In the traditional world of marketing books either have a promotional website each that extols their value to the casual online visitor or are lumped together, in sequence of production on their author’s website. The logical abstraction of this is that the book is a product and the author a product creator. As such the focus of anything that is created around the product is marketing and has the intent to move as many units as possible.
I am an author who writes about marketing, a marketer who sometimes uses writing and a content creator whose ideas, thought experiments and social musings cut across the worlds of writing, search, web development, social issues, science and personal development. Oh, and I hate marketing. At least in the traditional sense of the word.
This makes my website a repository of mixed ideas most of which, up to a point were an obvious, logical progression.
What changed things, a little, was The Sniper Mind which took me deep into the world of applied neuroscience and bridged the gap between our inner world and our observable behavior. Or, as I called it from Axons to Actions.
While it represented, for me, a natural progression in terms of subject matter it appeared to be a break with the usual subjects I write about and warranted a website of its own. The Sniper Mind was ground-breaking in many ways. It brought cognitive competencies that are taught in the battlefield to help soldiers adapt and overcome the unexpected to the world of business and everyday life.
Despite the fact that I delivered The Sniper Mind late and at a third higher wordcount than originally agreed, there was still a lot of material I had to leave out and questions I had not answered. That material and those questions ate at me. At the back of my mind there were jots I was itching to join. I wanted to know why we do whatever it is we do, for instance? Why not do something else instead? I wanted to know why we feel motivation is an issue. Why we procrastinate. Why we give up. Why we don’t align our needs with our wants. Why we find it so difficult to find our way through life.
Those questions built and built util they were almost impossible to ignore and then the pandemic came along. Suddenly the material I had been collecting, the material I already had, the new studies I had been following, the musings I had written here and there, began to make sense.
None of us, really, knows how to behave properly. If we did, then we would better know who we are, what we want and how to go about getting it.
It is hard for us to understand (or even accept) that we don’t know how to behave. This is why the people around us, from our family and friends to celebrities and influencers we follow, find it so easy to affect and guide our behavior.
We use the notion of ethics, beliefs and values to justify behavior that we engage in. We hold contradictory beliefs, often within the same timeframe. Our behavior is driven by what we think is good for us balanced by what we believe others expect us to do. We present one face to the world and another to our self. To put it frankly we are a mess. All of us are a mess some of the time and some of us manage to be a mess all the time.
It is this that Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully sets out to address. In many ways it is a sequel to The Sniper Mind. Whereas that book addressed business more, Intentional looks at what we can do. How we can develop personally. Some of the areas of Intentional that affect identity, decision making and personal development then will be added to this website. These are what I call “the subject” of the book.
Areas that impact marketing, thinking and the book itself will be added to my main website. This way my life will become a little more manageable and I get to create content that matters without spreading myself too thin across several different book websites. I am explaining my rationale here because some of you The Sniper Mind-fans asked me and also some of you wondered whether there would be a dedicated website for Intentional.
Now you know.