Big Ideas

• Tens of thousands are now involved with the Occupy Wall Street Protests worldwide
• Web based platforms facilitate the coordination of mass gatherings and protests around the world
• With online collaboration tools, a single leader or clear plan are not required.

You have undoubtedly heard about the Occupy Wall Street protests that have been growing around the world. The short news snippets don’t really capture the magnitude of the movement. Protests are being scheduled in dozens of cities around the world and recently the Almalgamated Transit Union, with 190,000 members has given its support. This is a world wide phenomenon and it is growing quickly.

How Occupy Wall Street Started

The birth of the movement was a post on the Adbusters website on July 13th. Here is a small quote from that first call to action,

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

The home page of OccupyWallSt.org describes the movement as,

Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

Occupy Wall Street to Occupy the World

Another website, OccupyTogether, has since been created to coordinate some of the scheduled protests and other activities in dozens of cities around the world.

On Oct. 4th, the date of this post, there were more than 39,000 followers for the @OccupyWallSt Twitter account, with many thousands more for city focused protests around the world. (@OccupyChicago – 7000, @OccupyLA – 5000, @Occupy_Boston – 3500, @OccupyToronto – 1600, @OccupyTokyo – 400, with many more for every major city on the planet.)

Lessons in Collaboration

We have learned from the middle east uprisings this spring that leaderless movements have the power to topple governments and really change the world.  Occupy Wall Street is no different. There is no central organization or leader directing the movement,  participants are connecting and coordinating with widely available web based platforms . There are groups like MoveOn.org, that are trying to co-opt the protests, but for the most part, it is a largely ego-less and egalitarian process. Even the demands of OccupyWallStreet.org have been community driven.

The Future of Collaboration

Whether you support the protests or not, there are many principles here to learn from. With the internet, and social media in particular, ordinary citizens can coordinate and mobilize on a large scale. Time, money and central leadership are no longer necessary for massive collaboration.

Consider some of these implications.

• Motivating and involving a dispersed volunteer effort is starkly different than an employer – employee relationship. Try motivating people to take action without paying them.
• A vision to do good in the world is far more powerful than any monetary reward. Is your company making the world a better place?
• Large groups of people can be mobilized without central control or authority. What could your employees accomplish if given the freedom?
• Democratic and egalitarian processes can formulate a unified vision. Direction doesn’t have to come from the boss. Give your employees the information and freedom to direct their own future.
• Self-interests and ego gratification only serve to derail the process. Let the cause or vision be the focus, not a rock star executive.

Action Items

• For your next project, try an egalitarian process where there is no leader and decisions must be made democratically.
• Find a meaningful unifying vision for the project, and get out of the way.
• Put trust in the process. You will not always get your way, but continued involvement by motivated participants is far more valuable than being in control.
• If your company is not making the world a better place, than maybe it is time to adjust your priorities.

Links
OccupyWallSt.org
OccupyTogether.org
General Assembly for Occupy Wall Street
Reddit -  Occupy Wall Street

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Big Ideas:

• We get more satisfaction when we exert more effort.
• Obesity may be linked to how easy it has become to eat high calorie foods.

Photo by Kappa Wayfarer

What would bring more personal satisfaction to you, being dropped on the top of Mount Everest by a helicopter or actually climbing the entire mountain and reaching it on your own after days of effort?

How about running a full marathon of more than 42 kilometers versus secretly taking a taxing and just running across the finish line?

I think it is safe to say, that most of us understand the value of effort and sacrifice in our accomplishments. We tend to under-appreciate the things we get easily.

The Ikea Effect

One description of this psychological bias is termed the Ikea Effect. Wired Magazine author Jonah Lehrer writes about the personal satisfaction from assembling our own furniture,

Although the furniture might look like crap — I always have a few leftover screws — the flimsy assembly of molded plywood feels like a masterpiece.

Lehrer goes on to write about experiments that show that mice have a preference for food they have to work harder for. It turns out humans are not so different. With the advance of pre-prepared meals and fast food, it has become very easy to get a high caloric intake.

Food stops being something we make and create — it doesn’t require very many lever presses, so to speak — and becomes something we simply ingest. Eating just gets easier. And then we get fatter.

But maybe we’re not just consuming more calories because they’re available at such a low cost. Maybe we’re also consuming more calories because each calorie gives us less pleasure. The lesson of those lever-pressing mice, after all, is that when we don’t work for our food — when it only requires a single press, or a few whirls of the microwave — it tastes much less delicious.

Relationships seem stronger the harder you had to work to make them successful. You appreciate anything you make yourself more highly than that which you buy. Hard work and sacrifice make final accomplishments that much more rewarding. In our convenience focused lives, perhaps we can increase our personal satisfaction by taking the more arduous route.

Action Items

• Instead of complaining about traffic of your daily commute, how about cycling to work so you get exercise and a sense of accomplishment everyday.
• Grow your own herbs and use them in the preparation of your own meals. Nothing will be as healthy or delicious.
• Stop looking for shortcuts in work and life. There is no substitute for hard work and focused effort.

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Big Ideas

• Downsizing the size of your home can save you money and time.
• It is likely that you could live in 1/4 of the space you currently do.
• Smaller designs can still be beautiful.

Average home sizes in the U.S. have increased from 983 square feet in 1950, to 2,430 square feet in 2006, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Over that same period, the average number of people per household has declined from 3.37 to 2.57. (US Census) With record high foreclosures in the U.S. in recent years, perhaps Americans in particular have been living in too large, for too long?

Trading up to a bigger house is expensive. There are reality fees on the new and old home, moving costs, new furniture. Then the monthly costs of a larger mortgage, higher energy costs, more cleaning and maintenance, larger yards and expensive entertainment equipment. Keeping up with the Jones’s is expensive.

How small of a house could you downsize to?

Here is a video of an 89 square house, that could be bought ready made for $46,000. Now this is extreme and not feasible for most, but it is a good starting point for consideration.

Smaller houses don’t have to be ugly either. Check out these designer micro-houses in Japan.

The best part of downsizing your lifestyle is that you purchase much less of everything. It is hard to buy new things if you don’t have room to store them.

My Experiences in Japan

I lived in Japan for many years in apartments and houses of all sizes from a one room apartment to a 4 bedroom house. One thing I can attest, is that the number of possessions I owned increased relative to the amount of space I had to store it. Now that I have sold most of my possessions and live location independent, I have very little need to buy any physical goods.

The End of Shopping

The money savings are significant, but more importantly, I am no longer a shopper. I don’t have any interest or need to buy anything other than food. That is a huge mental release. So much of our lives are spent thinking about things. We are jealous when our peers buy a car nicer than ours. We then spend time shopping for a new car or at least thinking about it. If we buy a new car, we spend more time cleaning it. We worry about it getting scratched. We pay more for insurance because it a more expensive vehicle. Maybe we worry that we paid too much or made the wrong choice. When newer models start coming out, we feel that our ‘old’ car is no longer adequate and really regret our decision. Then the process starts all over again.

Our possessions really do own us.

Of course, living smaller also means you will be using much less energy to heat and cool your home. Not only is it good for your wallet, it is also good for the planet.

Action Items

• Don’t up-size your house or apartment. The money you save in real estate fees, a higher mortgage and moving costs can easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of your home.
• Can you move to a smaller home? You might even find some prime real estate for cheap if you can squeeze into less land area.
• How much better would your life be if you spent 10% or 20% less per month. I cut my living expenses by more than half, so it is definitely possible.
• Think about how much of your free time is dedicated to the stuff you own. What else could you do with that time?

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Here is a fascinating video by the BBC called The Century of the Self. It is about public relations master and nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays. Bernays was instrumental in creating our consumerism culture, invented PR, advised governments and was a key influence on the propaganda of Nazi Germany.

Edward Bernays took Freud’s ideas about the primitive aggressive and sexual forces driving people and used them to manipulate the masses.

He showed American corporations, for the first time, how they could make people want things they didn’t need, by linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Out of this would come a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying people’s inner selfish desires, one made them happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate our world today.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are some high-lights of the video.

• Sold World War I to Americans.
• ‘Propaganda’ was the word used by Nazis so Bernay re-named it as Public Relations.
• He persuaded women to smoke by branding them as ‘torches of freedom’ and linking smoking to the suffrage movement.
• Helped link products and services to emotions and feelings and how people wanted to be seen by others. It was a shift from purchases based on needs to desires.
• Created the idea of cars as symbols of male sexuality.
• Started the shift from the notion of active citizens to passive consumers.
• Helped popularize President Coolidge by linking him to movie stars.
• Popularized Freud’s ideas in the US.
• Key influence to  Joseph Goebbel, the Nazi propagandist.
• Created the vision that democracy was only possible in a free-market capitalist society in the 1939 New York World Fair.

Here is a link to a free PDF version of  Edward Bernay’s 1928 book, Propaganda. (You may have to right click and save as to download to a PC.)

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