Ever heard or read about “Six Degrees of Separation”?

According to our friends at Wikipedia, the original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb.

The new research, uh… a much bigger group made up of 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population. Technology and social networks are linking us closer than ever. We are now just mere 4.something degrees away from one another. 

In other terms, the chances of you meeting your idol (The Dalai Lama? Your president? Heck, you could even add Oprah and why not add Mark Zuckerberg to the mix) is simply 4.something friends away from happening.

We’re not going to get into the way they made this deduction as it goes into some complicated algorithms that you would seriously need to be an analytical mind to understand. Frankly, you’d get a headache from our explanation. To keep it short and sweet, let’s face it, the social network era has provided us with tremendous reach. Any Jean, Pierre, Véronique and Paulette can share ideas with only a few jumps to a large portion of the world’s population and with even fewer steps to the entire population of a nation.

How did we go from carrier pigeons to 15MB/second speed Internet connections? Ideas now spread faster than they ever have, and the pixels of separation between you (in Haiti) and your mentor (on Mars) will become fewer and fewer. 

Long live innovation and the digital age!

PG, over and out.

Fix your Bike

For this post,  we will attempt to do an exercise. 

We invite you to take part in this process. If done well,   it will have thought us all a lesson... or two. 

Let's start by taking a look at this picture:

Take a close look and you will see many reasons why this bike is a pain in the you know what. While looking at the image, right here, right now, list ALL the things that are keeping YOU from moving forward. List all the psychologic or life flat tires that are inhibiting your success,  and write them down. It could be anything. Anything that is keeping you from reaching your fullest potential. Keep the list. We will.

By next monday,  fix your bike or fix your car or fix your laptop, and post it for your appreciation. By then, we will each take our individual list and learn, by looking at the restored "bicycle",  how to rewrite our negative life affirmations into positive ones. 

It could be a life changing week! Especially with the new year resolutions!  

Go! Go! Go! 

List at least three things that are keeping your tires flat... See you next monday. 

The State of Social Media

For today's blog,  we're doing something differently: we're using someone else's video to help update our dear readers,  yes...YOU :-),  on the state of social media. 

Keep in mind though that the numbers,  from November 22nd when the video was uploaded to now,  have changed. 

Millions of connections are made every day,  is your brand ready to take advantage of that and to start being a 'friend' to your consumers?

 Get out there. Observe. Connect. Grow.