Your New Year's Resolutions Suck and You'll Never Keep Them

It's January 1st again. So we're going to hear our friends and loved-ones make resolutions. We're going to see the social media "motivational" posts talking about their resolutions.  We've heard it all before (or read it on our friends' social media):

This year, I resolve to:

• lose weight
• be more positive
• make 'self-care' a priority
• save more money
• make more money
• cut out 'toxic' people
• eat more healthy
• drink less alcohol
• drink more water
• exercise more
• be more fit

There's nothing wrong with setting goals.  I admire and respect people who take the steps required to better themselves and their lives. The problem with resolutions is that most are not SMART.

They're not specific and extremely vague.  Success and progress are difficult to measure because most people don't give themselves the proper steps to take to get their goals.  Most resolutions makers can be so overly enthusiastic and motivated that the goals they set for themselves aren't achievable and realistic. Even if you measure your progress, you realize that you can't reach your lofty goal and you end up getting discouraged.

Of course, most people making resolutions don't give themselves a proper time frame to achieve and succeed. Meaning that because they don't give themselves deadlines, they end up simply meandering instead of achieving what they set out to do.

Aside from the quality of the resolutions, if you really thought that whatever you're resolving to do was important, you wouldn't be waiting for an arbitrary day of the year to start doing it.  You'd be working on that goal right now.  You would have made it a priority already and adjusted your habits accordingly.  You already would have been looking for ways to stay focused and disciplined to achieve your goals. You wouldn't be relying on "motivational" pictures and videos while going on social media to tell everyone that "New year, new me" will so totally happen in 2020.

A Quick and Easy Guide to Displaying Your Virtue

Becoming a good person who contributes to society is difficult, as outlined in a previous post.  It requires a change in mindset, a change in attitudes and acting according to rules.  Making that change can also mean that you will face consequences from friends, family and even the authorities. There will always be a cost to being a "good person".  It's actually far easier to LOOK like someone who's virtuous without actually making the sacrifices.  So, in order to gain social brownie points, you'll need to be effective at signaling your virtue to both your digital and analog social circles.

Here are a few easy tips on how to do that.

1) Be Offended and Outraged

You have a lot of options here. You can be offended about jokes. You can be outraged at the lack of racial/gender/religious/sexual orientation/physical size/disability/dietary choice "representation" in films and TV shows. You can complain about public figures' comments, or lack thereof, on a given controversial topic that they have no expertise on.  You can complain about the insensitivity of Halloween costumes.

Of course, even if you're not part of the group that you believe is being victimized by the offensive piece of content, you shouldn't be shy to show how offended and outraged you are.  After all, if you're not part of that underprivileged group, you can still be an "ally" to that group.  You can use your "position of privilege" to help the cause.

You know, because people that are different from you have no agency at all and will always require your help.

2) Take to the Streets and Protest
Historically, protesting on the streets has been a great way to get governments to take action.  This worked in the past when trying to get a dictator to step down from power or to have specific laws changed.  It's eventually worked for people wanting political prisoners to be freed or for people wanting to get an occupying power out of their country.

Of course, there's a cost for those types of protestors. They historically have been targets of violence, unlawful imprisonment and other human rights violations.  Think about the Civil Rights movement in the US in the 1960s, the Arab Spring protests in the early 2010s, the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, or more recently, the protests in Chile and Hong Kong as examples.

If you live in a free society and democracy in 2019, the types of causes similar to those mentioned above aren't found as easily.  Instead, you'll have to find ways to protest against problems and concepts like censorship of free speech, racism, police brutality, income inequality, sexism, anti-scientific thinking, climate change and human extinction.  It's not that these causes aren't worthy of protest. The problem is that these are complex, unspecific issues that require extremely complex solutions which can't be fixed by simply taking a walk.

For example, if you want to stop climate change caused by humans, you can try to get governments to commit to making investments in clean energy and reduce carbon emissions. To make that work, that means you need to create a mechanism to enforce their commitments.  And then those governments have to get trillion dollar industries to bend to their will.  Good luck fixing that with your march.

But hey, you did take to the streets for a cause.  You marched and blocked traffic to let people know that you're fighting against a concept or something that requires a multiple levels of complex thought to to reach a solution.  You didn't really affect change and put yourself in any danger of violent reprisals. Your protesting just made it LOOK like you did something. That should be enough. You just want to seem like you're "fighting" without actually incurring any real cost to your well-being.

3) "Think of the Children"

Saying that you're thinking of children and future generations as a reason for your position is great way to show your virtue.  This is true whether you're part of a highly religious group wanting to censor the latest blasphemous, popular film or whether you're part of an environmental activism group trying to fight climate change.

Even if you don't have kids or you don't really care about kids, you'll sound like someone who cares. All you need to do is to position your argument as being based on "protecting children" or ensuring that you are fighting to "leave a better world for the next generation".  This is a very easy way to demonstrate that you are unselfish and better than other people who can only think of theirs and their own families' current well-being.

It is true that children can be vulnerable to adults who can directly exploit them. This is not what I'm talking about.  To actually help expose and help prosecute a pedophile or a child pornography ring requires time, effort and could potentially put yourself in harm's way.  Studying and getting a job as a social worker who tries to take kids away from their abusive home is way more difficult than simply clicking "like" and "share" on a social media sob story.

It's much easier to say that you're thinking of the children when you petition school boards to censor what kind of books teachers should be teaching or when you demand that certain types of words need to be "policed" in schools.  That's an easier task that will make you seem like a good person who wants to help children.

4) Document everything on Social Media

Of course, you must make sure your efforts are visible to the world. If there are no pics (or videos), then it didn't happen.  This is where social media comes in.

Now I'll admit that in places where oppressive governments censor the press and the flow of information, social media has been useful at disseminating news of civic unrest.  The Arab Spring wouldn't have played out the way it did if it wasn't for Twitter, for example.

However, for those living in free, Western democracies, you can also use this tactic to make your actions seem more virtuous than they actually are.

Post selfies of you and your besties participating in protests to show that "you took part in this historic moment." That way, when someone else did the work of getting elected, changing laws and negotiating with multiple stakeholders to effect real-life political and social change, you can point to your Instagram pic and take credit because you skipped out on a job you don't like that day to take a walk.

Don't be shy to post on public figures' social media accounts to call them out on their non-woke behaviours and opinions. You can "call them out" if they're not living up to the arbitrary moral standards of the day.

Even if these public figures are too busy doing their jobs and have outsourced their social media to their marketing and PR teams, it's ok. You'll get more views on your posts by tagging these people than just posting something yourself. And that means more people can potentially see how morally superior you are.

Final Thoughts
It's very difficult to actually be a good person.  In fact, it's almost impossible if you consider all the unintended consequences of your choices and actions.  Creating real social change is incredibly difficult. It's much easier to make people THINK that you are virtuous.  It's easier to adopt a strong opinion on a subject and determine that one side is perfectly good and the other is evidently evil without examining the nuances.

Whether it's allying yourself with an "oppressed" group or using future generations as the "beneficiaries" of your actions, the idea is to make sure that the most amount of people see that you're being morally superior.  With that, you can reap the benefits of being a good person without having to face the difficult consequences of choosing morally acceptable behaviour.

The (Potential) Benefits of Getting Bullied

For a brief time when I was about 10 or 11 years old, I got bullied. On a daily basis, a much larger kid, along with a couple of his buddies, threatened to beat me up if I didn't give him money.  Being a kid from a recently immigrated, not-very-well-off family, I didn't actually have any money to give him.  The experience induced a lot of anxiety whenever I had to go to school and I eventually told my parents.

Even before I got bullied, my parents somewhat prepared me and told me to expect to meet a-holes in the world who will eventually bully me.  It wasn't to scare me.  It was to prepare me so that I'm not surprised when it happens. They told me that when it happens, to stand my ground and not let any bullies push me around. I should try to talk the bully out of doing what he's doing, and if absolutely necessary, not be afraid to throw hands and fight back.

My parents never intervened. They never called my school or the bully's parents.  Eventually, after weeks of not acquiescing to my bully's threats and just standing up to him by saying no, the bullying stopped.  We thankfully never came to blows.  I think I eventually gained his respect because he saw I wasn't backing down from him. We never really became good friends, but everything was smooth sailing and he and his friends eventually left me alone.

...........................................................

Today, with the best of intentions, schools have anti-bullying programs.  Kids are encouraged to immediately report bullying behaviour (be it physical, verbal or online) to a teacher or an adult.  Some schools have zero tolerance policies on bullying and fighting.  While the spirit behind these rules are commendable, there are some weird arguments that can be made to say that in certain situations, bullying can have some positive effects on kids.

Bullying experiences acts as fuel for success
How many stories of accomplished people in all walks of life have started by being subjected to bullying?

At some point, a lot of great art has been produced in reaction to people being oppressed, being bullied and being put in adverse situations.  Many comedians will tell you that one of the reasons they learned to make people laugh was because they didn't want to get picked on.  Many authors have taken the pain they felt from bullying and put that into creating great works of literature.  The field of acting is filled with people who are constantly seeking validation from other people, especially from "the cool kids" who excluded them when they were younger.

Look into the biographies of some of the wealthiest and most successful professional athletes (especially professional fighters).  You'll see that part of the reason they started their sport was because they were bullied.

Former two-division UFC champion Georges St-Pierre has openly shared that being bullied at school is what started him in martial arts.

Bullying can teach kids conflict resolution skills
With zero-tolerance bullying policies, kids are told to immediately report any bullying to teachers and their parents.  On the surface, this sounds good.  Eventually, if things get bad, you will want an adult to intervene and stop the bullying behaviour.

Here's my problem with it.  If kids who are getting bullied decide to immediately go to an adult as directed, they won't necessarily learn how to resolve the conflict with bullies on their own.  Instead, they will learn that the first thing they need to do when there's a conflict is to look for an authority figure to defend them.

So what happens when these kids grow up to be adults?  What if they have an "intimidating" neighbour who's playing music too loudly at night?  Will they be more likely to call the landlord or the cops immediately to complain?  Or will they talk to the neighbour first and nicely ask to turn the music down?

What if it's just a co-worker being a bit rude or inappropriate in the office?  An adult who as a kid learned to go to an authority figure will immediately go to their boss or to HR instead of figuring out a way to confront the office bully in a way that will help make the bullying stop while trying to keep the working relationship healthy.

Bullying can help kids learn social skills
One factor (though not the only one) that causes kids to get bullied seems to be the fact that they're not as socially adept as their peers.  I'd hate to sound like a "victim-blamer", but most of the time, the kids that get bullied are the ones who haven't yet developed the social skills needed to make friends, making them easy targets for bullies.

This is where parental preparation can be helpful. Teaching kids to be friendly, interested, curious and unafraid of rejection will help them talk to other kids. That will help them start conversations, find common ground and make friends more easily. Building social skills early will prevent a kid from getting bullied.

On a large scale, a lot of the school programs have learned this is the case and have been slowly implementing social skill building workshops for kids.  The great thing about this is that it won't just prevent bullying but will also develop adults with better social skills in the future.

Final Thoughts

Now, I'm not an advocate of bullying.  It's a terrible experience that I wouldn't like any kid to feel.  In fact, the online bullying of today makes it so much more of a difficult experience because it's no longer confined to a specific time and place. It can now happen to anyone 24x7 with technology and social media. In many cases, extreme bullying has sadly led to suicides. In that sense bullying is toxic.

However, like with any poison, it's all in the dosage.  Bullying can provide the benefits mentioned above, but it has to be the right amount and the right intensity.  My thought is that it should be like weight training.  If you start with bullying that's too much for the kid to handle, they will simply be crushed by the psychological and physical trauma. This is where online bullying can be a problem because the bullying doesn't end when the kid leaves the school.

With just the right amount, paired with proper parental preparation and management of expectations, bullying can help a kid strengthen their minds, learn to deal with conflicts, with people in general, and maybe even motivate them to succeed in the future.  The difficult part is finding the right balance that will build someone up instead of destroying them.

5 Tips to Help You Win an Election

It's election season again in Canada. It can be fun to see what strategies each political party leader is using to win over their voters.  Some are working better than others, but if I ever become a politician and decide to run for office, here's what I would do to win.

Tip # 1: Don't pretend to be "perfect"
One of the problems with politicians is that they like to project an image of a leader that's above the common folk, that their values and thoughts are superior.  They want to show themselves as the perfect candidate, wearing the perfect clothes, the perfect family and always saying the perfect slogans, participating at the "right" events. So guess what happens when the dirt comes out that goes against that perfect image?  They immediately lose credibility.

What's actually better is to be somewhat less polished. Look at some of the democratically-elected world leaders who gained traction in the past few years and see how less-than-perfect their public images have been.

If you have any flaws as a human being (which we all do), don't be afraid to get called out on it.  Don't be afraid to laugh at yourself when you make a mistake.  Which brings me to my next point...

Tip # 2: Take ownership of your past
If I were running for office, I would make sure to prevent any potential scandals that could derail my campaign by being upfront at the beginning.  I will start by immediately publicly admitting past mistakes.  At the very beginning of the campaign, I'll post pictures of myself getting drunk and/or high on social media, videos of me making borderline racist jokes, and controversial blog posts or op-ed pieces that I may have written.

What you're doing is getting all the dirt out of the way as soon as possible.  You're telling the voters: "Yes, I'm human.  Yes, I've made mistakes in the past as you can see. I apologize if I hurt people before with the foolish behaviours of my youth.  I've changed since then.  I've evolved.  I've learned, I'm now wiser and ready to be your leader."

You can apologize if you want, but it's usually easier to do it once and then move on.  Yes, even if you are Canadian.  Sure it will hit the "news cycle" and it might hurt your numbers at first. But after a couple of weeks, when a new scandal, natural disaster, celebrity sex tape or a new provocative piece of "news" hits, most people would have forgotten your admitted mistakes and they won't affect your results come election time.

The idea is to control the narrative and not give your opponents the chance to portray you the way they want. This move also gives you the image of being a "flawed human" who can be a good leader because you have "proven" that you can learn from your mistakes.  You become more relatable.  You'll also be seen as transparent and not hiding anything.

So what's the best way to control your narrative?

Tip # 3: Use "new media" more than (if not as much as) "traditional media"
The problem with traditional media like TV, radio and other ads is that you have to make sure that you can get your views, your personality and why your opponent is wrong in very short, 15 to 30 second sound bites. Now you have to depend on your voters to pay attention and put together all the different sound bites so they can get an idea of what you're trying to communicate before they can vote.

You also have to depend on the goofy political debate formats where nobody really answers questions.  Instead everyone's trying to cram their talking points in where it seems appropriate. Worst of all are the political ads.  They're expensive to produce, it's expensive to buy time and most people probably don't think they're credible at all.

The better strategy is using new media, like YouTube, social media sites and even podcasts.  You have full control over what you say on a YouTube video.  You won't get interrupted by an interviewer because they need to get small sound bite before going to a laundry detergent commercial.  You'll be able to talk as long or as little as you want to explain your positions and policies.  You can respond more clearly to criticisms and you can interact almost instantaneously with your constituents from any where in the country.

Using certain social media sites, you can show the "behind-the-scenes" of your campaign. Or how human and relatable you are.  You just have to be careful to not be too perfect with your posts, because it's very easy to see when someone's pretending to be authentic.

What's even better is that you're making it easier for traditional journalists to get the information they need from your campaign because it's all accessible.  You get to be top-of-mind.  And of course, all this is relatively cheap when compared to buying ad space or paying PR firms to get you on TV and radio shows with dwindling audiences.  All you need is good lighting, an intern holding a smartphone and your YouTube and social media accounts.  If you provide entertaining, but politically relevant content, you're good to go.

Tip # 4: Find the quiet majority's opinion
It's quite easy for opinions to be swayed by what the media likes to highlight as "important issues" of the day.  The common cliché is that the traditional mainstream media will normally highlight the loud, minority opinion because they can sometimes be so extreme (on both the left and the right side of the political spectrum), that it gets more ratings, views and clicks.

If you truly want to get elected, you might want to actually talk to your constituents instead of watching the news media's version of what the constituents want.  Most of the time, you'll find that a lot of "hot-button" issues are really non-issues to the common voter, and a lot of issues that are being ignored by the media are really the most important ones to the electorate.

Once you find the true pain points of your voters, the easier it will be to come to them with a solution that only you can provide.

Tip # 5: Destroy your opponents' credibility
The most interesting thing about elections to me has always been the marketing problem that each candidate faces.  They are trying to position themselves to appear a certain way to voters, while at the same time trying to position their opponents in a very negative way.  If you want to make your opponent look bad, there's no point in lying or spreading misinformation about their positions.  All you need to do is to find a way to diminish their credibility.  The simplest way to do that is by making them look like hypocrites.

This will work the best because most candidates are still stuck in the past and haven't followed Steps 1 and 2 above.  In all likelihood, most politicians are hiding some kind of secret that will conflict with their proposed policies.  For example, if your opponent is championing diversity, equality and is depicting themselves as the "inclusively woke" candidate, finding old pictures of them wearing a racist Halloween costume or recordings of them going on drunken, anti-Semitic rants can be very damaging.  If your opponent is the pro-family values candidate, finding old videos of them smoking crack cocaine while partying with sex workers is not going to be good for their image.  You get the point.

Whether or not their target voters agree with their behaviour isn't the issue.  It's the fact that their proposed policies compared to their past behaviours will make them look like hypocrites that will make them less credible.

Now it goes without saying that when your people find the dirt, you simply have them use anonymous social media accounts and pretend to be "confidential whistleblowers" to leak this information.

Finally, be wise about the timing of your leaks.  You don't want to release these too early.  What you want to do is strategically leak these as soon your opponents' numbers are reaching a peak in the polls.  The damaging information, will cause those numbers to go down and put the opposition on the defensive.  As soon as they get their numbers back up again, that's when you release another piece of damaging information to put them back on the defensive again.  Just hope that you have enough dirt so you can repeat the process over and over throughout the duration of the campaign.

So that's it.  Five simple tips that any political candidate needs to follow in this era.  If you look closely, you'll notice that more and more politicians will begin using these strategies in the future.

How to Gain More Influence on Social Media Through Annoying Behaviour

We've all used social media.  The currency on all these sites are followers, clicks, views, likes, shares, retweets and number of comments.  If you have nothing of value to share on your social media, the best way to get these is by being annoying.

1) Post vague status updates (mainly on Facebook) about how you're feeling bad or sad or annoyed, etc, without explaining exactly what happened.  This is a great way to "get attention" and "concerned" comments asking if you're doing ok.  If you're a complete narcissist, it's an excellent way to fish for compliments from well-meaning people who want you to stop feeling bad about yourself.  Also, public comments showing concern will also make these well wishers look sympathetic to other people so they'll have incentive to be nice to you.

2) Write a self-righteous, virtue-signaling, social/economic/political/religious rant complaining about white people, cis-gender males, non-LGBTQ+ males, people with money, people who aren't vegan and basically people who won't respond because they're too busy running the world.  You will get social brownie points from the echo-chamber of people who think like you. The more sweepingly general and having the least amount of nuance in your post, the more angry reactions you'll get.  If you're doing this on Facebook, the algorithm will ultimately move your post to the top of the news feed because it's keeping eyeballs on the site / application. Bonus points if you can somehow claim to be a victim of whatever group of people you're railing against.

3) Repeat point 2 on Twitter.  Because of the character limit on Twitter, you can write your angry rant as multiple posts, numbering them.

4) The off-shoot of points 2 and 3 would be to write the virtue-signaling, self-righteous post against the people on the opposite end of the political spectrum.  You'll get just as much of a response from the other side.  You'll even get strong reactions from people who disagree with you.  Again, the social media platforms' algorithms will identify the post as being engaging and will therefore give it more views. If you go this route though, you have to be careful because the rant can end up being borderline racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/xenophobic.  The platforms might flag you for "violating their terms of service". Of course, if that happens, you can use that to further strengthen your following by playing victim.  You can easily say that you're being censored and your right to freedom of speech is being violated.

5) "Humble-bragging".  In case you didn't know what that is, it's a bragging post about an being in a great event or being in a pic with someone famous disguised as being "blessed" or "grateful" or of course, "humbling".  A great example is a someone going to a TED talk, taking a selfie with one of the famous speakers and then posting it with a vapid quote talking about how lucky they are to be there.  We get it: you were able to gain access to an exclusive event and rubbed shoulders with some very influential people. You don't want to seem like you're showing off on your LinkedIn profile, so you write it with very obviously fake humility.

6) Be "on vacation" all year round. Whenever someone goes on vacation, they normally take their vacation pics and either post them all at once when they get back or they post everything on the day that they take the pics.  Instead of doing that, I suggest banking your best vacation photos and then post a different one or two daily on Instagram and Facebook.  Not only does this make you look like a well-traveled individual, it's also very attractive to people who are stuck in depressing office jobs, or who have to take long commutes on public transportation. This is especially true during the winter.  Great travel pics will get a bunch of likes especially if you start adding semi-motivational, humble-bragging quotes and hashtags.  Bonus points if you're a relatively attractive woman who can pose in a bikini on a sunny, white sand beach.

These are just a couple of tips that you can use if you're trying to build a social media following.  Get a critical mass of likes and followers and you can finally monetize your social media accounts by selling fit teas and supplements.