Normal people take vacations…

We use our “downtime” to take on select member projects that tickle our interest.

Below are a few that we thought might tickle you…

This first one is a promotional video produced and directed by the “Big Guy” himself.

It was produced for CounterThink Tank Inner-circle Member, Anthony P. Colandro “Gun Trainer to the Stars” who operates Gun For Hire Training Academy, just across the river from Midtown Manhattan  here in the United States…

Making this video was a real “blast” (sorry)

This next video is a trailer for an upcoming interview with Counterthink Legacy Member, Art Williams, Founder of A.L. Williams Corporation It was shot on location in Highlands North Carolina (at a beautiful resort that Art owns).

And the one below we did as a spoof for the “Big Guy”…  Just for fun.

The problem is that He loved it!  And now he plans on using it as his new promotional video to introduce him at live events–  How Crazy is that?  It’s so Typical Berardi…

It’s a fact: most decisions are based on bias.

A person will be usually inclined to believe something that has a positive emotional effect— that makes him feel good, or supports his pre-conceived beliefs— even if there is strong evidence to the contrary.  Likewise, a person may be reluctant to accept hard facts that are unpleasant, or may cause him mental suffering. Neuroscientists call this trait emotional bias.  And it results in our inability to think straight and make good decisions.

Sure. Many of us would like to think otherwise—that we’re exceptions to the rule, that our decisions are rooted in logic rather than emotion.  But the truth is, what we’re typically doing is justifying our emotional decisions, with logical afterthought. In other words, we make an emotional decision then use whatever logic we can dredge up to back up that decision.

Emotional bias is a part of the human condition, and it becomes nearly intractable in times of extreme stress and in the face of monumental disasters— like the one we’re witnessing in Haiti.

The problem with emotionally biased decisions is they cause us to do things that are exactly opposite of what we should be doing—often exacerbating the problem rather than solving it.

In the days following the earthquake, those involved in relief efforts – including Brazilian peacekeepers and Haitian government officials, spent way too much time dealing with emotionally driven issues rather than with logical ones.

The emotional impact of seeing bodies littering the streets and stacked high like cordwood can be devastatingly traumatizing.   But contrary to what one might believe, the bodies of the dead pose no appreciable health risk to the living.  Yet in situations like these, emotions rule decisions.  The result?  Precious resources and manpower that should be used in saving lives, tend instead, to be diverted to tending to the dead.   And such is the reality in Haiti.

Despite lessons learned from previous humanitarian disasters, and in direct opposition to advice given by the World Health Organization and other public health experts— who urged relief teams to focus on saving lives and on providing food, clean water, shelter, sanitary toilet facilities and medical assistance— relief workers on the ground instinctively and predictably yielded to human emotion and diverted a precious percentage of their limited resources and manpower to burying the dead. According to Carol Joseph, a government minister, the authorities have already buried 70,000 bodies in mass graves, and plan on continuing their efforts.

The real public health dangers in Haiti, at this time, are not the mounting bodies. The real risks come from cholera, malaria, dengue fever, hepatitis, dysentery, and even from common diarrhea (the second most common cause of infant deaths worldwide), as well as respiratory infections exacerbated by overcrowding.

So far, epidemiological surveillance along the border with the Dominican Republic, where thousands of people have fled, has not yet shown an increase in infectious disease, but without some straightforward CounterThinking and a little logical intervention, that’s sure to change.

To save the lives of survivors, rescue workers need to concentrate their actions and resources on the treatment of trauma, and expand access to surgical care, safe water, antibiotics to treat infections, and simple painkillers to ease the suffering of the injured. And then they have to try to circumvent future problems by giving mass immunizations for infections such as tetanus.

CounterThink often demands doing the unthinkable.  In this case, the unthinkable would be to ignore the growing mountains of human corpses and move on as if they weren’t there.  Here, CounterThink, means going against one’s immediate gut reaction; taking urgent, logical and simple steps to help the living, not tend to the dead—as distasteful, and traumatic, and barbaric as that may seem.  That’s exactly what should happen, but history tells us, that’s exactly what will not.

And more will die so others might feel good.

CounterThink is about sticking your head above the crowd—about getting recognized above all others.  Most products and businesses are about nothing. They blend in. Great businesses and products are about something. They stand for something, promote something, strive for something—other than simply making another sale.

In the cluttered, white bread world of sandwich shops Subway became about weight loss—using a testimonial storyline about Jared Fogle.

As a student at Indiana University, Jared Fogel weighed in at 425 pounds.  In March of 1998 he began a novel weight loss plan of his own design.  The plan consisted of skipping breakfast, eating a 6-inch Subway turkey sub—sans the mayo and cheese—along with baked chips and a diet Coke for lunch and a 12-inch veggie sub (again, no cheese or mayo) with a diet coke for dinner.

Fogel lost 94 pounds in the first three months and after adding exercise, he dropped another 245 in the next year.

In April of 1999 the university’s newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student, did a story on his remarkable weight loss   The story, which was later picked up by the Associated Press and Men’s Health magazine, caught the attention of some sharp marketers at Subway, who approached Fogel to screen test as a pitchman for the brand.  The initial television commercial featuring Fogel rolled out in the Midwest and indeed struck a cord with consumers.  Voila. Subway pokes its head out from the crowd and captures the attention of a new market segment.

More recently Post, makers of Shredded Wheat cereal launched a truly innovative campaign, against of all things, innovation.  The TV, print and electronic media campaign, targeting technophobes and the growing segment of progress-resistant geezers and boomers, features fictional character, Frank Druffel, as spokesman.  Duffel’s pitch: “We put the NO in innovation.”

The Shredded Wheat campaign is CounterThink in action.  The strategy they use—leading with the homely truth, and turning a negative into a positive— is a tactic made famous by my friend Joe Sugarman, and used brilliantly by the marketers at Post.  And while the bulk of breakfast cereal marketers trip over one another to dominate to the kids, teens, tweens and twenty-something markets, Post is heading in the opposite direction—targeting the somewhat slower-moving, fiber-challenged, AARP-ers (which by the way, happens to be the fastest-growing market segment with the greatest amount of disposable cash).

CounterThinking marketers turn their products, services and companies into something of significance—they are about something.  But they are not about just any ol’ damn thing.

Subway turned sub sandwiches (which have been historically thought of as a favorite nosh of the chronically obese) into weight loss.  And Post joined in on the conversation that’s going on inside every technophobe’s head by taking potshots at innovation.   These strategies are not the same as when Cheerios tried to position itself as the self-proclaimed poster child of the “heart smart” movement, or when Quiznos tried to claim that true sandwich innovation could be found under a toaster.

In the case of Cheerios, General Mills drastically misunderstood the principles of CounterThink when they tried to turn cereal (which those of us who grew up in the post-60’s, toy-in-the-bottom-of-the-box era used to think of as something fun) into life insurance (which ain’t much fun at all).  Quiznos didn’t do much better.  A toasted sandwich is, well… a toasted sandwich. Not different enough to poke its head above the crowd.

CounterThink is not just different—it’s radically different, like transplanting mismatching, incompatible hearts into babies—a groundbreaking, lifesaving practice pioneered by CounterThinker, Dr. Lori West, that is totally revolutionizing the thinking in transplant medicine, or treating patients with drugs that initially make them sicker in order to eventually make them well—a strategy termed Paradoxical Pharmacology by CounterThinker, Dr. Richard Bond, of the University of Houston, or like the counterintuitive, controversial work of British traffic safety engineer Ben Hamilton Baillie who is making traffic intersections much, much safer by making them very, very dangerous.

All of these amazing CounterThinkers are inner-circle members of the CounterThink Tank and living examples of why getting on the CounterThink Tank membership waiting list should be the top item on your priority list.

We anticipate our general membership will re-open soon after the first of the year.

If you’re serious about learning the principles of CounterThink and networking with other great CounterThinkers like yourself from all over the world… get on the list!

Send me an email, with “membership wait-list” in the subject line, and we’ll let you know when spots become available.

In my last CounterThink marketing post we looked at defining your market—as in: Who is your market?

We saw how mainstream thinking causes us to view our market way too narrowly, focusing on the decision maker— the actual consumer of our products and services. As a result, we spend too much of our time, energy and money trying to reach that decision maker.

I showed you how, CounterThinker Ray Kroc, through his clown of a mascot, built a hamburger empire by reaching a whole new group of people—those who may not have had the money or ability to buy what he was selling, but had the power to influence the buying decision of the people who did.

This week, as we further examine how CounterThink affects marketing, I want to change your thinking about the term “marketing” itself.

How do you define Marketing? Do you think about marketing as being simply a function of sales and advertising? Do you think of it more creatively? More Expansively? How you define marketing can have a dramatic impact on how well your business is doing.

Walt Disney, another great CounterThinker, looked at picking up litter, scraping chewing gum off of sidewalks and the much-talked-about nightly routine of repainting all the fenceposts in the park, not as a function of maintenance, but as a function of marketing.

Imagine a father of three, sitting on the edge of the bed in his hotel room picking melted chewing gum out of the crevices of his favorite pair of sneakers with a bent coat hanger, after having just spent a long, exhausting day and 700 bucks— on admission, food, snacks, drinks, ice cream and souvenirs. I don’t care how much fun the family had that day, the last thing that guy’s going to remember about the happiest place on earth before he lays his weary, overspent head on the pillow is that damn chewing gum.

Disney knew that the physical appearance of an establishment plays an important psychological role in the customer’s perception of the overall experience. And Ray Kroc felt the same way.

The success architect of the Mc Donald’s empire once described consistency and clean restrooms as “marketing.” Although, during my last visit to the Golden Arches, it became glaringly apparent that Kroc’s latter concept might not have been fully grasped by his successors.

Look, I don’t care what Richard Carlson’s goofy book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff,” says. As far as I’m concerned, not sweating the small stuff is great advice for the Masses of Asses who will strive for mediocrity and barely attain even that much. If you want to rise to the top, in any endeavor, you’ve gotta sweat the small stuff.

“Little hinges swing big doors.”

As CounterThinker, W. Clement Stone, the self-made billionaire-philanthropist and father of the Positive Mental Attitude movement—best known for his trademark pencil-thin mustache and flamboyant bow ties— used to say, “Little hinges swing big doors.” And swing them they do—either open or closed, depending on your attention to detail.

People are drawn to CounterThink live events and seminars, to my newsletter and to this column because they want to expand their thinking, their income, their business, and their opportunities. But I find that the majority of people’s thinking—especially, the way they think about the way they think— is way too limited.

Here, we’re talking specifically about marketing. And as usually is the case, the context in which most people think about marketing is waaaay too narrow.

Generally, too little thought is given to things like: the physical appearance of the business— the consistent spotlessness of the tabletops, seats, ketchup bottles, windows and restrooms. What does the outside of the building look like as potential customers approach—is it clean and inviting? Does it appear safe and well-lit? And how about the package you’re shipping out? How does that package look when it gets into the customers hands— after having made its way through the shipping process?

I recently bought a few pairs of very expensive athletic socks ($90 a pair) from an online vendor. The socks arrived in a plain white, Tyvek envelope and the product boxes inside were crushed beyond recognition.

Yeah, I know, they’re socks… and crushing a pair of socks isn’t gonna hurt ‘em. But the damn socks were ninety-bucks a pair! And what really got me goin’ was the packing list crammed inside the crumpled box that read: “Packed with Care by George W.” Ya gotta be kiddin’ me, right?

So, even though there’s nothing wrong with the product itself—I actually really like the way the socks perform—I’m already searching out a new vendor for my next four pairs. With one simple, little screw-up that business lost a potentially good customer. And unless he’s reading this article, the owner may never figure out why—worth thousands of dollars in lifetime sales (see the chapter on calculating Lifetime Customer Value in my “Managing by the Numbers” series). I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think that’s the outcome the marketer had in mind.

How about testimonials? Do you use them to their utmost? Testimonials, as those of you have been following me already know, are the lifeblood of marketing. Without properly structured testimonials—from happy customers who are already enjoying the benefits of your goods or services—you’re leaving the bulk of your prospects unconvinced.

A lot of savvy marketers use testimonials, but most really fall short in their full context and application. A few CounterThink strategies include using testimonials on your invoices, statements and even on your collection and dunning letters. I’ve proven in my own businesses that testimonials actually improve collections on receivables and reduce delinquent accounts.

Do you routinely include a photo of your smiling customer—having fun with, and enjoying the benefits of your product or service? How about video and audio testimonials? Do you record your customer’s impromptu feedback after just experiencing your product or service for later use on DVD, Websites and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and You Tube?

Do you keep testimonials coming even after the sale has been made, the service has been delivered and the product has been consumed? Doing so will serve to enhance the new customer’s perception of satisfaction with the buying experience—they see and hear all the great things others are saying, and feel as if they should feel the same way. The continued, diligent practice also results in less returns and refunds. Testimonials should be included in everything you put out to the public. And they are so important we’ve started working on a new educational program in the CounterThink Marketing Series— Marketing with Testimonials. (If you’re interested in participating in the research, or want to reserve a pre-release copy, drop me an email: sandy@counterthink.TV)

People love surprises. So, do you give them a little surprise when they buy from you? Is there a little something waiting for them—Cajuns call it lagniappe—that appears with seemingly random regularity, like the 13th roll in a baker’s dozen?

My wife owns, among other businesses, a specialty niche boutique for women. She gave me a little resistance when I first suggested that she start handing out pieces of individually-wrapped gourmet, European chocolate to everyone who came into the store—the expensive kind, not those crappy little kisses.

I can understand her reluctance. After all, with an average transaction of $36 and a candy cost of about $1 a piece, it hardly made any sense—from a bottom-line standpoint—especially when I insisted that her salespeople also hand out chocolate to shoppers who didn’t buy a thing, or even to those who came in to return a previous purchase. But I’m a CounterThinker, not a bean counter, so it made perfect sense to me. Here’s why…

Chocolate is the No. 1 most craved food, and women are the ones most likely to crave it. The sugar in chocolate triggers the release of a nerve chemical called serotonin that results in an overall sense of well-being. The sweet taste also releases endorphins in the brain, giving us an immediate euphoric rush. The pure cocoa butter in good, expensive chocolate gives it a velvety-rich texture and the high cocoa content enhances the flavor and aroma—stimulating yet another nerve chemical called galanin—which satisfies our fat craving and provides what scientists have termed, a moment of ecstasy.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Chocolate contains theobromine and caffeine— compounds that provide an instant mental boost, and phenylethylamine—which stimulates the nervous system, increases blood pressure and heart rate, and is said to produce feelings similar to that of an orgasm.

As a marketer, I can’t think of any better feeling I’d want my customers to associate with my business. So, the way I figure it, a nice piece of chocolate just might keep them coming…ya know, back.

So far, the little chocolate experiment has been quite a hit.

It’s all about looking at marketing in a broader, more creative context then one would typically feel is necessary. That’s what makes it CounterThink, and that’s what makes it work so damn well.

One of the things I’ll keep doing here is trying to expand the way you think about everything—including your business, your opportunities and your possibilities. And in the coming weeks, months and years you’ll find an eclectic mix of ideas, examples and strategies—some of which, I suppose, you might expect, and hopefully a few that you might not.

He did it, not by listening to the marketing experts of the time, who advised him to be sure to target the decision makers, but by winning the hearts of “champions” all across America.

The clown found his champions watching Saturday morning cartoons, and impressed on their growing little minds the idea that a toy should be included with the purchase of every hamburger and fries.

The clown knew that these little champions had neither the money nor the ability to purchase what he was selling, but he also knew that each of his champions rode in the back seat of a car driven by a decision maker who had both the money and the ability.

The clown realized what most experts had missed—he knew that when the time came for the decision maker to make a decision, his champion would spring into action and influence the decision maker’s decision. And with that, an unshakable burger-empire was born.

I’ve warned you not to fall into the same trap that hobbles most of the marketing mainstream—thinking you must always target the decision maker in your marketing. But many of you still insist on riding that train to its inevitable dead end.

Perhaps it’s because mainstream sales trainers and advertising salespeople have long insisted that the first step in making a sale is to reach the decision maker: “Don’t waste time on people who have no authority.”

The result of this horrible advice has been that marketers habitually ignore the friendly and readily accessible champions who could make the job of selling so incredibly easy — the secretary, the file clerk, the husband, the wife, the golfing buddy, the kids, or the friend of a friend.

But never try to target a champion! Nobody likes to feel like they’re being used. Simply realize that champions are all around you, every day. And all you need to do is tell your very convincing and compelling story to anyone and everyone who will listen to it. You never know whom that person might know.

While it has always been difficult to reach the person who has final authority to make a decision, reaching all the people around that person is usually incredibly easy. And if just one of these people is deeply impressed with your story, they will carry your message and your cause to the one who makes the decisions.

We call the process word-of-mouth. And it only works when it is not contrived. When you ask a person to talk to their boss for you, you’ve just killed the magic.

Contrary to popular belief: Success is not about who you know, it’s about who knows you.

How many strangers do you impress with your story each day? Have you been ignoring all the friendly, powerful champions that surround you? Have you mistakenly assumed that they couldn’t help you because they don’t have the money, authority or ability to buy whatever it is you’re selling?

Are you proud of the product or service you sell? If so, then talk about it, shout about it… write about. Even if the people who are listening all seem to be small potatoes.

Looking for a really neat way to tell your story without seeming like you’re pushy or only trying to sell something to somebody? Take a look at our new, soon to be released, “CounterThink Marketing—Marketing with Newsletters” program. Used right, newsletters can convince like no other—they can tell your story, over and over, in an informative, friendly non-threatening way. Who knows, you might be the next clown to create an empire of your own.

Global Warming?

The War on Drugs?

Gun control?

And the Real Housewives of Loompaland?

What interests me is that most people who argue strong opinions about one thing or another don’t argue from a position of real knowledge.

Typically, people making the loudest argument don’t usually have a fist full of data that supports their position. What I mean is, they themselves have not collected data from glacier ice core samples, or traveled with drug mules, or visited the mythical South Pacific island of Loompa to watch the Real Housewives in action.

Hell, most people shouting about global warming (climate change, or whatever the buzzword of the day is) won’t even bother to google up the latest statistics on polar bear population density, or stop to think about how much artifactual heat those original electronic temperature-measuring devices— that we’re basing all of our current comparative data on— gave off.

I’m not picking on the global warming folks, either. The same can be said about the majority of folks who hold a strong opinion about one thing or another.  Most won’t dare to look on the other side of their argument and risk having to deal with inconvenient, errant facts that might disrupt their already formed conclusions.

So, why don’t average people think like that? Who do you know that’s got that kind of time?

Besides, most people simply don’t think—they rely on others to do their thinking for them.  I’m not throwing stones here; I’m just stating a fact about human nature that the author Malcolm Gladwell so brilliantly revealed in his book Blink.

The average person is totally dependent on the trend of thought of the masses— or whatever so-called experts are saying is happening, and what they say about what it all means.

But, as we’ve seen with the recent Climategate scandal, those experts might be bending the truth to fit their own personal assumptions and adgendas, or they themselves may be relying on what they have learned from others— who were merely stating, unquestioningly, what they assume to be true.  Take for example the much-quoted statistics regarding gun seizures in Mexico.

Back in the spring of ’09, president Obama told the nation that ninety-percent of the illegal guns seized in Mexico came from gun shops in the United States. That’s a figure that could have bolstered the argument anti-gun supporters and the beliefs held by some of the gun-control advocates on both sides of the border.  That is, if it were true.

The real number turned out to be somewhere closer to 17%.  But that hasn’t stopped politicians and the press from perpetuating the misinformation.  In a December 1, 2009 article for Government Executive titled, Guns & Drugs, writer Katherine McIntire Peters, who as a professional journalist, should know better, perpetuated the myth:

“A less frequently cited figure is equally alarming to anyone living south of the border: Ninety percent of the weapons seized from the drug cartels by Mexican authorities are traced to the United States. While the cartels are moving drugs north, arms traffickers are moving guns south. It’s a symbiotic relationship that threatens security in both countries.”

Given the lack of verifiable data from Mexico, the hidden political agendas on both sides of the border, and the fact that most of the recovered weapons have no intact serial numbers, we really can’t calculate a precise figure for what portion of crime guns have been traced to the U.S.  And then, consider that neither the Mexican or US government has made account for the number of weapons that have been legally purchased from U.S. Manufactures by Mexican police and military which eventually end up in the hands of the drug cartels when Mexican soldiers and police defect to the side of the drug lords, and you’ll get an idea of how difficult a task it is to get at a real true number.  Of course, pro-gun people want the real number to be lower and anti-gun people want it to be higher.  But it’s not about what we want to be true that should influence our thinking– it needs to be about what actually is true.

And remember the hullabaloo about H1N1 being the worst pandemic since 1918?  Well, as it turns out, the apocalyptic predictions popularized by government “experts” and fueled by the 24-hour news networks never came to fruition— as reported in a December 8th story in the LA Times: Swine flu may be mildest pandemic ever, researchers say.

Back when I was a neophyte studying epidemiology, I had a professor who told us: Never believe the first report. Good advice, then. Good advice, now.

As Malcolm Gladwell showed us, this shortcut thinking is common— across the board— for all things we have no firsthand expertise in. The vast majority of people who confidently hold a position on, say, the war on terror, or evolution, or the proposition that more gun laws equal less crime, or the best way to treat a Lymphangiosarcoma are likely entirely reciting hearsay they picked up in the form of sound bites from some Authority on MSNBC, BBC, Popular Science, Oprah or Acta Oncologica.

The average person has a certain group of people whose word they trust and they repeat as if it were documented fact. Most people I know have never personally looked through a telescope or microscope, unraveled the human gnome, examined a core sample of a polar icecap, or analyzed the historical, comparative data between the passage of new gun restrictions and the instance of violent crime. And wouldn’t know what they were looking at if they did.

As a general rule, people circumvent analytical thinking (which takes time and involves learning something new) and opt, instead, for shortcut thinking: we trust what each other tells us, and rely on group consensus and the collective opinions of others to help us navigate our way through a lot of our own day-to-day problems.

We suddenly need a surgeon, or a trial lawyer, or a good housekeeper. What do we do? We ask our friends and associates (very few of which are qualified experts on evaluating the competencies of surgeons, litigators or domestic help) and we then make our decision based on their recommendations: the guy who pumps gas down at the local Petrol station says Dr. Testeze is the top urologist in town…

In other words, the average person behaves exactly like human beings tend to behave. Which is why, as CounterThinkers, it’s critical for us to do the opposite—to think things through from beginning to end, to examine the flip-side of every argument, to test against the current best practices, to do our own research whenever possible, to question everything—including conventional wisdom, accepted practices and venerated beliefs, and at the very least, verify the validity of the information we are relying on.

And if you promise that you’ll do so, I can confidently promise you that you’ll be far more effective at whatever you do, and be much more likely to find a new and exciting way to make more money or solve a nagging problem that’s been forever getting in your way…

…and I also promise, I won’t make you think about the twisted sexual proclivities of a chocolate factory owner who will only employ men who dress in skins, whose wives dress in leaves and whose kids run around naked.

I’m always on the prowl for examples of what I call “Logically Illogical” thinking.  Well, courtesy of a reader in Scary Ol’ England– here’s one fresh from the Ministry of Idiotic Solutions…

After an exhausting 2-year study, costing £250,000.00 (just north of $400,000.00 US) the Britain’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) concluded that 10-pin bowling alleys are hotbeds for disaster.

HSE officials are apparently losing sleep over the possibility that it might be far too easy for people to get trapped in the machinery at the end of the alley that sets up the pins.

Bare in mind– at no time in British bowling’s recorded history has this ever happened.  But why let a little fact like that dissuade the public health and safety folks from doing their appointed (and taxpayer funded) duty?  Solve something they must.  Even if it’s not a real problem.

To paraphrase Mark Twain: Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a government bureaucrat. But I repeat myself.

At first, the study’s authors considered ordering every bowling alley to erect barriers across lanes to prevent bowlers from arbitrarily running down the 60-foot alleys and jumping, head first, into the pin-resetting mechanism.

They were forced to abandon the otherwise clever idea after realizing that the barriers would not only stop people from entering the pin area, but they would also keep the bowling balls out.   (No, seriously.  You can’t make shit like this up)

But with the typical tenacity of a bureaucrat holding a clipboard and a taxpayer funded study grant, the committee settled on requiring bowling alley operators to install photoelectric eyes on all lanes so that pin-setting machines will cut off automatically if anyone tries, ya know… to jump in.

Oh, and whilst they were at it… “you careless operators better make your staff wear these here earmuffs to muffle the noise of the balls hitting the pins, or we’re gonna fine ya.”  Apparently England has had a running problem with deaf pinsetters.

What I found even scarier than just another needless solution to a non-existent problem (which we’ve come to expect from governments oversite of a Nanny State) was how many average folks supported the actions.  There were more than just a handful of comments on the dailymail.co.uk website, lauding the HSE study… like the one from Chris, from Burgess Hill, who said: “seems pretty sensible to me.”

Che fessi…

Starving Cancer Patients May Help Chemotherapy Work Better

It’s a standard practice for cancer doctors to recommend that their patients eat before chemotherapy because they can lose their appetite afterwards, and because it’s always been believed that patients need to eat in order to get stronger. But researchers at the University of Southern California say the exact opposite may be true.

Scientists have known that limiting calorie consumption can help mice and other organisms live longer and avoid developing tumors. But new research suggests calorie restriction may also enhance chemotherapy for cancer patients.

Short-term starvation techniques may apparently help shield healthy cells from the damaging effects of chemotherapy, while still leaving tumor cells vulnerable to treatment.

A series of laboratory experiments found that reducing the food supply for as long as 60 hours helped toughen normal cells and make chemotherapy work better on tumors.

Scientists think the starvation technique may work because it forces cells into a slow-down mode to brace themselves against stresses from free radical oxygen, or toxins like chemotherapy. Tumor cells, on the other hand, are unable to slow down because their genes are programmed to make them grow and divide uncontrollably.

The study’s senior author, Dr. Valter Longo said: “The potential here is that you could give chemotherapy three times more frequently with very little side effects.”

The study caught the attention of cancer doctors at USC’s Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles. Doctors there are designing a clinical trial of as many as 20 cancer patients, to see how they perform on chemotherapy after fasting for a short period, compared with those on a normal diet.

Meetings go ‘Topless’ in Siloncon Valley

Like so many innovations from the home of hi-tech, the latest movement in Silicon Valley is counterintuitive: ditch those computers.

A growing number of companies in the Silicon Valley, home to Google, Yahoo, Apple and Cisco are urging employees to leave their laptops on their desks when attending office meetings and engage in the decidedly low-tech form of social networking known as human interaction.

Naturally, there’s even a snappy term for the move: topless meetings.

Sue Fox, author of Business Etiquette for Dummies says: “Face-to-face meetings have become a low priority because they’re constantly interrupted by technology.”

John Vars, co-founder of Dogster.com, said. “Get rid of the gadgets, and, “meetings go quicker. People are communicating better, the flow is faster.”

For some, though, the problem lies not with the technology brought into office meetings, but with the meetings themselves.
Technology blogger Jeremy Zawodny wrote “People hate most meetings,”. “They become a source of frustration.”

That frustration has led to yet another innovation: meeting-free companies. That too has a snappy moniker: “meataxto”, as in take a meat axe the meetings.

No-laptop meetings make sense. No meetings makes more sense.

Good News for Tired Parents

If you’re the parent of a newborn and would like to get a bit more shuteye, you might want to listen to the advice of Sleep Doctor Polly Moore. Although, the counterintuitive advice may shock today’s overachieving, overscheduled parents, like all things CounterThink, it’s working amazingly well.

San Diego sleep specialist and neurologist Polly Moore, PhD studied a 90-minute rest and activity cycle that determines when babies are most likely to nap. Her new book titled “The 90-Minute Baby Sleep Program” is written to help parents and their babies sleep better at night.

According to Dr. Moore, there’s this 90-minute clock running in our brain all the time, that signals the human rest/activity cycle.

Dr. Moore says, “If you want them to sleep through the night, you really have to focus on the daytime sleep first.” I told you it was counterintuitive.

Dr. Polly Moore created what she calls the NAPS plan to help parents clue into her 90-minute cycle theory. Here’s how it works.

N: Note the time when your baby wakes up.
A: Add 90 minutes.
S: Soothe your baby to sleep as the 90 minutes wind down.
The end result? Baby sleeps better and sounder at night, and for longer periods of time.

How universal is this 90-minute cycle?

Start watching for your own 90-minute patterns. Most people also tend to have 90-minute variations in their creative thinking, and about every 90 minutes, people tend to want to have something to eat, something to drink, or otherwise to put something in their mouth, which may explain my frequent trips to the refrigerator when I’m writing. And we’ve also learned there are 90-minute variations of blood flow alternating between the left and right hemispheres of our brains.

Dr Moore offers a sample sleep chart for download.

Most people would have you believe that the nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered down. I’m going to tell you that the exact opposite is true… the one that sticks out, becomes the hammer. Over the next few weeks, if you keep up, I’ll show you how to go from what you’ve got to what you want, in a very short period of time.

Just as a lump of coal becomes a diamond and a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, human thinking is undergoing its own strange metamorphosis. Are you curious to see what it will become?

One of my early childhood mentors, a man by the name of Earl Nightingale said, “We become what we think about.” I believed it when Earl said it, and over the years I’ve proven it true in my own life. I now also believe that what quantum physicists are saying… that thoughts are things.

Because when you stop to think about it, every non-naturally occurring thing in our lives… from the cars we drive, to the tools we use, to the music we listen to, to our favorite recipe, or the words we use to describe it all, first began as an idea– a thought in someone’s mind. And before that idea was born, nothing like it ever existed– the idea was totally different.

To have something different you must do something different. But in order to do something different you must be able to think something different. And before you can think something different you must be willing to believe something different.

It’s been said, Whatever the human mind can conceive and believe it can achieve. But, we can only achieve what our mind can first believe is possible.

So, when we meet, I plan to challenge your beliefs about what is possible.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to stretch your thinking. You see, the mind is not a rubber band. Unlike a rubber band, once the mind is stretched with a new idea, it is incapable of returning to its normal size.

So, I want to stretch your mind with new ideas, new possibilities– to break you out of your normal thinking patterns. So eventually, you become incapable of seeing your current problems and challenges and limitations in the same old way.

My goal is not to teach you how to think, but to CounterThink. What is CounterThink? Well, let’s say it’s different language for the mind.

Compelling advertising, breathtaking architecture, legendary military strategies, intoxicating musical composition, masterful works of art, life-saving cures, industry-changing businesses and the recipes of award-winning chefs are merely dialects of the language of CounterThink.

There are things that are known and things that are unknown. In between there are doors. CounterThink is the key to unlock those doors.

We’ve come to rely on the tried and true. CounterThink is the realization that there is no real advantage to doing things they way they have always been done… only disadvantage. Because what worked well yesterday, may not work as well today and almost certainly, will stop working tomorrow.

Problems are like cancer cells–they learn quickly how to evolve and mutate to survive and grow. Your thinking and solutions need to evolve faster

Time is your chief competitor. Like it or not, you are in the race of your life, and the ability to learn faster may be the only advantage you have left.

The answers to difficult problems are rarely out in the open for everyone to see. Instead, they are like buried treasure. But, to find what no one else has found, you have to look where no one else has looked. CounterThink helps us to discover hidden treasures in secret places.

We’re all looking for an advantage. Grasp the principles of CounterThink and you’ll hold a lever that will move the world.

My goal is to teach you how to think the inconceivable, so you might do the unthinkable–to achieve the impossible.

Albert Einstein has it right when he said, “If I only had the right question… If I only had the right question.”

To make this program of any value to you, I, too, need the right question. What is the right question? It’s the one that’s on your mind right now. The one that keeps you awake at night, the one that won’t let you rest. The one that if you only had the solution, it would make all the difference.

Those are the kinds of questions that breathe life into CounterThink. And that’s the kind question I want you to email to me. Trust me on this on, there is a solution to your problem.

So send me that question that’s burning I your heart, and together let us discover the treasure that has been waiting for you, all the while, in secret places.

This is Alexander Berardi saying, Don’t just think, like the rest of the pack. CounterThink and take the lead.

Crime is Down in the US—But You’ll Never Guess Why.
Archbishop Okay’s Pic of Disciples Involved in Wild Orgy
Giant Erections on Display in Japan, and More Stupid Human Tricks.

The new statistics are in and looks like crime is down across the US for another year in a row… somewhat of a trend. According to FBI statistics, the national violent crime rate dropped 34 percent over the past decade. New York City had 496 murders last year, and in contrast to over 2,000 a year in the early 1990s, that’s not bad at all.

We are safer. Our property is safer. Sure, crime is far from being a thing of the past, but compared with the dangerous days of two decades ago the difference is stark.
Some of the reasons for crime’s downward decline seem kinda logical– more and better trained police, fewer men in the crime-prone late teens and early 20s, less crack cocaine, more alert citizens, all of which are pointed out by those who keep track of such things.

But there is one factor, as you might have guessed, that is overtly counterintuitive. This downward trend in crime appears to be very closely linked with a corresponding rise in immigration– especially illegal immigration.

In the past decade, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has doubled to roughly 12 million, while at the same time the crime rate has continued to fall ever downward.

But how can that be? What happened to the crime wave perpetrated by a high influx of illegal aliens that so many experts predicted would sweep over the countryside? What about the gangs, the cutthroat crime lords from Central America, the shootings, the killings, the drugs?

While it may be we have all those things to fear, new studies show that they’re not coming from the sources we once though they would in fact, and this should come as no surprise to those of you who are familiar with CounterThink.TV, reality is turning out to be exactly opposite. New data shows, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and less likely to go to prison than our own native born.

The Public Policy Institute of California studied the issue and in February reported that nationally, native-born men are more than three times more likely to go to prison than immigrant men. And, in the crime-prone category (men aged 18 to 40), the native born men are 10 times more likely to be in jail.

Yeah, but what about all those Mexicans? Well, in California, immigrant men from Mexico in that same age group, are eight times less likely that U.S.-born men to be imprisoned.

Sure the statistics go completely against common sense, but like I’m prone to say, common sense is about 99% common and 1% sense.

But when you look at it from a CounterThink perspective, it all makes perfect sense. After all, legal immigrants are all screened for criminality, and illegal immigrants, here to find work, aren’t real anxious to risk getting arrested and deported.

We are a safer nation, not in spite of the immigrants, but perhaps because of them.

Oh, yeah… as always, you can send your hate mail to: HateMail@CounterThink.TV.