The greatest possession we have costs nothing, it's known as love.

The above quote has always stuck in my mind, and was said by the popular Kentucky-born jazz musician Brian G. Jett (although it has been said a countless other times by many more influential people, and probably originated long before the "Jett" was born). I thought I'd write a blog post about it, .....as you do obviously....

----
----

Friday night.

For the first time for as long as I can remember...I am at home. I am not out socialising and having a good time with friends. No, I'm stuck in front of the TV watching Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, guest staring Dev Patel (of Skins and, most recently, Slumdog Millionaire). It's about 11pm and I am absolutely beat and thinking of going to bed.

What is wrong with me, I wonder. It's Friday night, it's before midnight....and I'm thinking of going to bed?!!

I'm determined not to be a boring old fart (it's English slang meaning "boring somebody", for those of you who don't know), so I decided to check out this "Slumdog Millionaire" film online. YES, I watched it illegally and I'm not proud to say it! "Slumgdog Millionaire" tells the, what i think, "heart-warming" tale of the young boy from the Indian slums, Jamal (Dev Patel), and his story of how he managed to know the answers to get right up to the 10 million rupees answer on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire- or as Anil Kapoor, playing the host, puts it "Who wants to be...a MULLINIR!". Love it!

Directed by Danny Boyle (who's films I absolutely love, check out Trainspotting, Sunshine or 28 Days Later), it is a real gem of a film, with a good moral story behind it - as much as money can make you happy, love conquers all. In fact, the only reason Jamal ever went on the show was to find his long-lost teen love, Latika (Freida Pinto).

This kinda got me thinking....and hence the reason for this blog post and the use of that fantastic quote. Plus I think it's fitting as we just had Valentine's Day (i didn’t get anything in case you wondered nor expect or want anything...).

My thoughts....

Can love really conquer all material wealth?

Does having love outweigh having money?

Do we need love, in whatever form, to SURVIVE as complex human beings in our current social hierachy?



They say it's lonely at the top, whatever top that may be. I have to agree with those people. I think when you're at the top, you get sucked into the whole situation - money, material goods, power, responsibility. You lose track of whats real in your life and what really matters - sure you could survive without that flash car, people all around the world do it every day. Sure you could live without £2,000 or £10,000 in your pocket every month, over half the world - thats more 3 BILLION people - are thought to live on just £2 a day.

Could you live without your mothers love though? Could you live with the thought of knowing that you can never "love" or have feelings for anyone ever again?

WAIT for a second.

Take a look at Maslow's Hierachy of Needs - http://www.abraham-maslow.com/m_motivation/Hierarchy_of_Needs.asp - which says that in terms of what we need in order to become Self Actualized beings, that is what I believe to be the true potentional of a person, we need Money before Love? In today's society, is material wealth more important to someone than having the knowledge that if you ever need help, someone is there to give it?

I think Valentine's Day is a good example of these two "needs" - i.e. Money and Love. The whole reason that this day was dreamt up was because people wanted to show their love with one another. But do we REALLY need a specific day of the year to do it? Surely, if it's true love...then it lasts all year round. Love can be shown when you hold someone close and wisper "I truly love you" in their ear. Or that feeling that you get when you hold hands with them...

My conclusion - nothing but a commercialised day which people spend their finances on to "show" their love to their other partner.

Love doesn't need to be represented by a diamond ring, a bunch of the best roses in town, or a one-off meal in a fancy restaurant that costs a month's salary. Love is higher than that. I think, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, that the best gifts are the ones that mean the most to the receiver and the giver, not how elaborate or expensive it is. For example, doesn't the memory of getting a picture album showing your best pictures together stick in your mind more than the roses he/she got you? Doesn't that picture of you that he/she drew of you, which took them days to do, feel better to receive than a gold necklace? Doesn't it feel nice to read a love poem that your partner has written you, rather than receive a book of 100 love poems and stories written by a best-selling author?

If you think it doesn't, then you my friend are consumed in the world of material goods. Sure its nice to show off to your friends about, and it makes you feel very special...but wheres the effort and the REAL love in them?

I think "Slumdog Millionaire" really points this out - and skip to the next paragraph if you dont want me to ruin the end of the film for you. Even though Jamal wins the 20 million rupees on the gameshow, whats more important to him is that his girl was watching. His girl never stopped loving him, and to be reunited at the end and be in each others arms is something money can't buy.

What I'm trying to say here, if you've managed to follow my random collection of thoughts (I tried my best to put them into organised and understandable paragraphs), is that love means a lot, especially to me. And I don't JUST mean love that you can get and feel from a boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/fiancée....platonic love between friends and family too. Love has been around since the first mating of two concious beings - monkeys, humans, cats..whatever. Love is what brought us some of Shakespeare's finest works...Love is what brings together torn-apart families. We don't NEED a specific day of the year so share that with each other.

Love, in whatever form, is worth more than any money can buy....

A final thought, and a question that if you read this post you should be able to know what I think the answer is...

Is love really shown by how much your partner spent on that necklace for your anniversary, or how tight he holds you when he's hugging you?

Is love really shown by how much you treat your friends when you're out together or on birthdays, or how they can pick you up from when you're feeling depressed and unhappy?

----

----

All the best,

Dave

You Learn More from your Mistakes than Your Successes

Listen up guys and gals. This might be my first proper post on here, but I think if you read it through, absorb it and put it to action, this may well be very beneficial to you. Well...I can only hope eh? :-)

--------
--------


We all make mistakes.

It's in our nature as humans to not always be perfect, and anyone who ever says they are is a BSer and a liar. Obama isn't perfect, Einstein wasn't perfect, even Her Majesty The Queen isn't perfect. One thing I do know however is that by making mistakes, we become better people because of the experience.

The blog title is perhaps the most important life lesson I can think of. That you learn more from your mistakes than your successes.

Just think about it for a second.



Say it again. You learn more from your mistakes than your successes.



When I first entered the working world, starting with a part-time job at a tile shop in Crayford, Kent, I was a young, naive boy - I still am at the age of 18/19 and I think everyone still is at this age- I knew nothing about sales, customer care, working in a team properly, managing clients, and generally anything that you need to know to be able to function without someone guiding you with great care, every step of the way.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way, right up until the time I left for my position as BDM at More Than Healthy. Perhaps I would enter the customers address wrong because I didn't ask them to spell it, assuming I knew it already. I might have wrongly re-stocked an SKU, which caused a huge mess up on our computer systems...meaning we would be down on stock when it came to Stocktake. Sometimes I over promised, or misinformed the customer about a particular guarantee or quality of a product....I could go on.

Everytime I made a mistake, my manager Becky (or any other team member infact) was there to tell me what I did wrong, and I listened as intently as I could. You feel bad when you make mistakes, you say to yourself you'll never do it again and that you'll remember to correct it before you see it going wrong again. I wrote a lot of my mistakes down on a notepad (I felt that it would allow me to remember them easier).

Perhaps it's the emotions we feel when we make mistakes - the feeling of guilt, regret or humiliation that make the event so much more impacting on our working habits/skills/whatever you want to call them - and the reason why we don't remember our successes as much is because the feeling of being good at something absorbs us into the moment and we don't really remember how we managed to do it and how we can pass on how to be successful to our protegés.

This isn't to say we don't learn from our successes. When we are successful, we take the good points away from the experience. When I made my first sale at More Than Healthy to a large company, I learnt that it was important to maintain and build an excellent relationship with the buyer before they would consider something. This isn't always true of course, as in some instances you can just give it the ol' "gift of the gab" and they'll buy it. I learnt that money coming into the business, made the business more profitable as it expanded the opportunities for us to do advertising, marketing and PR (duh!).

But. And a big but. All these successes were, more or less, based on my experiences when I was unsuccessful.

I suppose you could do one big circle and say that "Success is based on learning from failures..and a lot of hard work". Just think about it. When it really comes down to it, you can get lucky some of the time. It was luck that allowed me to sell £500 of the 10% commission stuff in one day at Topps, just because I was there at the right time to deal with the customer. It was luck, and a few good connections, that allowed me to get to know Summer Rayne Oakes, one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to sustainability and environmental issues, and someone I've definitely learnt more from than a book could bloody ever teach me!

When we make mistakes, I've learnt it's important we acknowledge them first of all. How can we learn from a mistake if we can't say to ourselves "Ok, I f***ed up."? Keith Chegwin said that and recovered from alcohlism, to come back and write a best-selling book. When I went to my first big wholesalers sales meeting in Nottingham, back in December, and in my haste to be successful and make our first big sale, I made a deal there and then to sell our product at a far lower price than what we sell to everyone else at. My directors in the business were not happy, and I had realised I had fucked up. The deal ended up being blown apart and we never got it.

I don't look at the "what-ifs" because that doesn't further my understanding of how to not make the same mistake again. I now know I shouldn't have made the deal without consulting my superiors first, and I took this away from it knowning that next time, no matter if it is in this company or not, I would seek permission to do the deal first.

Next time I had a meeting with a distributor, I made sure that my superiors were happy with the deal before it went through. We got it, and I felt successful.

I learnt more about how to run a company and do sales from my failure, than I had because of my success, and my success was BASED on my previous failure.

I feel like I could go on here, but I think my arms are a bit tired now and the post is getting a bit long.

If you take anything, ANYTHING away from this blog post, take away the following two sentences because they may be of use to you no matter what you do.



1. You learn more from your mistakes than your successes.
--- Admit the mistake, know what went wrong, and take that way as an experience.


2. Most successes are based on failures.
--- You can't expect to be successful immediately. There are a select few of people who have had success without failures, but I can't really think of anyone of the top of my head. When you are successful, realise the errors of the things that happened on the way to being successful and learn from them.



Life is a big lesson. I realise that at such a young age, I shouldn't really be saying these kind of things because I've only been alive almost 19 years. That doesn't mean I don't have the experience of someone aged 25.

----
----

So yeah, I hope that helps out one way or another.

Constructive comments, praise or criticism about this blog post is welcomed. Because hey, if I don't get them...how am I supposed to be a great blogger if I don't know what people think should be changed (i.e. my failures)?

All the best and until next time,

Dave Cocozza