Amazing achievement of peak performer
READER Paul Buckingham draws our attention to the UKās forthcoming National Achievers Congress, promoted in exhaustingly upbeat prose at . The congress, we are told, will be attended by millionaire entrepreneurs like Richard Branson along with āa potent combination of other celebrated niche money-making experts who ensure no matter what your background or current circumstances youāll finally break through to the success youāve always deservedā.
Most striking of the achievements of the dynamic speakers promised for the congress is that of Anthony Robbins, the āworldās number 1 peak performance coachā. His āoutstanding life has allowed him to personally meet, consult, and coach an incredibly diverse group of over 3 million people from 80 different countriesā.
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Paul calculates that even if Robbins has only spent 10 minutes in person with each of these 3 million people and, as a high achiever himself, spends 10 hours per day, 7 days per week doing his meeting, consulting and coaching, then he has spent 137 years so engaged.
āI think this must make him about 155 years old,ā says Paul. āThatās a major achievement in itself. I think I shall enrol for the conference.ā
AT THE Homebase ādo-it-yourselfā home improvement store in Hove, Sussex, UK, one reaches the outside garden centre by a sliding door. To one side, this is labelled āautomatic doorā, but on closer inspection, just under this sign is a small red button, with the instruction āpush button to openā.
Martin Pettinger finds it odd that the door does not open as he approaches, as he would expect. But, Martin, itās not fully automatic. Itās just a bit automatic, if only a little bit.
Older readers may be reminded of the rhetoric about the ills of āThe Push-Button Worldā in the book with that title, subtitled āAutomation todayā, by Edward Maurice Hugh-Jones, published in 1956 ā a time when a lot of things were only a little bit automatic.
Feedback also recalls marching confidently into a glass hotel door in Ramallah in the West Bank, expecting it to glide open like it would in London, then ruefully continuing down the street rubbing the Feedback nose and muttering āwrong decade!ā
For, as cyberpunk novelist William Gibson observed: āThe future is already here ā itās just not very evenly distributed.ā
WHO is your googleganger? The ā āAustraliaās national dictionary onlineā ā has announced that āgooglegangerā is the Word of the Year for 2010.
The University of Sydneyās online news : āGoogleganger, a noun, is defined as a person with the same name as oneself, whose online references are mixed with oneās own among search results for oneās name.ā
Feedback is embarrassed to acknowledge the truth of the comment by Sue Butler, editor of the dictionary: āNo one can resist the temptation to key in their own name in the search box and see who pops up.ā
Aim for infinitesimal improvement
BETTER that we preserve the anonymity of the reader who responded to our mention of an automatic mission-statement generator (5 February). This reader once worked for a company whose mission statement was āTo constantly improve while providing a consistent level of service to customersā.
It didnāt take those working in the IT department long to realise that the only way to achieve this was to improve at an infinitesimal rate, so that over any given finite time period the level of customer service would not change.
āThe management obviously thought that this was a really inspiring strap-line,ā our reader reports, ābecause it was greeted with knowing nods and smiles when they said āItās a difficult aspiration but I believe we can achieve itā.ā
GOBBLEDEGOOK of the week comes from of Tokyo, Japan: āGraviton is not the name of the blended ingredient. Within the particle that composes the smallest unit of matter, there is the force of gravity, which equals Graviton governing the gravitational wave and can be found in all matter within our worldā¦ In the most advanced science, experimentation and research are being conducted to stabilise the gravitational wave and activate the cells. Considering the health of the skin, KD Cosmetics have implemented the usage of the gravitational wave at its best condition in the āGraviton productsā.ā
Reader Darryl Luscombe says: āThis makes no sense to me.ā We feel the same way.
FINALLY, the label from a jar of āmarmaladeā ā Waldenfarm Orange Spread, to be precise ā that Richard Hendry scanned when he was in Canada said that it contained: āTotal fat 0g; Sat. Fat 0g; Cholest. 0gā ā close to what youād expect. But also: āTotal Carb 0g; Sugars 0g; Vitamin C 0gā¦ā
Richard sent us the scan, but he left the original tub in Toronto: āIt was, not surprisingly, tasteless.ā