Gordon Alexander
August 18, 2000, 07:55 AM
Dien has written about Newton’s Laws, and I hope he writes some more, I find it very interesting.
One of those laws has to do with a body in motion will remain in the direction it is going until acted upon by an outside force.
WE humans have outside forces and inside ones too.
I’d like to share a few of the outside forces that have shaped my life, especially in the last few years.
These forces could come from anywhere at anytime, even from a post on a forum like this one…
In fact, one force that IMPACTED me was a post on my old forum…it changed the flow of my life. So here is that old post and my response to it.
Posted by Anthony Blake on July 27, 1998 at 07:18:29:
In Reply to: Mary Campbell's CAVE. posted by Gordon Alexander on July 26, 1998 at 23:13:14:
Gordon...
After reading this and many of your messages on this board, after being entertained and transported by your words, something struck me that I hope maybe you see too.
My friend, I consider you an able marketer, but to be honest, I feel that you are toiling in the wrong field. You see, you are a natural storyteller, you have the gift of "gab," the ability to spin yarns, tell stories, recount memories and adventures that geniuses like Mark Twain had.
Your stories are filled with metaphor, with truths, with lessons learned from the heart and shared with love and joy...
And so, I offer this simple and I believe loving recommendation... marketing may be good, but the world needs more storytellers... and you my friend should investigate every avenue as to providing your well honed product to the masses...
I see you in the vein of Garrison Keillor, Tom Bodett, or Calvin Trillin... I can imagine your voice, on radio or tape, your words in a printed book or magazine short story, recounting stories of your childhood, of lessons learned, of the foolish things we adults sometimes do... of times both good and bad, of the joys and disappointments in life, of seeing the beaming face of a young child or the streaming tears of a saddened senior...
Done right you could make Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio as famous as Lake Wobegon...
I see this as your TRUE calling, and I know that others see this too... You have the ability to make your world come alive in the readers minds... of taking them down paths filled with entertainment and lessons...
Your fortune, my friend, is laying right before you... you have the ability to right volumes with massive ease, to become the next sage that we can learn life lessons from...
I know that I'll be the first person in line at my local Barnes & Noble to buy your book... or to read your stories in the New Yorker...
Just a suggestion from a friend that sees a diamond in the rough that's begging to be shaped and formed and polished and set out for everyone to discover its magnificent glory...
Success!!!
Tony Blake
And here was my response to the post:
Thank you Tony Blake,
It is where I would like to head too. Have much work scattered throughout the house. Now, do I need a good agent? Or is this the type of work that you can self-publish? I guess I need to watch the Canfield tape?
Would like to pursue this as time allows, therefore I am NOW for sale. To the highest bidder. Any offers?
I'm going to print all these nice things out and head down to the cave later.
Thank you Tony, and everyone for the nice comments.
Gordon Alexander
This was a couple of years ago. Now, Tony Blake is a MASTER marketer, and as I’ve posted recently at another forum, if marketing were golf, then Tony Blake would be a Jack Nicklaus type, and me? I’d be more of a Rod Funseth…and if you said who?
Then RIGHT ON.
I’m not a marketer, although Tony was right, I am an able marketer. I dabble. I am not a pro. I had the good fortune to learn from a pro, and I’ll get to Ben Suarez in a minute.
But when someone like Tony Blake says these kinds of things, you have to take them into serious consideration. And I did.
So, Tony Blake was one of those outside forces that deflected my direction. He had an IMPACT on me, and still does. I am, after all a student of the Masters. So I learn all I can about my mentors.
There could be a post here at sowpub that might impact you the same way as Tony’s did me a couple of years ago. Maybe even change the course of your life too.
I guess it was about 6 years ago, Ben Suarez stood on a stage at Walsh College and offered me a position with his company.
Now I’ve written extensively about that, at first I turned SCI down. Then did some work under contract and eventually I went inside for a short while to LEARN everything I could.
I am not the corporate type. I knew my days inside SCI were numbered from the start, so I worked hard to learn, for myself, all the workings of a major marketing company.
There were three people who had a huge Impact on me at SCI, the first was Rod Napier, who runs the company and is one of the ELITE marketers in the world.
Rod has written copy that pulls in millions of dollars a year, and has a control that has never been beat.
And I had the good fortune to have Rod looking over my shoulder and making suggestions. LOOK, you can’t pay for that kind of education.
The other men were Paul “Chip” Klingaman, an Executive Director and my NPGS NEWSLETTER editor, Chris Yochens.
I owe all three of these men a great big THANK YOU, for they taught me more in one year than I ever could have learned in a lifetime, I think.
See, what happens to most people when they take a job, is that they learn that job.
But I was free to roam SCI, taking any and all assignments that others didn’t want.
I got to talk to and learn from ALL the different divisions. And I was an oddity at SCI.
They didn’t quite know what to do with me, because I was the proverbial round peg, and they had a whole bunch of square holes to fill…but their dilemma was my good fortune.
So, I learned and studied and EDUCATED myself, while getting paid to boot. Life was good.
But the reason Ben Suarez asked me to join his company that day at Walsh College, was because I did a project and he detected some “talent”, he saw, perhaps the rough diamond like Tony Blake alludes to.
These were two incidents instigated by other people that changed my direction and course.
I’ll have more to say on this later, but I’d like to hear from you, what kinds of outside sources, events, people, etc. changed the direction of your life?
I know Julie Jordan Scott has an interesting story, one which I’ve read at her site, about how a death threat (or two) was an outside force that changed her direction.
Would you care to share yours?
Gordon Alexander
PS. I’ll have more on this later, I owe Tony Blake, and perhaps some day I can pay him back. You just don’t know where the outside forces that impact your life are going to come from…so keep reading…it could be right here at sowpub.
One of those laws has to do with a body in motion will remain in the direction it is going until acted upon by an outside force.
WE humans have outside forces and inside ones too.
I’d like to share a few of the outside forces that have shaped my life, especially in the last few years.
These forces could come from anywhere at anytime, even from a post on a forum like this one…
In fact, one force that IMPACTED me was a post on my old forum…it changed the flow of my life. So here is that old post and my response to it.
Posted by Anthony Blake on July 27, 1998 at 07:18:29:
In Reply to: Mary Campbell's CAVE. posted by Gordon Alexander on July 26, 1998 at 23:13:14:
Gordon...
After reading this and many of your messages on this board, after being entertained and transported by your words, something struck me that I hope maybe you see too.
My friend, I consider you an able marketer, but to be honest, I feel that you are toiling in the wrong field. You see, you are a natural storyteller, you have the gift of "gab," the ability to spin yarns, tell stories, recount memories and adventures that geniuses like Mark Twain had.
Your stories are filled with metaphor, with truths, with lessons learned from the heart and shared with love and joy...
And so, I offer this simple and I believe loving recommendation... marketing may be good, but the world needs more storytellers... and you my friend should investigate every avenue as to providing your well honed product to the masses...
I see you in the vein of Garrison Keillor, Tom Bodett, or Calvin Trillin... I can imagine your voice, on radio or tape, your words in a printed book or magazine short story, recounting stories of your childhood, of lessons learned, of the foolish things we adults sometimes do... of times both good and bad, of the joys and disappointments in life, of seeing the beaming face of a young child or the streaming tears of a saddened senior...
Done right you could make Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio as famous as Lake Wobegon...
I see this as your TRUE calling, and I know that others see this too... You have the ability to make your world come alive in the readers minds... of taking them down paths filled with entertainment and lessons...
Your fortune, my friend, is laying right before you... you have the ability to right volumes with massive ease, to become the next sage that we can learn life lessons from...
I know that I'll be the first person in line at my local Barnes & Noble to buy your book... or to read your stories in the New Yorker...
Just a suggestion from a friend that sees a diamond in the rough that's begging to be shaped and formed and polished and set out for everyone to discover its magnificent glory...
Success!!!
Tony Blake
And here was my response to the post:
Thank you Tony Blake,
It is where I would like to head too. Have much work scattered throughout the house. Now, do I need a good agent? Or is this the type of work that you can self-publish? I guess I need to watch the Canfield tape?
Would like to pursue this as time allows, therefore I am NOW for sale. To the highest bidder. Any offers?
I'm going to print all these nice things out and head down to the cave later.
Thank you Tony, and everyone for the nice comments.
Gordon Alexander
This was a couple of years ago. Now, Tony Blake is a MASTER marketer, and as I’ve posted recently at another forum, if marketing were golf, then Tony Blake would be a Jack Nicklaus type, and me? I’d be more of a Rod Funseth…and if you said who?
Then RIGHT ON.
I’m not a marketer, although Tony was right, I am an able marketer. I dabble. I am not a pro. I had the good fortune to learn from a pro, and I’ll get to Ben Suarez in a minute.
But when someone like Tony Blake says these kinds of things, you have to take them into serious consideration. And I did.
So, Tony Blake was one of those outside forces that deflected my direction. He had an IMPACT on me, and still does. I am, after all a student of the Masters. So I learn all I can about my mentors.
There could be a post here at sowpub that might impact you the same way as Tony’s did me a couple of years ago. Maybe even change the course of your life too.
I guess it was about 6 years ago, Ben Suarez stood on a stage at Walsh College and offered me a position with his company.
Now I’ve written extensively about that, at first I turned SCI down. Then did some work under contract and eventually I went inside for a short while to LEARN everything I could.
I am not the corporate type. I knew my days inside SCI were numbered from the start, so I worked hard to learn, for myself, all the workings of a major marketing company.
There were three people who had a huge Impact on me at SCI, the first was Rod Napier, who runs the company and is one of the ELITE marketers in the world.
Rod has written copy that pulls in millions of dollars a year, and has a control that has never been beat.
And I had the good fortune to have Rod looking over my shoulder and making suggestions. LOOK, you can’t pay for that kind of education.
The other men were Paul “Chip” Klingaman, an Executive Director and my NPGS NEWSLETTER editor, Chris Yochens.
I owe all three of these men a great big THANK YOU, for they taught me more in one year than I ever could have learned in a lifetime, I think.
See, what happens to most people when they take a job, is that they learn that job.
But I was free to roam SCI, taking any and all assignments that others didn’t want.
I got to talk to and learn from ALL the different divisions. And I was an oddity at SCI.
They didn’t quite know what to do with me, because I was the proverbial round peg, and they had a whole bunch of square holes to fill…but their dilemma was my good fortune.
So, I learned and studied and EDUCATED myself, while getting paid to boot. Life was good.
But the reason Ben Suarez asked me to join his company that day at Walsh College, was because I did a project and he detected some “talent”, he saw, perhaps the rough diamond like Tony Blake alludes to.
These were two incidents instigated by other people that changed my direction and course.
I’ll have more to say on this later, but I’d like to hear from you, what kinds of outside sources, events, people, etc. changed the direction of your life?
I know Julie Jordan Scott has an interesting story, one which I’ve read at her site, about how a death threat (or two) was an outside force that changed her direction.
Would you care to share yours?
Gordon Alexander
PS. I’ll have more on this later, I owe Tony Blake, and perhaps some day I can pay him back. You just don’t know where the outside forces that impact your life are going to come from…so keep reading…it could be right here at sowpub.
