This morning, Seth Godin posted this:

You rock

This is deceptive.

You don’t rock all the time. No one does. No one is a rock star, superstar, world-changing artist all the time. In fact, it’s a self-defeating goal. You can’t do it.

No, but you might rock five minutes a day.

Five minutes to write a blog post that changes everything, or five minutes to deliver an act of generosity that changes someone. Five minutes to invent a great new feature, or five minutes to teach a groundbreaking skill in a way that no one ever thought of before. Five minutes to tell the truth (or hear the truth).

Five minutes a day you might do exceptional work, remarkable work, work that matters. Five minutes a day you might defeat the lizard brain long enough to stand up and make a difference.

And five minutes of rocking would be enough, because it would be five minutes more than just about anyone else.

It is a great example of the quick shots of inspirational adrenaline that Seth scribbles out nearly every day (sometimes multiple times a day) on his blog. But I would amend his wise words just in the slightest and add emphasis to one line in particular.

First, the amendment. I don’t think five minutes is enough. I also believe that we are capable of much more than that. I appreciate that Seth is letting us off easy, but I personally feel that I can work in flow for between 30 minutes to 2 hours almost every day. For more on Flow, a brilliant practice that you should be bringing into your business life, you can go here.

Now for the emphasis. He says that a potential great work is “to deliver an act of generosity that changes someone.” I say that the greatest work you can do is lift another person with your generosity. I would emphasize Seth’s point that the work you do in a day is measured by the people you can effect.

If you are in business, your output of a product or service is only as good as the positive change it creates in the lives of your customers. But you, as a human, are also only as good as the positive change you are directly making in the lives of your people. Your employees, your co-workers, your family and friends should all end each day feeling appreciated and fulfilled, bettered for having passed through another day of trials, growth and human interaction.

And that typically takes you just a little longer than five minutes.

“Levitt and Dubner’s SuperFreakonomics: Rather than a Sequel to the Original and Uncanny Economic Stories We Presented in Freakonomics, We’ve Created a Dry Scientific Journal of What Other Economists are Doing and How They’re Passing It Off as Pop Psychology. Also, We’ve Included a Bonus Guide on How to Start Your Own Business as a High Paid Escort Including Suggested Services and Hourly Rates.”

The full title is very long, but funny in a “pick it up off the shelf and show your friend to get a laugh” marketable way. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

Levitt, the economist and presumably “the source” for the material again pairs up with Dubner, the storyteller, to rekindle the magic they made together four years before with Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. I loved Freakonomics. It was, in so many ways, the right book at the right time. Like lightning striking, many factors came together to create the perfect conditions for a dramatic effect. Freakonomics published on the heels of Gladwell’s counter-intuitive bestseller, Blink, into a general resurgence of interest in pop psychology and pseudo-educational non-fiction.

Levitt and Dubner grabbed some literary headlines with their sensational, statistically-based assertions, including the deliberate counter-argument to Gladwell’s explanation of decreased crime covered in The Tipping Point. They had a lot of fun, fresh and surprising discoveries that were shared in a punchy and “radio-friendly” way that is a tribute to Dubner’s writing ability—he was able to convert Umberto Eco into Dan Brown. The masses could enjoy Freakonomics.

But like the old adage about lightning striking, Superfreakonomics is a miss.

UNLESS you are looking for financial data to support your transition from your current career into the thriving industry of High-Paid Escort Service Providers. In which case, the first 55 pages are a “must read.” In these pages, a world-renowned economist will explain to you that prostitution is not about buying sex, but really about limited suppliers seeking to satisfy a decreasing demand for a price inelastic service. It is virtually a cut-and-paste business proposal for you to take your Brothel plan to the investors for your A round.

If you have the time and interest to learn more about effectively selling yourself on the street at an hourly rate, this book is for you. If this does not currently align with your career goals, borrow it and read chapter 5 about global cooling, as this will be the water-cooler topic sometime in the near future where you can impress your friends.

My rating for the book is 20,000 otherwise stable housewives turned drug addicted prostitutes because of inalterable economic incentives out of a possible 50,000 otherwise stable housewives turned drug addicted prostitutes because of inalterable economic incentives.

Also, in my extensive research for this blog (i.e.- “reading wikipedia“), I learned they are making a film adaptation of the first book. This will be bad. I look forward to writing another Inexpert Review in the future, apparently sometime around August 2010.

Because, as a thoroughly indoctrinated believer in the fast movement towards the “inexpert web,” I will contribute media reviews for which I am fully and openly unqualified to make. This is my review of the movie The Princess and the Frog.

I saw The Princess and the Frog with my wife and two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. We went with friends who had three daughters, ages 2, 5 and 8. I had already been warned that the movie was “going back to Disney’s roots” and that it was a little “over the head” of the carefully targeted young, purchase decision driving Disney audience.

But my wife had been prepping our princess-obsessed 2 year old for more than a month about a “new princess movie” and we were excited about her first outing to the great American tradition of paying for television, so we headed into the appropriately marked theater and took our seats. Even though we arrived twenty minutes early, we missed the first few minutes of the show (to be explained later), but this proved to not be a problem.

I feared that I had missed a few key plot drivers that would be significant later. These fears were unsubstantiated. Many key plot drivers were missed throughout the show and it had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t confused at any moment about WHAT was going on in the movie, but I often wondered WHY it was going on. Some of those questions include:

• Why is the prince making deals with a voodoo priest?
• Why is the prince’s servant suddenly such a willing accomplice in fraud, kidnapping, deception and eventual attempted homocide?
• Why is this kid’s movie telling me so much about how to work voodoo magic, make deals with evil spirits and otherwise begin my own practice in the dark arts?

This last question occurred time and time again during various voodoo magic scenes in the movie where I saw beautiful animated sequences set to catchy songs filled with chorus girls and colorful flashing lights while characters performed blood rituals, fortune telling and otherwise sold their souls to the underworld. I kept tapping my feet and fighting the urge to shout, “Boy, black magic sure looks fun!”

At least there was an overt moral lesson near the end of the movie where the voodoo practitioner’s soul is violently, albeit colorfully, harvested by his demonic overlords. A valuable scene that clearly states to viewers of all ages, “Black magic isn’t ALL fun and games.”

On the ride home, while curtly checking the offspring over for signs of long-term mental and emotional injury, I determined she survived unscathed. I believe her two-year-old mind was confused during the film as well, but her recurring questions may have been more along the lines of:

• Why aren’t there more princesses?
• Why are we watching these boring frogs so much?
• And What happened to the princesses?

Interrupted by the occasional thought, “When Genie did magic in Aladdin, he did it without human blood, voodoo dolls or apparent soul bargaining. Was that even REAL magic or was it just pretend?”

My overall rating for the movie is 3 and a half shrunken head voodoo talismans on a scale of five shrunken head voodoo talismans.

Rating: 3 and a Half Shrunken Head Voodoo Talismans Out of a Possible 5

And my summary statement is: “The Princess and the Frog: Not at All a Re-telling of the Beloved Fairytale, but Rather a Beautifully Animated Infomercial on How to Start a Career in Black Magic and Be Your Own Voodoo Priest. With an Occasional Princess.”

Shawn’s Graduation Speech for the GSU
Global Partners MBA Class of 2008

The four things I learned from my MBA program.

1. I’ve developed a physical dependency on PowerPoint.
2. I learned a new language.
3. I learned that anything worth learning can be conveyed in a chart
4. I learned to take existing models, charts, concepts and ideas and apply them to new sets of data.

I have elected to not simply tell you about these new competencies, but also to demonstrate them to you during the course of this speech. Item number one, my adeptness at PowerPoint that has been carefully honed over the course of the program, is best illustrated by the creation of this presentation. Number two is that I have learned a new language. To enter the global partners program, it is a prerequisite to know another language besides English. We were told that this was so that we would be able to quickly adapt and understand in the cultures and countries that we visited as part of the program. But we were lied to.

The REAL reason is that our professors wanted to make sure we would be able to learn a brand new language: the language of business. As MBA students, we have learned a brand new language, complete with its own vocabulary. I apologize to those who are in attendance who have not yet learned this language, because I would like to deliver the next segment of my speech in b-school-ese.

“4Q and 1600 ICH ago,
We determined that the FV of our WACC
Could be improved by exchanging CA for FA
and leveraging our IP.

After a SWOT analysis of our OTB,
We chose an MBA with GSU in the program called GP.
In Oct. 07 in CS 600, the Cof’08 began.
We met P-Y and KDL. And also Robin M.

We learned Econ and Pol Strat, Comm Dip and Int Bus,
Bus Law and Bus Mark, and Cost and Info Sys
In our IT class we read how HDVD
Would go DOA thanks to PS3
And in P-Y’s Ops class at IAE
We learned to streamline Mfg using JIT

We saw RDJ and flew to CDG
We changed our USD into RMB
In PRC we toured the BOG,
Then grabbed some US food at MickeyD’s

After all that, we’re back at GSU
Here in ATL with 1 thing to do,
To cross the stage and receive our degrees
And add 3 new letters to our CVs.”

The third thing that I learned was that anything worth learning can, and SHOULD, be communicated quickly and easily with a graph or chart. I would like to demonstrate the truth of that too you with a few examples.
· A Pie Chart About Pie
· A SWOT Analysis of the SWAT
· The f(x) = excitement x effort
· The Brown Cloud and
· The Classic Marketing Matrix

The fourth thing that I learned was how to apply existing models and analysis to new data sets to reveal new patterns and models. I feel that this skill can be accurately demonstration by taking the comedic model of Jeff Foxworthy’s “You Might Be a Redneck” and applying it to our own particular data set.

You might be a GPMBA…
1. If you’ve ever tried to calculate your student loan debt in Euros.
2. If you know the right way to pronounce “Strategy” and “Tactic”
3. If you’ve ever used the word “widget” to describe a theoretical product line.
Or if you’ve ever looked up the translation for “widget” in French or Portuguese.
4. If you’ve ever checked with a fellow student to know not only what class you have tomorrow, but what country it’s in.
5. If you’ve ever sat in a class taught in English and had to think “What language am I hearing?”
6. If you’ve ever lost 150 thousand dollars in a virtual margin call on the virtual stock market.
7. If you’ve ever accidentally started a nuclear war in Brazil or depleted the world’s oceans of their fish population.
8. If you’ve ever spent more than 8 hours in the DC airport. Twice.
9. If you’ve ever begun a question with the phrase “I was reading in the Wall Street Journal…”
10. If you’ve ever bragged that your new suit was made in China
Finally, If you’ve studied 20 subjects across 4 continents and traveled around the entire world in 432 days as part of your international business education…