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The Walking Boom

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Today’s post comes from idea maker and marketing guru Spin Williams, who is always in residence at the Meeting That Never Ends.

You heard it here first – walking is coming back!

We were delighted to read the results of this  latest study by some Swedish people  about how good it is for your mind and body when you get up from your desk and go out for a thirty minute walk at lunchtime.

This was another case of the Swedes verifying common sense healthy things that really make a difference in your life – they’re so predictable! Maybe that’s because they already do these things – so taking the walk is one kind of workout and then bragging about it is a separate and equally strenuous exercise in self congratulations – it’s Doubly Aerobic!

Here at the Meeting That Never Ends, we endorse the concept but we’re far too busy to take a lunchtime walk. We stay at our desks – otherwise how would we ever catch up on the tasks we’re supposed to be doing over the lunch hour? Time is money! Maybe those Scandinavian countries can afford a government-mandated break for thin crisp breads and organic cheeses, but in America, we work!

The study says a walk will improve your mood an clear your mind, as if that’s a good thing.

What they don’t realize is this – the American workplace thrives on bitterness and resentment fed by physical inactivity. We became a world power through focused decision-making by a long string of cloudy-minded, angry jerks who would have come up with something so much more civilized and European if they’d only stood up for a while and moved around! That’s why we’re number one – a heady cocktail of spite and willful ignorance!

But all of us at the meeting agreed – there’s no resisting the power of group-think. That’s why we decided to try to get out in front of this walking-at-lunch trend.

The best new product idea to come out of the meeting is a strap-on human feedbag with a built-in pedometer, so you can count your steps and count your calories at the same time! Test name – Active Buffet! We’ll take this to market at about the same time Apple comes out with its new iWatch!

No time to waste. Grasp opportunity!

Yours in marketing,
Spin

Where’s your favorite place to take a walk?

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Business

Farmstead By The Sea

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Back in the day, my brother would lament that we weren’t born into a money-smart family.

It’s not that our parents were financially reckless – quite the contrary. They were careful and conservative and as a result we were well taken care of all the while we were growing up.

But we were not marinating in entrepreneur sauce.

My brother imagined that under different circumstances, we might have absorbed some business smarts from a line of savvy patriarchs who could have shared their collected wisdom regarding investments, promoted the expectation that fortunes would be made, and somehow transmitted to us a knack for being in the right place at the right time with the right connections to make a killing on emerging market trends.

Whenever he offered up some fresh regret over this unfulfilled scenario, I agreed in order to avoid an argument. But secretly I was glad I hadn’t turned out to be that guy who is always counting the money and scanning the horizon for some way to gain an advantage over everyone else. Life is too short.

But now with new evidence seeming to emerge every day that climate change will cause a rise in the sea level coupled with the news that humans are living longer than ever and the first person destined to reach age 150 is already breathing air on the planet today, I’m wondering if life will ultimately be too long.

And in my most ambitious moments I’m thinking maybe I should fire up my latent market-cornering urges and invest in future beachfront property located considerably back from the shore. Some observers believe it’s not too late to alter your financial strategy to make the best of a global environment that will be water-rich and ice cap-poor. Apparently there’s opportunity there because the market hasn’t adjusted yet for a coming coastal calamity.

In other words, rich people are still buying expensive places with water views. According to the Forbes article linked above, “… billionaires like Larry Ellison are purchasing beachfront property rather aggressively.”

In a world where everyone accepted that climate change is really real, the advantage-takers of Wall Street would be buying farmland, life jackets and pontoons. They’d be crunching the numbers to locate the new waterfront building a Riviera in Ohio. With so much wealth at stake, why don’t they act quickly and aggressively on the conclusions of an overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists?

Unless being money smart is not exactly the same thing as being really smart.

What’s the best financial advice you didn’t follow?

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