Ahhh…Chivalrous men, where hath thou gone?

The noble gentlemen with courteous, gallant and appreciative behaviour toward the needs of women are a dying breed.

Growing up in the 80’s, many women and I were fortunate enough to appreciate and enjoy the extent of these wonderful gestures from our mate, male friends or strangers even! Many men practiced this behavior until something unbeknownst crept into our society and poisoned this trend.

It is extremely doubtful that modern day teenage girls would apprehend what chivalry is, let alone being shown chivalrous display counterparts. The same for the boys, who are dismissive of extending such behaviour since this practice is not being passed on – in households, school or not even TV.

Girls, do you remember the last time you were shown such behaviour?

Boys, do you remember that last time you were compelled to be chivalrous?

Luckily, I was exposed to those wonderful interactions; here are some of my acknowledgments:

Thanks to the…

• Boy who opened car doors for me, waited for me to be seated and closed the doors behind.
• Boy who asked me to walk on the inside of the pedestrian walk way so he could watch out for incoming traffic and shield me from splashes of rain puddles.
• Boy who offered to carry my huge luggage uphill during my travel in foreign Japan.
• Boy who held my coat and help me put it on as I have sore arms from working out.
• Boy who walked out of his own birthday party to walk me through dimmed alley to the parking lot.
• Boy who followed me home in his car to make sure I don’t fall sleep on the wheel.
• Boy who made sure to drive slowly in front me on the slippery road in order to tame my road rage and guided me home in the dark snowy nights.

Not to say that these considerate actions are owned only by men, but can we really imagine the first five items done by a women to a men? Guess we haven’t evolved to that era yet.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR1L2ih8Kkw

So what happened? Who killed it?

Most speculation surrounds the women’s movement that’s almost a century old; the fights to create gender equality between women and men in the modern world, in terms of earning power, career advancement, and roles in household. How did a movement intended for the good of the women is also composing the grand exit of the good old chivalry?

I definitely believe that was a trigger, but there is something else that’s pushing chivalry to extinction. My own speculation -- Modern life consumerism. Time to put 2 and 2 together and really imagining the future without chivalry dying.

From a Big Fish in a Small Pond

After graduating from co-op management program at a prestigious school, most of my friends were applying for positions in big corporations such as Telus, Proctor & Gamble, Toyota, TD, to name a few. Unlike any of my friends, I shied away from big brand names and went into a medium size business in the industrial sector.

When asked why, I replied “why not?”….but without any clear reason in the back of my head. I wanted to shy away from the norm, the rat race, to create my own experience, make my own path, shape my career roadmap in the way I want.

After three years of working in a medium size company, I now know that logical reason behind the rebellious instinct.  For pure adventure, entrepreneurial reasons – and that I was not concerned with make big bucks at the time.  Already free from my OSAP loans, I didn’t need to play safe with my decision; I wanted to experience entrepreneurship by working in intimate environment where decisions are made faster and direct impact and results were more a

pparent.

With that said, I wouldn’t recommend trading off money-making opportunities at corporate level for the need to experience the world. Choose your own battle, but remember, money can come later with experience.

Working in Corporate vs. Small-Medium Enterprises.

I chose an industrial distributor in the capital goods sector with manufacturing capability – a place I have never experience through co-op. Started off spearheading the estimating department pricing projects as a Project Estimator, after one year I was been given the authority to take command of the company’s Marketing initiatives

as a Marketing Analyst.  The company created the position for me after my recommendation and proposal for a marketing department to be established to growth sales.

When asked by others what has been my most significant accomplishment professionally, this was it.

Having directorial dominance in a field that I love – Marketing, a position where I can be creative and entrepreneurial, and having a direct working relationship with great business minds – the President and the Vice-President of this 80+ employee company. While I wore many hats doing design, executive and direct marketing programs throughout the four branches nationwide, the work was expanding my strategic and visionary through discussions with the owners.

At the occasional meet-ups with friends from the same graduating class discussing work, sometimes I doubted about my choice to stray away from corporate companies.  As much as I love my job at the company very much, I can’t help to speculate the fact that maybe it would’ve been better for my skill and finances if I went to the other side.

So how do you choose between either during job search? What decisions do you need to consider?

Choosing your first full time employment after graduation is a very serious decision. You are choosing the cornerstone of your career, setting the path for your career road map.

Let me help you put into perspective choosing between jobs at corporate level and small medium enterprises.

Pros & Cons of Corporate & SMEs…

A great article by Bruce Mau – designing to shape the future…

Let me begin with an admission. I am a designer, which means I cannot afford the luxury of cynicism. Designers are called upon to come up with solutions to problems of every imaginable description, from designing a machine to provide kidney dialysis at home to creating an interface for complex critical systems like air-traffic control. No matter what the specific nature of a project- whether it’s a park or a product, a book or a business – optimism is always central to my work. It’s as important to what I do as research tools, computer systems, or a sense of colour.

Three years ago, the Vancouver Art Gallery invited me to produce a major exhibition on the future of design. They had no fixed ideas as to what that might mean, except for the scale; they wanted something that would mark a significant commitment by their museum to the design field.

My first impulse was to say no. To discover what is happening in design around the world and to explore its potential across all the disciplines seemed too daunting. Besides, I was happily working on a full slate of projects that were already very demanding and personally rewarding.

But something was irritating me. There was something floating around in our culture that I found deeply troubling. It got under my skin until it became an itch I had to scratch. There seemed to be a growing split between reality and mood, a conflict between what is actually happening in the world – what we are capable of, what we are committed to, what we are achieving – and our perception of how we’re doing. The prevailing mood feels dark, negative, harrowingly pessimistic, and tending to the cynical. Bizarrely, this kind of negativity has become the vogue even in creative fields, which are traditionally committed to vision, beauty, and pleasure, to notions of utopia·- to possibility, in other words. This is especially true in design. How, I wondered, had the virus of pessimism crept into the one area of art that is charged with looking forward?

First and foremost, design is committed to a better, smarter future. It’s the art form pragmatically focused on finding solutions for how we live in the world. But it seems we have mistakenly conflated the word “critical” with the word “negative” and embraced a cynical perspective. Art speaks mostly in dystopian terms, while business is charged with envisioning our future. Today the talent to make beautiful paintings is a bus pass to the suburbs of art discourse; crankyarchitects scowl from magazine covers and moan, absurdly, about their powerlessness. Gloom and doom are everywhere.

These days, to express optimism in educated company suggests that you are either wilfully ignorant of the facts or simply a fool. To be serious, to be critical, to have a voice, we have to be cynical. To strive for something – something better – is a Pollyanna project for the naive.

In stark contrast to this prevailing wind of negativity, the experience of the team that worked with me on Massive Change (as the Vancouver project came to be called) was quite the opposite. In the face of global challenges – and there are many of unprecedented seriousness, from the AIDS disaster in Africa to the environmental impact of our growing population – we nevertheless witnessed action coming to bear on almost every significant problem. We saw new possibilities in collaboration and connectedness, which, along with the Internet, would allow designers around the world to draw on knowledge and expertise that had never before been accessible.

My experience with this project has been delightful, with one startling exception: I discovered how controversial optimism can be.

THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM

Despite our collective despondency, we live in a time when more peopie are richer, healthier, better educated, more literate, and more productive. We live longer, travel more, and enjoy greater access to knowledge and freedom than at any other time In human history. Worldwide, we now number more than six billion people – partly because we are able, with varying degrees of success, to sustain that number. We have beaten back the Malthusians.

And there are other victories worth noting:

WE HAVE BEATEN BACK HUNGER

Through ongoing innovations in agriculture and the development of crops that produce a higher yield – India has become a net exporter of rice, for instance – we are feeding more people. Not the whole world, it must be said, but we have come a long way. According to a 2004 report from the United Nations, more than thirty countries reduced the number of hungry people by at least 25 percent during the 1990s.

WE HAVE BEATEN BACK DISEASE

I don’t want to sound overly optimistic here. AIDS continues to ravage Africa, and until we find ways to deal with that tragedy, a deep shadow will haunt our future. However, there is a genuine commitment to finding a cure for big killers like malaria and dysentery. In the past, a disease like SARS in China, Hong Kong, and Toronto would have wiped out tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. It didn’t. Because we collaborated globally to fight SARS, we lost only hundreds.

WE HAVE BEATEN BACK CHILD MORTALITY

Since the sixties, we have halved the rates of child mortality for most of the developing world, including China, India, and Brazil, and at the same time we have increased global life expectancy by seventeen years. The average number of children per woman in most of the developing world has gone from more than five to fewer than four, while child mortality in some countries has gone from between 10 and 40 percent of the population under five to less than 10 percent. According to Gapminder.org, “Today most countries in Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world have small families and infant mortality is low. We now have a completely different world!”

Related to this shift is the changing role of women. In a conversation I had with E.O. Wilson, the author of The Future of Life, he said, “If you want to do something for the environment, educate and liberate women,” because “when women are educated and liberated, the birth rate declines.”

The statistics suggest that this is exactly what is happening.

WE HAVE BEATEN BACK DEATH

Not literally, of course. I am not that optimistic! But for most of recorded history, life expectancy hovered around thirty years. Many died in infancy. If we survived, we married young, and died young. Even by the end of the nineteenth century, life expectancy was just over thirty-two years.

Today, average life expectancy worldwide is now sixty-five years.

One way to measure global progress is through the United Nations Human Development Index. The HDI measures a basket of factors including life expectancy, school enrolment, adult literacy, and gross domestic product per capita. Taken together, these offer a useful portrait of the development of a society and its ability to meet the needs of its citizens.

Looking at human development around the world since 1975, it is striking to see that with few exceptions the trends are all positive. Not only do the United States, Canada, and other Western nations show steady improvement, but more recently countries like India, China, and Brazil are moving in the same direction. With the glaring exception of Africa, we are moving to a more developed world. Of the thirtytwo countries still classified as low development, with an hdi of less than 0.5, thirty are in Africa. But public awareness of Africa’s situation is at least on an upward swing, a dramatic change in its long and tortured history with the West.

Another way to consider progress is to look at our commitment to reach certain objectives. At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, 189 countries adopted a global to-do list. The eight goals are to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and the empowerment of women; reduce child mortality by two-thirds; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and cultivate a global partnership for development. The fact that we have come together to articulate these goals, and committed ourselves to meeting them, gives a sense of the true nature of our human project.

Are we on target to get through the list by the deadline of2015? No. Are some places gelling worse, not better? Certainly, but very few. Are some developed countries negligent in meeting their obligations? Yes. But are we making progress? Absolutely. We may be behind schedule but we are mostly moving forward. For instance, based on current trends, child mortality rates will be 15 percent lower in 2015 than they were in 1990. If the trend continues, we won’t meet the Millennium goal until 2045. Thirty years late – but still a staggering human accomplishment, made possible by collective global collaboration.

Another way of measuring progress is to look at not only what we have defeated but what we have embraced. We have embraced wealth in all of its dimensions. In fact, one accomplishment of Massive Change was to reconfigure notions of wealth to include freedom, education, literacy, mobility, human rights, health, sanitation, communication, collaboration, science, technology, knowledge, and now, increasingly, sustainability.

To a large degree, the greatest challenge we face as a global culture – sustainability – is a consequence of our great success. We are six billion people today, not because we have failed in designing solutions to the problems we have faced, but because we have overcome many of the worst problems afflicting people around the world.

CIRCLING THE WAGONS

In the course of our work on Massive Change, we met an extraordinary man named Stewart Brand. An innovator and entrepreneur, he was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, a counter cultural landmark in the late sixties and early seventies. He led a campaign to convince NASA to make a photograph of the Earth from space, an image that has become a defining icon of our age.

Brand is also a founder of The Long Now Foundation, an effort to expand our cultural time horizon from the next fiscal quarter to the long term. He believes that when people think things are bad and getting worse, they do the usual things people do to protect themselves: They circle their wagons, hunker down, and close the border. They move to gated communities in their cities and in their hearts. They take what they can get while they can still get it.

However, if they come to understand that things are improving – that we are working together to make things better – they will invest in their communities and their businesses, in their children and their family, in their culture and education. They will do so because once they discover that things are actually getting better, enlightened self-interest will make them wantJo be part of the improvement. ..

I think we have been missing something quite important in assessing where we really stand, and this gap limits our forward momentum. We have been missing it because the old politics of Left versus Right are no longer relevant or helpful. A more collaborative approach is emerging. Rather than seeing things in terms of Left or Right, this approach seeks indicators of social and economic progress along a continuum running from retrograde to advanced.

To grasp the approach, think of an image whose pixels have been distributed to a million citizens worldwide. It is an image of collaboration, shared problem-solving, accessibility, and collective enterprise. It is a complex and beautiful image, perhaps the most beautiful image of all time. In contrast, our understanding of the world is driven by a media culture obsessed with violence and conflict. The tenor is one of negativity and crisis, which translates into pessimism and cynicism, and from there to apathy and paralysis. This negative world view can erode human agency and without that, we’re basically sunk.

As a global culture we are beginning to outgrow polarized and binary divisions but we still confuse the media with reality. If we were to publish a newspaper called Reality, it would be a mile thick. The first quarter-inch would arrive on your doorstep, scare the hell out of you, push the worst of human possibility into your world, make you want to lock your doors, inhibit your impulse toward community, and drive you to xenophobia, resentful and fearful of all the violent others determined to ruin your life. The rest of the mile of newspaper – the reality of our world, the part that never gets published – would be Massive Change, the story of how millions of people from every part of the world are working together to confront the dilemmas we face as a global society.

The media is our siren and our lullaby. In a neverending cycle, it shakes us up, alerts us to danger, then puts us back to sleep, reassured that someone else is taking care of things.

But what we need to be reminded of is our own potential. We have the power to make change on a global scale, to solve the problems we are facing today. We have the means to make the things we love more intelligent and more delightful. We have the imagination and the ability to invent new ways of sustainable living in advanced, courageous, and open societies.

All we need is the optimism to realize it.

I love the creative tie-in, very adorable. But as a market-eer, I need to stress that this barely scratched the surface of what marketing truly is. So, if you are indeed new to marketing like a newborn, digest this marketing lesson lightly with a giggle along with your marketing textbooks.

The basic script:
1. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: I am very rich. Marry me! – Thats Direct Marketing

2. Youre at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says: Hes very rich. Marry him. – Thats Advertising

3. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and get her telephone number. The next day, you call and say: Hi, Im very rich. Marry me. – Thats Telemarketing

4. Youre at a party and see gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink, you open the door of the car for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her ride and then say: By the way, Im rich. Will you marry me? – Thats Public Relations

5. Youre at a party and see gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says: You are very rich! Can you marry ! me? – Thats Brand Recognition

6. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: I am very rich. Marry me! She gives you a nice hard slap on your face. – Thats Customer Feedback

7. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: I am very rich. Marry me! And she introduces you to her husband. – Thats demand and supply gap

8. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say anything, another person come and tell her: Im rich. Will you marry me? and she goes with him – Thats competition eating into your market share

9. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say: Im rich, Marry me! your wife arrives. – Thats restriction for entering new markets

Then came websites like save.ca or coupon.ca, building their business on that need everyone has, the need to feel elite from the fact that s/he was able to get THAT at a BETTER PRICE! Amidst the pool of these overlapping coupon websites, came Groupon, the only one that has gotten it right, for both its advertisers and the shoppers.

Groupon offers coupons for products and services at a reduce price and the coupon are sent or saved to the subscriber’s account to be printed off and redeemed. Unlike other websites, Groupon’s marketing focus is on unusual and unexplored offering in niche markets. It has been successfully emptying my saving account with at least three to five interesting deals each month. While there are few restaurant deals, I have been eyeing on beauty deals with massages and spas; adventure packages such as rock climbing, kayaking and boat cruising; lifestyle enhancement with teeth whitening, boot camp sessions, and festivals; and gift finds with photography sessions and theatrical events.

See it for yourself, how Groupon is one of the hottest website in 2010!

Its business model is thriving on insisting two key value propositions. What appeal to its clients are the concepts of,

1. Collective Buying Power - Only if a predetermined minimal number of discounted product or service is bought, then the deal is on and everyone saves! This reduces much risk for the retailers by having a guaranteed volume of sales making up for the lost margin.

2. Seize the Day, Get the Deal – There’s only one main deal each day, the deal of the day. This compliments the first concepts by urging the purchases to reach the tipping point so that everyone gets the deal. What it really means to the retailer being advertised is, in a matter of 24 hours, its business is promoted to thousands of Groupon subscribers, and at least a minimal of agreed upon businesses will be generated overnight!

In sum, advertising, marketing and promotions are offered to retailers at guaranteed result at risk free cost!

Let Groupon marketing tell you more:

Learn How Groupon Works! from Brad Chmielewski on Vimeo.

The rationale behind Groupon`s business modeling strategized to create and deliver value to both seller and buyer is powerful yet simple. The details in Groupon’s structure and process, such as the write-up copywriting team, account managers or pricing specialists, etc, integrateably build a mutually beneficial relationship, win-win situation for all sides! I imagine that the retailers can meet with Groupon team to set an attractive pricing that prompts sales but also allow them to generate a profitable gross margin with the overall volume. The copy writers chimes in to detail conditions in the fine prints with expiry dates and redeeming policies that help retailers to streamline the committed subscribers into steady streams of business afterwards. A simple line of, “One Coupon Per Visit,” and “By Appointments only,” are all part of achieving that goal.

With its study on the demographics of the target market, Groupon economy certainly supports my claim that women love deals more! Here’s a rush of young, smart, educated, fun loving and working women who are available feeding off Groupon deals!

Some men joins volunteer services because they know nice, kind women volunteers. Here’s the gold rush of single, smart, educated, working and fun loving women existing in the Groupon community, how can men tap-in? Thanks to social media, now you can tap-in at Groupon Facebook, Deal Discussion Forum, Blog and Twitter!

Groupon makes a great marketing case study for 2010. The economics of Groupon is changing consumer behaviour and increase purchasing power at this wallet-tightening period, at the same time, utilizing the available web technology, Groupon is evolving into a sophisticated market intelligence service by tracking every single activity and transaction. Finally, quantifiable marketing ROI for the doubtful business owners who cut, instead of increasing marketing budget during hard times. I can’t wait to see how this venture will unfold and turn a page in the world. Perhaps in the distant future it will own a page in the business case study at Harvard!

The marketing and creative professional woke up quickly and tackle the challenge by infusing drama to engage the middle sphere of the brain -- the emotional brain.

Although, the selling power of sex still prevails but nobel market-eers can still rely on the tempting the audience with drama. Secretly, we all crave drama in our lives.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1dRKM-lkYk

Be your own judge and answer the following:

1. What was the element of feeling used?
Did you want to replay it again?

2. What did you expect the commercial to be about?
Did it exceed your expectation?

3. When were you hooked?
Did you watch every second of it?

4. Will you remember the product name when you go to the category’s aisle?
Does remembering the commercial prompt you to make the purchase?

It’s natural for us to be so primitive and be self-centred. That’s because the portion of our brain that’s the first to be developed during birth is connected to our spine and nervous system, designed to watch out for us. Good or bad, it makes us focus and pay attention to things that directly and immediately affect us. Hence, the effectiveness of words such as “you”, “me”, and “I”, in marketing messages.

Human have learned to develop the thinking brain over the years that allow us to evolve and be more sophisticated. However, being inundated with so much noise in this information age, the trend is back at targeting the brain that responds and acts the quickest, the primitive, self-centred brain.

And with years gone by, our primitive brain takes over the evolved brain that thinks for others, through being awaken, signaled and trained to perfect the “all about me” thinking by consumerism.

Consumerism not only focuses on self-centredness and creating selfish thinking, but at the same time brainwashes us into thinking any imperfection, ineffectiveness and unpleasantness should not be tolerated.

With the works of marketing, consumerism has portrayed a world where anything can be easily replaced because something out there will satisfy our every wish. We shall not have to put up with inferiority in product, service…or our significant others. The idea is that if anything is unsatisfactory, it can be replaced.
How does this destroy chivalry in modern days? The rippling effect of this senseless and cold behavioural and thinking pattern has slowly crept into us which stop us from thinking for others, being thoughtful and being patient with others.

If we are not able to think for others and be patient with others, how are men going to stop, hold the doors for women and say, “after you…”?

How are women going to appreciate the thoughtfulness in their gesture by stopping and smile while
saying “Thank you”?

Chivalry is Not Dead
Chivalry is not well alive either. Many have talked and talked this topic to death but only some openly suggested any possible solutions.

I believe both genders need to wake up and truly recognize the biological and physical differences between the two sexes that were developed to complement each other with their own unique strength. Also, both needs to understand that gender equality is created so that women are not denied rights that are applicable to men but not for women to develop double standards which past society have mistakenly adopted for too long.

More importantly, if you believe chivalry is a sacred function and virtue that need to be incorporated into our daily beahaviour, then let your children hear it and let your action speak louder than words to those around you.

What chivalrous displays have you encountered? What chivalrous acts have you done?
Let’s praise about them and be a force in restoring modern chivalry for a better future!

Feminist and gender equality movement were meant to make available the things that weren’t obtainable for women, such as broader career options, voting rights, etc. The workplace in particular, was the place to look for tangible changes for women and consequentially it directly affects the gender role in the household.
Feminists are those who are concerned with the issue and appreciate the reduced gap between the genders. However, extreme feminists take things to an unnecessary, or even insane, level by thinking women are better than men and men are just a tool for procreation.

These extreme feminists are probably those who scream at men who opened door for them out of politeness because they take it as a sign that the men think they are helpless and not equal to them.

Beside this extreme feminism, large female populations are mesmerized by the notion of girl-power and independent women, which they expect men to fully recognize and submit to.

Sure, let's all throw rocks at them. Why?

The demonstrations of girl-power and supreme independence are often expressed into “women not needing men at all.” Slowly, men pick up the signal and forget the fact that most women do not have the comparable strength to push a dead car to the shoulder on a highway; to suffer through a long and crowded subway ride without a seat wearing 4” heels; or to fight off robbers in dark alleys taking their purses by force.

And now, even small gestures out of respect and politeness such as door holding or helping with heavy luggage are disappearing.

Another destructive movement is how the majority of women go above and beyond to get validation from men of their emotional needs; by asking men to tolerate their mood swings and meet irrational demands.
It has been loudly announced that we are emotional and complicated therefore men who are supposedly be strong and take care of our needs will need to be understanding, tolerant and jump through the hoops to solve our problems and put us on a pedestal.

Let's See How Far He Will Go to Make Up For It!

However, when men show these “feminine” traits; troubled, anger, sadden or depressed by other aspects in their lives, these women find it undesirable to deal with their emotional needs and tell them to “suck it up or toughen up, you are a man!”

These women are confusing men with mixed signals! On one hand, they want men to recognize their girl-power prowess and independence, but on the other hand want to be put on a pedestal when mood swings and emotions strike. On top of that, when men ask for the same attentiveness and patience for their stressful and emotional time in return, they are scoffed at!

How do men carry on the tradition and virtues of chivalry when these women make the situations so unfavourable for them? Do women buy flowers for men to make it up to them?

How Consumerism Damaged Chivalry

#1: The only important things in life are money and sex

Since the dawn of time, men have always identified their status amongst others with the amount of resources they have. From land hungry warlords to gold crazed kings, modern men are not so different from them.

Modern men’s power, status, happiness and independence are all associated with money, because it is a tool to accomplish their ambitions. Between the two genders, men are most likely to evaluate another by how much he makes. It is the bottom line that signifies the person’s ability to buy, consume and provide to the family.

Foremost, to men money can “buy” the love of a woman, hence the viral sensation below.

Basic grade school formula: Girl = Money x Money

For a man, as long as he keeps on earning money, he can buy status, looks, respects and therefore “happiness”. After all, women love and needs resourceful and powerful men (see above). Why does he need to be bothered with any other thoughts except for being money hungry?

There is one other thing on his mind, as most worrisome moms like to tell their teenage daughters, S-E-X. Men have countered this notion by saying that “women want it just as much as we do!”

That just goes to show the whole world has been right about what occupies most of their minds and that men do see sex oh-so-ever important, since forever. There’s no pure danger with this fact until the world twists the thinking with modern day marketing with the use of sex in their marketing strategies.

A Very Naked Woman Selling Perfume for Men

If you look around, we are surrounded by movies, commercials and advertisement that compete for our attention and most of them are using sex as appeals one way or another. Women are being portrayed as sex objects and eye candies to be feasted on. And slowly, men start to objectify women as breasts, legs, buttocks or thighs, rather than human beings with intelligence and inner beauty.

E.g. Sunshine Girls Calendars from Toronto Sun.

An Everyday Must Read at Work by Many.

#2: Nice guys finish last

This is a decade old question; do nice guys really finish last with women?

The validity of this statement is a whole separate discussion by itself, but the implication of this thinking has impaired men’s judgment and twisted their minds into unconsciously wrecking the chivalrous spirit in them.
“Don’t be nice to women. No matter what they say, all they really want is a bad boy, a jerk.”

The successes in conquering numerous number of women in short-term relationships for these “James Bond” type men have converted and recruited many of their peers who were labeled nice, to ditch their old empathetic ways.

The popular idea altered the existence and survival of chivalry by turning men into insensitive narcissists who aim to detach themselves from feeling the true needs of others. Avoiding being labeled the “Nice Guy” at all cost, these men evolve to “jerks” and train themselves to practice these “jerk” behaviours.

So What?
The above two thinking brainwash men and lure them into a world that present zero incentive and the negative consequences of being thoughtful, kind, considerate, attentive and sweet toward women.
So what’s the danger of men seeing money and sex as the two most important things in life? And so what if men all want to be like the heart-breaking James Bond?

If money buys happiness, respect and love, including the love of a woman, why bother developing human traits that are not as desirable compared to money?

Being sold to the idea that women are no more than sex objects and eye candies, it alleviate men from the sense of duty to be caring, considerate and sweet as partners in relationships. As far as men are concerned, women are liberating their bodies and the only satisfaction to be quenched in a relationship is the sexual component. Again, this reinforces the redundancy to be nice person in general.

True that many women fancy the chance of being with James Bond because of his bad boy persona. But as all the movie endings suggested, there is never any forever ever after happy ending with this heartbreaker.
To end this portion in good faith to the male race, I am absolutely, very positively confident that not all men are like that. In fact, most of my male friends act chivalrous when the occasions call for it.

Obviously, there are not many men who are 100% bought into or are extreme models of the above aphorism, but there are those who are affected by these thinking. Maybe you haven’t experience them but you must have heard of them.

It’s hard not to be scared of the possible future with the way world is turning with the trend still heading the direction paved with these two thinking. With advertisement continue to exploit the use of women in sex suggestive context to appeal to men and training them to objectify women; people using money as the sole measurement for power and social status; and what become the futures of the younger generations?

How Women Ruined Chivalry >>

My journey to India was also a journey into the heart of human achievement. The astonishing architectures and monuments, beautiful history and mystical religious traditions amidst the poverty, corruption and pollution make the locals more interesting to interview and understand.

After reflecting and making peace of what happened to me in India, the conclusion I can make about the mentality of a lot of hardworking locals I have met there is;

Success is not everything, it is the only thing.

However success is defined by the individual. Most of the time, it is money and prestige. They will do whatever it takes, whatever they can to get there.

To take that and translating into my own life pursuit, striving for excellence in all that you believe in should define your success. At different stages of your pursuit, you will find rising events that call for you to give all that you got.

And when that moment arrives, confidence is a must, beauty is a plus and creativity is an edge!

Did you know?
Before you wake up every day, there are many people who are already wide awake working relentlessly to reach their goals and pursuing their dreams. Life is sort of fair in a way that, everyone gets 24 hours in a day, can you afford to waste your life by the minutes?
After reading “Whatever It Takes” by Bob Moawad, I have decide to select, reflect and practice some of the most inspiring quotes from, as Bob defined them as, each call to excellence in life.

Here they are for you to click!

The Gift
The Freedom
The Dream
The Goal
The Plunge
The Mistakes
The Passion
The Commitment
The Attitude
The Drive
The Esteem
The Edge
The Standards

Choosing the book “Whatever It Takes” to accompany me on my trip to India was definitely a good choice. The locals and the various settings and sceneries in India have helped put these quotes into the most appropriate context. They have given the quotes shapes and sounds as burned images in my mind and I hope they never fade.