Asia Blogging Network

“You are what you focus on”, that’s what Joe Vitale meant in his book “The Attractor Factor”. Your focus will become reality. The problem, what are we focusing at? Is it to a negative topic, or positive. Our subconsciousness sometimes tend to focus to negative things/ideas.

If we focus to a negative thing, it will become a reality. We often did this unintentionally. It’s either our nature, or influenced by our environment. An example: You are having problems starting your own business. You reasoned that this is because most of your time are already taken by your full-time office job.

What will happen is your business will never take off, because you’re focusing on a REASON which is stopping you from moving forward.

When we’re focusing on problem, instead of the solution, what will happen is the problem will add up. Focus to the reason, and the barrier will increase. Focus to our weakness, and we’ll become weaker. That’s the power of thought.

The problem (or advantage) of our subconsciousness is that it’s not able to differentiate between negative & positive things. To it, everything is positive. If you don’t believe it, try this: I want you NOT to imagine an elephant.

What will happen? You will still think about an elephant anyway.

So we’ll need to do the reverse. Focus to the positive things instead, and it shall be. When we’re focusing on becoming rich, we will be. If we’re focusing on living healthily, we will be. When we focus on loving, we will be loved. When we focus on giving, we will be receiving. Therefore we shall commit our focus to the positives : wealth, health, happiness, and so on.

Unfortunately, there’s one more obstacle - our environment. It tend to drive us to focus negatively. Starting from news on the media, TV, radio. How many positive news are we seeing daily? You can bet that the negative ones far outweigh the positive. So we’ll need to leave those.

Some of our friends also tend to be very negative. They’re only complaining, gossiping, while doing nothing about it. We’ll need to leave these people, and find new friends which will help our quest for success. Those who are positive, productive, and support each other.

I have been pulled to these negative focus myself many times without me realizing it. When this happened, one after another will continue to pop up. After a while, it will start to affect us physically. Our body will feel weak and tired, while we’re doing nothing. Too long, and it may fell ill.

When this happened, I usually realized something is wrong, and started to focus on positive things to do. My mind soon becomes clear, and I feel energized again to start doing what I should be doing.

So come on, let’s focus positively. Befriend positive people. Read, hear, see things positively. Change the negative into positive. Read books which discusses opportunities, innovation, inspiration, and drives us to the solution. The glass is half full, and there’s so much we can do about it.

Let’s change. Right now!

HP have long been fighting a battle against refill cartridges, especially in my part of the world. But I think they’re going too far in this case — abusing customers and damaging their credibility and brand in the process.

Recently I received spam in my inbox from the website www.hporiginalsupplies.com, in Indonesian, inviting me to the HP Original Supplies Zone, where it said I could receive information about original HP products. (The email said I had received it because I had participated in HP promotions before. The only way that they could have received that particular email address was through my official dealings with HP, when at no time do I recall giving permission to be spammed — which raises its own concerns.)

The email itself contained some links to HP.com but its images etc were mostly hosted on the hporiginalsupplies.com website. I could find no easy way of confirming this was a legit HP site — the website was registered by a local webhosting company called Master Web Network. So no way of telling there. And as you may have found if you clicked on the link, the home URL itself throws up only a blank page; only this one, for unsubscribing, seems to.

It took a while for the HP guys to figure it out too: They came back to me today to tell me it is legit. It’s a website for an “electronic direct mailer” or eDM for “the HP Original Rewards program in Indonesia…. HP Original Rewards is an HP loyalty program designed for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) for the purchase of original HP print cartridges.”

To their credit, HP acknowledge that the “eDM doesn’t comply with HP’s brand standards” and have promised to do something about it. But that’s not really what troubles me. What troubles me is this:

• Why is HP setting up website addresses with its brand name in without following the usual brand procedures — a way for consumers to check whether it is, indeed, an HP site through the usual methods.
• Why is HP sending out spam, sorry, eDMs? OK, this is just Indonesia, but hey, we’re still people, right? I don’t like being spammed at any hour of the day by anyone, but especially not by a big player who doesn’t even bother to identify themselves properly.
• What makes this worse is that we’re talking about HP trying to persuade people to buy non-fake, non-refilled disposables. But how would I know that isn’t a company pretending to sell legit goods? The malls and streets here are full of exactly that: HP boxes and containers full of goods that aren’t, or are no longer, legit HP products.

I can understand HP’s difficulties here. It must be hard to launch these kinds of promotions while keeping an eagle eye on agencies and promoters you may outsource the work to. But if you’re trying to get the message across to consumers that they should be buying your genuine products and not falling for fakes and knock-offs, you shouldn’t be spamming them from a domain that itself looks fake and dodgy.

In 1983, Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor, shook the world with his Multiple Intelligences theory in Frames of Mind, later in 1993 with Multiple Intelligences: New Horizon, and lately with Five Minds for the Future. He has re-shaped how we think about our potentials and how we see the world. He has shown us how we are multi-dimensional human beings and that we can tap into whatever we own inside to succeed.

Based on his works, many researchers have used it as the foundation of other fascinating theories, such as Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: Why It May Be More Important than IQ. One of the latest works that has been receiving numerous accolades is Karl Albrecht’s Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success. (Note: This Karl Albrecht is not the 87-year old #15 billionaire in 2007 according to Forbes, however. Same name, different person.)

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