovative products like NDC that further allow you to fool yourself. You know the ancient Chinese saying; there is no fool like one who fools himself.

So why do they do it? They do it because they can just as you do it because you can. Instead of being a real man or woman and drinking your coffee black you have to dump stuff in and make it appear to be something it isn’t.

But like the ancient Chinese also said, once a fool always a fool.

Jack Deal is the owner of Jack D. Deal Business Consulting. Related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/humor and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com

There are some strange people out there. I should know, I meet so many of them on the bus on my way to work. You have the rockers. No, not the Elvis lookalikes but the ones who are a sandwich short of a picnic, the ones that dribble and rock back and forth.

There are also the strange people out there who do bizarre things like collect shop mannequins and marry them - as seen on TV - and strange people that do extreme ironing for the sake of a place on YouTube.

Then there are the truly obsessed. The exhibition stand designers. I’ve even had some of them on the bus - struggling on with their fold flat partitions and display equipment, bashing old grannies about and impaling small children on their multi-coloured pins and flo-charts.

You can tell these exhibition stand designers have been up all night, thrashing about new, innovative ideas for showing off their customers wares in a flash, effective way. Their hair is standing on end, they are mumbling to themselves and twitching.

Swatches of fabric poke out from the satchel of the exhibition stand designer in typical buff, electric blue or graphite grey. Touted around various customers, they are beginning to look a little threadbare.
And, my goodness, have you ever attended an exhibition and seen an exhibition stand designer in full swing?

All of a sudden, they stop looking like mad professors with an intense dislike for everyone around and become suave looking demons of organisation. They order workmen around, shunting everything into position in plenty of time before the grand opening.

Lighting is positioned in exact accordance with the exhibition stand designers brief from the customer to highlight the products on display. Even what most consider a boring subject, literature display, is given the treatment from the exhibition stand designers.

Built to exact dimensions to support, display and even read the necessary material, these stands are no less important than the elaborate ones that hold a multitude of equipment.

They organise their customer’s stands according to the 3D plan that was supplied months ago. Even the people who only have the fold flat partitions do not escape their beady eyes, and attention to detail is not lacking.

I went to my doctors surgery the other day and there was one there. I could tell because he had swathes of buff coloured fabric that he was stapling and folding to re-do the displays and partitions for nurses and leaflets.

Even my son’s school could not escape the incessant detailing of the exhibition stand designer. They have actually come in very useful for the children’s displays on parent’s evening and really set off their colourful paintings to good effect.

The offices on the high street I pass every morning have also had the treatment. Their open plan office suite has been divided by partitioning which doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen them getting irate with each other on a stressful Monday morning, throwing paper planes, nudging each others items when they feel there space is being encroached upon.

Seems these exhibition stand designers are on to a good thing. If only they could now put one between my son’s who can’t sit beside each other without a fight breaking out because one’s taking up more sofa space than the other!

Display equipment expert Catherine Harvey looks at how the unusual mind of an exhibition stand designer helps him do his job. To find out more please visit http://www.connectionsexhibitions.co.uk/