I just read a glowing tribute to the “Olympic spirit” displayed by all the happy young Olympic athletes. The focus of the tribute was on how we can apply some of the dedication shown by Olympians to our personal, business and professional lives.

Now I don’t want to come down on anybody, but I think a little bit of reality about this Olympic dedication thing would be a good thing. Surely the big question one must ask about dedicating yourself lock stock and barrel to snowboarding or skiing or (horrors!) mastering the luge is “Why am I doing this?”

Glorifying the Winners

Just saying “Because I want to be the best at what I do” is not a very good answer.

First, the odds of actually being the best – or even in the top ten or twenty – is a long shot at best. So isn’t this a rather bad investment of your time, energy and (probably someone else’s) money if the likelihood of your success is so low?

Yes, sure we glorify the winners once every four years. We see winners parading to the podium one after the other. But isn’t that rather an unrealistic picture given that there are probably at least 10 losers for every winner?

That isn’t even to mention the thousands who never make it to the games. What about them? What about the guy who continually comes up 16th or 17th in the short program or the half pipe? Is he or she “living the dream”? Or are they just the fodder that keeps the machine humming along?

Being the Best We Can Be

Second, what’s so great about “being the best” anyway. Is it an ego trip these people are on? Are we encouraging them to be and feel superior to everyone else? Is it the monetary payoff that justifies it? Or is it just the “Olympic spirit” (whatever that is) or “being the very best you can be” that makes us all value this process so much?

If “being the very best I can be” is such a cherished goal, why are not the rest of us doing it? If we say we value this sort of thing but don’t live it in our own lives, doesn’t that make us hypocrites?

Probably, but there is a much more practical answer to why most of don’t care about “being the very best I can be”. It is impractical, hard work, and ultimately rather pointless. There is simply no payoff. Most of us are happy to make our moderate living, live our unspectacular lives, and play a round of golf with our buddies on the weekend.

I’ve been involved in competitive sports pretty much all my life, and I know how addictive the idea of “winning” can be. But when all is said and done, in any competition there is one winner and a whole bunch of losers.

Is Tiger Happy?

If you go into a golf tournament, for example, to win, chances are you are going to be disappointed. Only Tiger Woods can consistently beat the odds and that doesn’t seem to have made him a very happy person.

I am not just talking about being realistic about your chances of winning. I am talking about being realistic about how much of your “spirit” you should invest in trying to win.

The Olympic Spirit

This is really what the classic Olympic spirit is about – and sportsmanship in general. Playing the game because you enjoy it, and keeping it in perspective with the rest of your life.

Today’s Olympians who are paid to devote their entire existence to training and striving to win are not exemplifying this spirit at all.

When you get right down to it most of them are naive young people being used for the benefit of commercial and political interests. They are being pushed and cajoled by parents and coaches into performing to feed their egos and the public’s gluttonous (and often profitable) appetite for entertainment.

But occasionally (twice to be exact) a guy (so far it’s always been a guy) will say something like “Stick your green tips up your a**. I don’t want anything to do with your green Al Gore-loving liberal bs.”

Usually I just ignore this kind of message and take them off the list. But a few days ago when I got this kind of message I decided to send a response to see what would happen.

I innocently thought that if I explained that these “green” tips had nothing to do with “global warming”, but were basically about saving money, this would suddenly make the guy at the other end of the message more receptive.

It didn’t work. He thought I sounded like a “liberal”.

I resisted the temptation to explain that, well, yes I am a kind of liberal, but I’m also a kind of conservative, and that I think people (mostly American people) throw these terms around without really knowing what they mean.

As far as the man-in-the-street is concerned the term “liberal” has been defined in recent years in a negative way by people like Rush Limbaugh. It is hard to understand exactly what guys like this don’t like about “liberals”, but whatever it is, they sure have strong feelings about it. The man in the street who listens approvingly to guys like Limbaugh know even less why they disapprove of “liberals”, but dammit, they just do.

The superficial answer is that “liberals” are in favour of things like big government, universal health care, handouts to the poor, wasteful social programs and high taxes. Perhaps more to the point, “conservatives” think “liberals” are slippery when it comes to things like right and wrong, and individual responsibility.

Now this is getting us closer to the meat of the matter. What “conservatives” want are solid answers, black and white distinctions between things like right and wrong, good and bad, the individual and society. Liberals, on the other hand want to be free to be noncommital about values.

In other words, “conservatives” like things black and white. “Liberals” only see shades of grey.

This can (and does) get confusing because “conservatism” sounds like a principled stance, but on its own really has no content, no inherent core principles other than conserving what already exists. A “conservative” wants to conserve good old fashioned values simply because they are good and old fashioned, not because they are inherently good or bad.

This is really a kind of pragmatism. For a “conservative”, values are worth conserving in any given society because they have become part of the fabric of that society. They have worked in the past, so there is no good reason why they shouldn’t work in the future.

There are obvious problems with this “pragmatic” rationale for conservatism. Clearly, different societies have different “good old fashioned values”. Chinese traditional values are different from American traditional values, and both are different from the traditional values of Iran. Could it be that simply conserving these in any given society is automatically a good thing?

Of course most “conservatives” would deny that their position is inherently unprincipled. But this is where the “principled conservative” as opposed to the “pragmatic” one starts sounding vaguely like a “liberal”.

Because there is no question that liberalism does have principles – or at least one. Its most cherished principle is “freedom” or “liberty” – the origin of the word “liberal”. Practising “liberals” are just hesitant to cash this general principle out in terms of simplistic things like traditional values, or some particular society’s view of right and wrong.

What they want is the freedom to choose – the freedom, as it were, to be free of traditional views, or the views of the elite, or of a bunch of priests or lawyers or bureaucrats, or of loud-talking guys like Rush Limbaugh.

Which brings us back to slippery – the thing that “conservatives” most dislike about “liberals”. “Conservatives” want to say “This is right and that’s wrong” while “liberals” want to say “Hold on. It may be right in your eyes, but there are other things we have to take into consideration.”

Does this make me sound like a “liberal”? I’m afraid it does.

Well, just about every time I go to my favourite coffee shop I see this scenario in the flesh. Tonight I could here this rapid-fire one-way stream of jibber jabber coming from two tables over.

How anyone can keep talking that fast for so long about nothing is completely baffling to me.

The only reason anyone really cares about marketing is out of necessity – the necessity to run a successful business, to make a splash in the world – ultimately to make a living. There’s really not much more to it than that. Try as we might to make marketing ideas sound exciting and insightful, there is very little that is inspiring about the quest to get people to buy more of your products.

So instead I am going to write about things I care about: politics, history, society, technology, ethics, music, philosophy, and other things I’m sure I’ve left out. That should be enought to keep me busy.

They comment on each other’s blog posts. They link to each other’s blogs. They write posts for each other. They run joint promotions, and so on.

In a recent article called “Let Me Show You Inside a Secret Blogging Alliance” Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.com details a conversation he had with a blogger involved in this kind of alliance.

If you have a struggling blog and are looking for ways to make it more successful, you’ll be sure to get some helpful ideas from this article.

About three weeks ago, in response to the popular Perry Belcher videos I decided to give it another try.

Here are some conclusions so far:

1. You can definitely drive traffic with Twitter. You need followers, content, and well written tweets.

2. The best way to get followers seems to be to…

- define your niche properly
- keep cranking out tweets
- write tweets that get attention
- use the appropriate keywords in your tweets

3. If you have a stubborn niche, follow first in order to get followers. For example, I created an account called the “kwtweetnet” to see if I could zero in on just local tweeters (in the local Kitchener-Waterloo Ontario region). The best way to get followers is to find local tweeters (I used Twellow.com), follow them, and then wait for them to reciprocate.

Keep cranking out the tweets, but make them substantive pointing to good content on your target sites.

I’m not an email spam alarmist. If you’ve read any of my stuff you know that I think “opt out” email is perfectly acceptable under most circumstances… and in any event there’s not much we can do about it, even if we don’t like it.

But I would think a credible company (like I assume Kohls is) would have a simple opt-out (unsubscribe) policy.

Not Kohls. After you unsubscribe they tell you your email address will be removed within seven days, during which time you may receive a couple more “alerts”.

This is BS. I suspect it is an out and out corporate lie. I have now unsubscribed at least three times over the course of the last two weeks or so.

We’ll see what happens. In any event I won’t be buying from Kohls…wherever they are.

There’s no doubt Google is responding to pressure from Bing.com, the new improved Microsoft search engine which now has new legs since the deal with Yahoo.

They are also responding to the news that both Twitter and Facebook are coming out with their own search engines.

You can be sure the revamp of Google, the new Bing, and the new engines from Twitter and FB are going to change the role of search engine optimization somewhat.