Smart Branding & Personal Goals

     The Paradox Wisdom Collection: Brand & Goal [Paradox #47]

                                             Reference: Ali Anani Buzz : Fear of Failure Magnification Effect                                                                                            https://www.bebee.com/producer/@ali-anani/fear-of-failure-magnification-effect

Smart goals is right up in my world with conceptions such as personal branding, that I have an immediate gag reflex when I entertain how they divert us from our natural disposition. A brand is an easy enough concept to understand so why make it personal? A goal is an easy thing to understand, so why make it smart? The answer is obvious, goal setting probably isn't smart and brand is not personal, it is an object.  How can it be personal if it transforms a person into a persona.

I do think goals are important and brand is important but the window dressing is not. Life is not made inviolate because of an absence of goals or an absence of brand, it simply opens up all of that life that is closed if we become obsessed with goals and brand.  So there is this space that have unwittingly not learned to occupy because we have become narrow in how we define goals and look at brand - the same way Ali Anani describes as a magnification effect in the buzz referenced that helped perpetuate this particular paradox wisdom.

Brand when it is a great experience is a creative experience but goals as we use them for business is an act of critical thinking. So the question becomes how do we make goals an act of creative thinking?  Just as important how do we also look at brand through the eyes of critical thinking.  When brand is left alone as creative expression, it wins awards but does not achieve its central and very basic purpose to sell something it was meant to sell.

Simon Sinek.  Why do we have to put a prefix like "Original" to the word thinker, unless we have learned NOT TO THINK.  So play is something we naturally learned to do and now we choose adult words like smart goals and personal brand because these offer cookie cutter solutions that save us from thinking - we take the recipe and we cook these tactics which individually we have no practical wisdom about.  This means our ability to focus is not a panacea or a saving grace.  As Ali Anani points out in his buzz we can gain an outcome different than we intended and then blame ourselves for the resulting failure - but we missed the wisdom of that failure, so our fear becomes malignant - when we always had the power within us to make our own fear wise.

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