Now: do you think this is an actual event, a recreated actual event, or fiction? Why? Please share your thoughts in the comments below before reading further.

Here’s my take on it:

I’m pretty sure it’s fiction. And I’m concerned that there’s no text with this film, and no credits at the end–in other words, no accountability. I have no objection to filming heartwarming works of fiction. I love that sort of thing, from Frank Capra’s “You Can’t Take it With You” to “Fried Green Tomatoes” to “Life Is Beautiful” and “Jude”. But all of these are clearly marketed as story, not fact.

In my opinion, this film is specifically designed to make most viewers believe this was a real event.

And I have trouble with that. I feel its “story-ness” should be disclosed, and we should also know who produced the film. I’ll tell you why in a moment, but first, here’s how I reached my conclusion.

Why You Can’t Necessarily Trust Your Eyes

Because I’m trained in journalism and have worked for decades in marketing, I ask hard questions about what is and isn’t real, what people’s motivations or agendas are, and how to filter information based on what’s really going on versus what the speaker or writer or photographer or filmmaker is trying to get you to think is going on.

If you watch any crime movies from the 1930s through 1950s, there’s a pretty good chance that the detective will turn to the suspect and shout, “photos don’t lie!” But here’s the thing: THAT is a lie. Photos can lie in what they choose to include or not. A famous example: the close-ups of a statue of Saddam Hussein being felled by a jubilant (and apparently huge) Baghdad crowd were discredited by wide-angle shots showing only a couple of hundred people, many of them US soldiers rather than locals. The close-ups were propaganda, not truth, even though the photos themselves were real and unretouched. And even in the 1950s–for that matter, even in the 1850s–there was a whole industry around photo alteration. This was true in film as well; ever hear the expression “left on the cutting room floor”? The technologies of photo editing and film editing go back to the earliest days of photography and filmmaking.

In today’s digital world, tools like Photoshop and video editors have transformed those doable but difficult tasks into something incredibly easy, and only an expert will be able to tell. So in this era, we can never trust that a picture or a movie is accurate unless we were there when it was shot. Thus, unfortunately, we need to bring a certain amount of critical analysis when we view any video, any photograph.

And through this lens (pun intended, I confess), when I watch this video, I immediately discard any idea that we’re watching real-time true-story footage.

Why?

7 Reasons Why I Think It’s a Fake

1. It’s waaaay too slick. This is professionally shot and carefully edited, by a skilled camera operator using high-resolution equipment, tripods, and lighting to produce footage as good technically as anything coming out of Hollywood. In real life, this would have been shot on a cell phone, held in a hand that shook at least a little. It’s on a moving boat, after all.
2. Much of the footage is underwater or behind the boat the dog was riding, yet no other boats are visible.
3. When the dog slips off the deck into the water, no people are around. If anyone were filming an actual event, we’d see some kind of rescue attempt, and we certainly would not see the boat blithely continuing away, stranding the pet. At least the crew of the videography boat would get involved.
4. It’s just too convenient that cameras happened to focus on all the key places. And yes, that’s a plural. There was one camera focused on the boat deck and later on the swimming dog, and at least one other one focused underwater at the dolphin and shark.
5. If the shark were really close enough to attack the dog, it would have gone after the dolphin too. Giant sharks don’t care much about “collateral damage.”
6. It strains credulity that the boat would be waiting, unmoving, in still water, just when the dolphin deposits the dog on the tailgate, considering there are plenty of waves in the dolphin-carries-dog footage.
7. I’m suspicious of the site it’s on, something called TopBuzz, which I’ve never heard of. I didn’t notice at first when I clicked the link from a Facebook message that it had a monstrously complex tracking URL, too. Uh-oh! I’ve stripped those tracking codes out of the URL as it’s posted here. To its credit, it doesn’t try to get me to watch all sorts of salacious videos, and a search for complaints brought up only questions about its relationships with content creators, not viewers. And I checked for viruses after having the page open for several hours while writing this, and it came up clean.

I’m also skeptical that this is a later recreation of a true event, although I’d grant that maybe a 10 percent chance. Why? Because much of the footage “documented” events with no witnesses. Unless one of the human crew is fluent in either dog or dolphin language, neither party could have told the story. And the dog might not even know about the shark threat. Certainly, the humans in the boat that drove away would have no idea. Since we don’t know who produced this or how to get in touch with them, we have no way of knowing.

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World
Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.

So instead, I’ll encourage you to hunt up three movies I’ve seen about people who gained power—and used that power to empower others. I saw these over a period of months, and not with the idea that I’d be reviewing them here. So these are mini-reviews.

“RBG,” the movie about “Notorious” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, covers her amazing backstory using law to promote women’s rights. I hadn’t known much of this history and am in awe of what she achieved long before she was on the Court. I also really like it that she could be friends with superconservative Justice Antonin Scalia; they were opera buddies. I believe that we make peace in part by reaching out to those who think differently than we do.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” the Mister Rogers movie, Watching the show occasionally with my daughter in the late 1980s, it was obvious that he was totally committed to children’s empowerment and acceptance of diversity. But I didn’t know what an activist he was, or about his own background, or about how the show format was shaped by a mix of serendipity and very deliberate choices. I loved discovering his passion to make a difference AND his choice to have as much fun as possible in the process. Fred Rogers was a remarkable man, and many of his messages resonate especially loudly in the past year and a half, to get our country back on track in an era where civility and respect seem to be very little valued.

“The Judge” may be hard to track down but it’s worth the effort. Wonderful documentary (in Arabic, with subtitles) about the first woman family law judge in the Arab world, a Palestinian. Not an easy role for any woman, even in Palestine, where attitudes about women’s education are more enlightened than in some other countries. She had very powerful opponents and even lost her ability to try cases for a while. It was interesting to me that the “courtroom” she presides over is really an office suite, where she meets with individuals and small groups and works out equitable arrangements for alimony, spousal rights of women, etc., all in conformance with Islamic law.

Two of these three are big releases and are getting traction at the box office. These movies proof films with a positive social agenda and without sex or violence can be commercially successful—and I celebrate that. I have no particular objection to sex in movies, but it should be integral to the story and shouldn’t be the reason to go see a film. And I do object to violence, of which there’s far too much on the big screen. If we want people to act positively in the world, our entertainment needs to model that! So it’s great that I can’t think of any violent scene in these three movies at the moment. If there was any, it was mild and in-context enough that it didn’t stick in my memory.

About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).

Watch the 3-minute video at the top of Expand Furniture’s Smart Space-Saving Ideas page. Don’t multitask; you need to see people going through the few seconds of converting a piece of furniture from one use to another, or storing it in tiny spaces when it’s not needed.

I found three takeaways for you in this short video:

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The Age of the Platform by Phil Simon (Motion Publishing, 2011)
 
The Internet is constantly changing. And yet, this book that was written (and rushed into print) seven years ago is still remarkably current. Some of the specifics have changed, certainly. Twitter doubled the maximum size of a Tweet about a year ago. Facebook abandoned API support for posting by third-party applications just this month.

But most of the principles remain the same, and all companies in his “Gang of Four”—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—not only remain robust but have continued to expand. And each also shows some significant problems.

Even in 2011, Simon saw Amazon as a company offering integrated shopping across many categories, far beyond books. Many people still thought of Amazon as a bookstore back then; now it’s a retail giant more akin to Sears; it even owns Whole Foods. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, personally owns the Washington Post. Yet anticompetitive practices and less-than-friendly labor policies continue to show up.

Several years after Steve Jobs’ death, Apple continues to innovate—and develop non-price-sensitive markets—in computers, telephony, music, and other areas. It’s now the most highly valued company in the world. Yet that value could tumble at any time. Simon discusses why companies like Microsoft and MySpace have lost the competitive edge. Apple, especially on the hardware side, is a company I personally see as vulnerable.

Facebook has grown its user base enormously and competes with Google not only as an advertising venue but also in video (Facebook Live), images (Instagram), and chat. But as in 2011, it still faces privacy scandals, and now, content scandals like trollbots as well.

Google, in turn, has a social network (Google Plus) very similar to Facebook, although nowhere near as popular. And Google also has moved outside the computer world. While continuing to dominate search and (via Youtube) online video, it’s also gone into such wildly divergent technologies as driverless cars. You could argue that this is a logical extension of products like Google Maps and Google Earth. But it’s a pretty big leap from GPS to vehicle operation. The driverless vehicle project has had its share of pitfalls, too—including a fatality. It wouldn’t shock me if Google bought Tesla at some point; I see many parallels between these two companies.

In the 2011 book, Simon is enthusiastic about open APIs that allow outside developers to easily build new utility into the platforms. Since I was reading his book just as Facebook was restricting posting access from third-party apps such as HootSuite, I wrote to him and asked what he thought of the changes. He directed me to a blog post he wrote in 2012: https://www.philsimon.com/blog/platforms/the-gradually-closing-platform-strategy/

But enough about what’s changed since this book came out. Let’s discuss the content that remains relevant.

Simon argues that these four giants—three of which were recent startups (mid-1990s to mid-2000s)—got their preeminence because they switched from one-trick ponies (Amazon=books, Apple=computer hardware, Facebook=seeing what friends were up to, Google=Internet search) to much broader capabilities integrated in a “platform”: an “ecosystem” of interrelated applications and capabilities that allows a user to perform many and diverse functions without leaving…that can add new capability simply by adding “planks” either developed internally or integrated from outside providers (pp. 22-23). Successful platforms keep raising the bar on technology, both to create more powerful user experiences and to scale up; they’re happy to build more capacity than they need now, so that it’s ready when they need it—and until then, they can use the excess to charge other companies for services (e.g., pp. 134-135).

Key to this model is the concept of “prosumer” (p. 6): a person who both produces and consumes. The Gang of Four have made us all into prosumers; each of us creates lots of content, and consumes even more. And every time we do something in either of those roles, at least one of these four companies is likely monetizing it somehow. Even if there’s no cost to the user (and that’s often the case), someone is collecting marketable data…selling ads…and integrating those two functions to serve ads directly related to that user’s activity patterns: searches, clicks, photo tags, downloads, video views, etc. (e.g., p. 122). For me, as a business writer and consultant, and for my wife, as a novelist, this often has humorous results; we’ll see ads for things we have no direct interest in. But for the average consumer, the computer can seem scarily prescient, serving ads for a new freezer after mentioning on social media that you had no room in your current one, for instance.

Another key is the network effect: the more people use certain technologies or platforms, the more useful they are to other users. If you had email in the early 1990s, you had a tiny circle of contacts—and you needed different email addresses to connect with people on different systems. And you did this from a desktop computer in a fixed location, over slow and balky dial-up phone lines. I got my first email address in 1987: a long string of numbers running over Compuserve. I gave up my account within a few months and didn’t try again until 1994. By that time, AOL made it easy to do email. And then the original Netscape browser made it just as easy to explore the nascent Internet. And then there was enough critical mass to pursue broadband, which in turn made it possible to do far more online.

One thing Simon doesn’t really discuss but fits in very well with his concept of platform is the interrelationship between number of users and ease of use. The whole idea of the platform is to make it easy and comfortable for users to stay within the system, as Google and Facebook do so well (e.g., pp. 113-117)—and as AOL tried to do but failed once Netscape opened up the rest of the online world (pp. 181-183). When the system is easy to use, more people use it. When a user base reaches critical mass, developers make it easier. Thus, with more users, developers figured out how to send email across different networks, and most people could get by with just one email address. And as email became the standard, and more people turned to the Internet for information, more websites sprang up, and ways to exchange information over the Net became more sophisticated. You could send documents! You could FTP videos and other large files! You could check your email from a remote location! And as first Apple and then Google built a user base for smartphones while the cloud allowed off-site data storage, suddenly you could do all this on a device that fit in your pocket, creating another revolutionary wave.

Much of this is because of something he does discuss, in some detail: successful platforms innovate constantly. Google even requires employees to spend up to 20 percent of their time on non-core projects (p. 120)—and that’s led to many new products. Simon shows 78 different Google application icons (p. 117), a number that’s probably much higher now.

Why are these platforms so successful? They make things easier for the user, who has to master far fewer interfaces. They encourage collaboration and build community. They put a lot of resources into both technology infrastructure and technology innovation. They’re willing to try things that fail in order to get to things that win big (p. 200)—and are preparing for Web 3.0, the “semantic web” (p. 239).
He also looks at why some other companies didn’t achieve this type of success, and what the risks are to these four giants as they become larger and more bureaucratic.

No matter what type of business you’re in, you’re likely to find this book useful in understanding how business in the first quarter of the 21st century is different than even the last quarter of the 20th.

About Shel & This Newsletter

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Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies by Nikos Mourkogiannis

About Shel & This Newsletter

I want to share with you some of the amazing people—I call them “practical visionaries—profiled in my award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. These folks are doing incredibly exciting work in bringing about a regenerative, thriving world. By the time this series is over, I can safely guarantee that you’ll be glad you’ve “met” a few of them. After each excerpt, you’ll find a brief comment from me, adding more context since you haven’t read the whole book yet.

Think about this: Whatever engineering challenge we face, nature has probably already solved it.

Imagine the fortunes awaiting companies that can roll out a construction material as strong and lightweight as spider silk…a desalination process as cheap and effective as the one that mangrove roots use…a water collection method as powerful as the one used by the Namib desert beetle. John Kremer talked about “biological marketing”—so why not biological engineering, also known as biomimicry? It’s just as miraculous—and just like biological marketing, the results can be outsized. Nature has figured out Zero Waste, and figured out how to do pretty much anything that humans feel a need to do: housing, transportation, flood resistance…

These technologies have been around for thousands, maybe millions, of years, and they outperform what we humans have come up with.

Meet Janine Benyus, TED speaker and author of several books on biomimicry. When she walks you through Lavasa, India, where native vegetation has not grown for 400 years, and tells you that the area gets 27 feet of rainfall during the three-month monsoon season and basically nothing the rest of the year, you know that maintaining a thriving city here will be challenging.

Yet, immediately abutting this city, she finds proof that nature knows quite well how to handle this environment: a hilly wilderness area that, despite the alternating torrents and droughts, experiences zero erosion. As she walks us through this wilderness, she shows us adaptations like an anthill built with curves and swales, so that it doesn’t get washed away in the flood. She walks us through a sacred grove there, cool and delightful even in the dry season, and lets us understand that our cities could be just as pleasurable to live in.

She shows us a 1500-year-old live oak tree in Louisiana that has designed itself to withstand hurricanes, and points out that only four of New Orleans’s hundreds of live oaks were killed in Hurricane Katrina.

And whether it’s in India, Louisiana, China, or New York City, she captures metrics like carbon sequestration, energy and water use from those neighboring wilderness areas—things no one has bothered to measure in the past—and then cheerfully announces, “Because this is happening in the wild land next door, no one can say it’s impossible. A city that does this, that’s generous in its ecosystem services, is going to be great to live in.” She describes ecosystems in terms like “generous” and “competent,” and reminds us that the human species, at 200,000 years old, is still a baby, and we can learn much from our “elders” in the plant, animal, insect, fungal, and bacterial realms.

Her approach combines human-built infrastructure and nature-built ecostructure together to provide “ecological services” that contribute to meeting per-acre and per-block metrics, carried in part by the buildings and in part by the landscapes.

Species adapt and evolve over time, growing more able to influence their environment while being influenced by it in turn—and most of these adaptations are positive both for the organism and the ecosystem. Maladaptations create room for better-adapted species to move in. Species that fail to provide these ecological services are maladapting, and will be replaced by those that do contribute, she says. She remains optimistic that humans will learn to positively adapt, and be welcomed by other species.

A lot of her work is based on the idea that because each place is unique, the technologies we use should be matched to each place, as they are in nature. In nature, organisms ensure the survival of the species by protecting the survival of their habitat; they can’t directly take care of offspring many generations in the future, but they can protect the place where those future generations will live.

How can biomimicry change our patterns of design and construction? Thousands of ways. Here are just a few projects Benyus and other biomimicry researchers are working on:

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Love Let Go: Radical Generosity for the Real World by Laura Sumner Truax and Amalya Campbell (Eerdmans, 2017)
You might remember that although I did recommend it, I was quite annoyed by my review choice last month, Doing Good Better (DGB).

DGB took a very clinical, engineer-like approach to deciding which charities to support and what activities to do—even what career to choose—for maximum impact but neglected many of the human factors. While I was still reading it, I went to an author talk by Amalya (“Ami”) Campbell and I thought her book Love Let Go would be the perfect antidote to my frustration.

Love Let Go, unlike DGB, is a very free-spirited approach to giving (DGB’s author would think it’s too free-spirited). It chronicles a church that had invested just USD $1000 into a mixed-income community affordable housing project in its Chicago neighborhood, back in the 1970s. All of a sudden, when that housing project was sold off, the church found itself with a $1.6 million windfall.

After long deliberation, the church leaders decided to tithe. They’d give 10 percent to their congregants, with only five words of direction: “Do good in the world.” This is introduced on page 8. Most of the rest of the book follows one of three strands:

• What the parishioners did with their individual checks (with a side story of how the media treated this story and what happened as a result)
• How the church—which had been struggling to get enough money for its own infrastructure— wrestled with what they’d do with the remaining $1.4 million (revealed, after teasing us all the way through, on pp. 183-184)
• Sharing the research and various philosophies on generosity that they sifted through during their long and very deliberative process

The impact from this one church and its congregants was quite impressive, but it’s only the beginning. Enabling a generosity mindset could be huge; in his Foreword, Richard Stearns of World Vision says that if every Christian gave an extra 60 cents per day (which works out to $219 per year), we could eliminate poverty in a single generation (p. xi). And yes, this is an overtly Christian book, probably the first I’ve ever reviewed. I don’t happen to be Christian, but I see no reason why this process couldn’t be replicated in non-Christian houses of worship and in non-religious organizations.

Generosity, say the authors, is our neglected superpower (pp. 3-4); using it involves the simple five-step process outlined on page 4. And we help ourselves when we get generous, opening ourselves up to all sorts of little miracles—and generosity begets more generosity (p. 95). People who give are as happy as those who double their income (p. 7). Even the bottom-income congregants, people whom no one would have criticized for using the $500 for themselves (including homeless Stephen Martin, pp. 106-107 and debt-ridden Kristen Metz, pp. 108-110, among others), found deep meaning in their giving. Of course, even a homeless man in the US is far wealthier than many people around the world; in 2015, a net worth of just $3210 was enough to put someone in the top 50 percent worldwide (p. 188).

All of this is based in something I’ve been teaching for years: an attitude of abundance. When you know the world will provide, it gives you the freedom to experiment. And while not every congregant’s $500 experiment was successful, most of them were—and several inspired even larger acts of generosity. The ones that failed were sometimes recast, for instance bringing in an established social service agency better suited to the mission (pp. 150-152). Another failure (according to the way most of us measure things) involved donating to the medical expenses of someone in need, who died nonetheless—but even this experience, which removed the money from circulation, offered many blessings.

Generosity has a twin, according to the authors: gratitude (pp. 153-166). Like generosity, gratitude improves with practice. When theologian Mary Daly says “you learn courage by couraging,” this church creates a corollary: we learn thankfulness by thanking (p. 161). And sometimes the most charitable thing you can do is to receive charity with grace, creating the freedom for others to feel the abundance of giving (p. 105, for instance). For the authors, this abundance mentality is embodied in the opening chapters of Genesis (pp. 43-44) and in the story of Jesus feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fish (pp. 143-144), as long as we don’t let fear get in the way—something even the usually abundant-thinking Abraham was not immune from (pp. 51-52).

And here, abundance is coupled with awe (pp. 132-134). That’s something most of us rarely experience, but the process of giving away money to individuals who in turn gave it to others, as well as the much longer process of deliberating over the remaining money, created numerous moments of awe.

The book ends with a chapter-by-chapter reading guide that opens discussion of larger issues and how this kind of giving program can make a difference. The very last page (p. 195) notes that individuals, not foundations or corporations, make an astounding 81 percent of charitable contributions. Then it asks three questions, and I particularly love this one: “What causes you to be optimistic about the ability of one individual to make a difference in the world? How can you increase your exposure to these sources of optimism?

About Shel & This Newsletter

What happens next if you win your biggest battle?

Whether you’re in business, running a nonprofit, or spearheading a community campaign, you need to know the answer to that question.

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Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (Gotham/Penguin Random House, 2015)

I don’t usually recommend books that annoy me as much as this one did, but I do recommend it. MacAskill raises crucial questions for anyone in the nonprofit or social responsibility spaces: how are our time and money best spent to make the world better? I agree that we have to be willing to dive deep enough to discover that sometimes, things that seem terrific at the macro level crumble in our hands when we look closely.

Yes, we want our resources to make the maximum impact—to hold our social impact projects and charity partners responsible for their actions AND their outcomes. And seeking fact-based answers about which of our actions do the most objective good is well-worth the effort. He’s an advocate of a scheme called QALY, which imposes a quantitative framework on decisions by looking at the outcomes. In theory, QALY should tell us whether it’s better to increase lifespan or increase quality of life, whether we best serve a greater number in less depth or a lesser number in greater depth, and how to measure costs and benefits of any initiative. And MacAskill remembers to factor in a lot of subtleties, such as how much improvement would occur without your help.

As an example, if a student is deciding whether to go into medical school, MacAskill suggests looking at how much impact this particular person would have as a doctor, versus someone else who would fill the medical school slot; there are always more people wanting to study medicine than available slots, so a doctor will be created regardless. That involves a whole host of questions: would the doctor be working in a developed country where services provided would not have great impact on the larger social picture but the potential for charity donation is enormous, or a developing country facing a massive health crisis, where that doctor could save many lives? Would another doctor have a social conscience? But despite MacAskill’s best efforts, a lot of it would be guess work.

Sometimes the answers may be extremely counter-intuitive; he cites cases where the most effective thing certain individuals can do is to go into a high-paying profession and live simply enough to donate large portions of that pay to well-vetted causes.

But I have a problem with his Bean-Counters Uber Alles approach. He tends to ignore a lot of the human factors, and I think that’s the kind of attitude that got us into trouble with our planet in the first place. It was actually a big relief to read that he became a vegetarian out of concern for animal rights, because it showed a caring persona that’s largely absent from the text. Yet he scorns the little actions we can all take to live more in our values, which I strongly feel make a big cumulative difference. In fact, I’ve written an ebook, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life–With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle, offering 111 simple and no-cost/low-cost steps we can take as individuals. If everyone did even 50, I think it would make a tremendous difference.

Doesn’t something go missing when we worry so much about the numbers and so little about the human factors? Is working at a job you hate for 20 years so you can donate more money and then be financially secure enough to take an executive position with a charity really better than working at lower pay in a meaningful career right off the bat? Are there tradeoffs in the massive improvement you can make in one person’s life through some kind of direct intervention versus the benefit of eradicating some scourge that affects many more lives? And how do you predict which of the people you help might go on to find the cure for cancer? It makes a lot of sense to reduce malaria deaths at a cost per life saved of $40,000, while the US spends millions per life saved on highway safety—and this aligns with his theory that we do the most good when we focus on the more neglected areas. But then again, I am alive today because improvements in vehicle safety allowed me to walk away from a 60-mph crash. So, in some ways, the whole set of questions and assumptions is absurd.

MacAskill gets even more absurd, with obnoxious positioning like a chapter called “The Moral Case for Sweatshop Goods” (he says they provide better jobs than the indigenous industries. I say that’s not good enough).

But in other areas, he’s spot on. As big a supporter of peace as I am, it’s hard to argue with his math that eradicating smallpox has saved more lives over the past 40 years than creating world peace would have over the same time frame. And it’s certainly important to choose to give to charities at the top of the curve, who consistently achieve far more with less and significantly outperform average charities. He names several of his favorites.

And one area where I’m in total agreement is how much impact one person can have, especially when joining with others, and especially in poor countries, where a dollar goes so much farther. Most human advances—in medicine, technology, agriculture, even human behavior—were because one person had an idea and nurtured it.

Bottom line: if you come in to the book as an engaged and questioning reader, willing to mentally dialogue with him about what makes sense and what doesn’t, you’ll find tremendous value. If you either accept it all at face value or throw the whole thing out, I’d say you’re making a mistake.

The 19-year-old who interviewed me for a telesummit on productivity recently asked me some questions I don’t usually get asked. Perhaps my answers about how I got started on this path and how the profit motive can be harnessed to create social good will inspire you (while demonstrating one of the principles in my second response). His questions in italic, my answers in ordinary type.

1. When did you first realize you could positively change the world?
My earliest activist memory was at about three years old. My parents were having a party, their friends were all hanging out and smoking, and I was reacting negatively to the smoke. So I crawled around under the coffee table and started breaking cigarettes in half.

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Don’t Sell Me, Tell Me by Greg Koorhan (Crossbow Studio, 2017)

Like December’s review choice, Blue Collar Proud, this is a bit of a sleeper in a small package. It’s another book that pays careful attention to ethics before getting into the more obvious topic (storytelling as marketing)—and I see that as a positive. For Koorhan, in order to succeed with story-based marketing, you have to build a company worth telling stories about. Since I’ve been writing about ethics, green principles, and social change as business success principles since at least 2002, I happily agree.

In the worlds of marketing and entrepreneurship, we often hear the phrase, “Shiny Object Syndrome”: the temptation to get distracted by the next shiny new marketing technique.

I’ve just invented a term for its “evil twin”: “Rusty Object Syndrome”: getting distracted by all the little tweaks you can do to clean up the work you’ve already done, instead of doing the new work that should be higher priority.

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

“Prosperity” by Dr. Pedram Shojai

Instead of a book this month, a brand new movie.

From the title, you might expect this would be a film about the “Prosperity Consciousness” trend embodied most famously in the movie, “The Secret” and Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich. You would be wrong.

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

We Rise: The Earth Guardians’ Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez

Martinez has been an activist for 11 years—and he’s not even old enough to vote. Only 17, he became aware of the earth’s current distress at age six and has been organizing ever since. Not just organizing. Performing original rap music and traditional dance, speaking at major conferences and even becoming only the second non-diplomat, non-politician to address the UN General Assembly, being featured in a film on youth activism, receiving an award from President Obama, standing up as one of 21 youth activists who are suing the US government to enforce climate change, and now, releasing his first book (with a major publisher, too—health and organic gardening leader Rodale). He was at the 20th Anniversary Rio Conference, organized a youth presence at COP21 (where the Paris Climate Accord was hammered out), and performed for the Water Protectors at Standing Rock.

I was a child activist too, starting—not counting an action against smoking I took in my own home at age 3—at age 12 when I went to my first demonstration, opposing the Vietnam war. And I, too, have been an activist ever since. Now, as I turn 61 next month, I’m seen as an elder—but I’ve got a few decades before I catch up with some of my activist friends in their 90s and 100s, such as Arky Markham.

But I was 16 before I turned vegetarian, 17 when I started speaking on the issues of our time, 20 before I participated in an action that definitely made a difference in the world (the Seabrook occupation of 1977), and 23 when my first book (on why nuclear power is a terrible idea) was published. So I’m in awe of this kid. We can think of him as a Malala Yousafzai for the United States. By the time he’s my age, he could have credits like toppling the whole fossil-fuel power structure or maybe managing a successful campaign to create a world unity government. I don’t know the specifics, but I do know he’s destined for greatness.

Martinez comes naturally to a holistic, intersectional approach that sees the relationships among multiple issues. Whether it’s getting big money out of politics, raising climate awareness among youth, or supporting the intersectionality of opposing different “isms,” he’s on the job. Raised in Boulder, Colorado by indigenous activists (his parents founded Earth Guardians, where he works as Youth Director), Martinez is strongly rooted in his own Mexica/Aztec tradition and very knowledgeable about the traditions of many other indigenous cultures, around North America and the rest of the world. This culture, where every living thing is sacred, informs his activism and his lifelong vegetarianism. It also provides a solid frame of earth guardianship and water protection from which he reaches out on a host of other issues.

That ability to see others’ oppression no matter what shape it has taken leads to deep wisdom: “Rather than pointing fingers, let’s work with people to help make better food choices” like eating less meat rather than instantly going cold turkey to vegetarianism (p. 135, pun intentional). That philosophy extends beyond food, to other areas where we can build connection, change our habits, and come together stronger.

And shifting our internal compasses to accept victory is part of that. He quotes activist Mika Maiava of Samoa: “You need to win from within, so that even if people look at you like you’re losing, you’re not losing because you’ve already won in your heart.” (p. 71)

At the same time, in a world where 200 species go extinct every day (p. 85), he demands immediate progress on climate change. And he’s doing what he can to create an empowered intergenerational movement to get us off fossil fuels into renewables, to create a humane and nutritious and just food system, and to secure the rights of every ethnic and cultural group on the planet. He’s doing his part to build a coherent, focused movement that can actually generate this needed shift, using every nonviolent tactic from lobbying through nonviolent direct action. Direct activism, he reminds us, “doesn’t wait for permission from leaders to act.” (p. 102)

He’s also very media-savvy. He understands the power of Standing Rock pipeline opponents self-identifying not as protestors but as water protectors—“defined by what we love and seek to defend” (p. 180). And writing in the earliest days of the Trump administration, he recognizes how the 2016 US election changed things for climate activists.

The book is well-researched, with plenty of facts and figures to back up his assertions. Even I didn’t know that not only does the fossil fuel industry receive $548 billion a year in direct subsidies, but also leaves us holding the bag for $5.3 trillion in externalized costs, for example (p. 144). On the positive side, he cites a study of college and university campuses investing in “green revolving funds” to finance the campuses’ own energy improvements; they show an astonishing 32 percent return (p. 219). The advance copy I have was in need of another round of proofreading, but hopefully that was fixed in the final printing.

Martinez is also using the book to spread messages from many leaders in the fight for global and local climate justice; the book includes his interviews with such luminaries as India’s environmental economist Vandana Shiva, Paul Watson of the environmentalist direct action group Sea Shepherds, climate activism pioneer Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org), actor/activist Mark Ruffalo, Bernie Sanders’ campaign liaison to Millennials, Moumita Ahmed, and several others including his own grandfather.

It gives me lots of hope to find a book this comprehensive and also (in places) really fun to read, written by a teenager. People like Martinez are our future, our bright hope. His book is well worth your time.

Seven of my ten books, including two of my five self-published titles, have won at least one award and/or been translated and republished in foreign markets. My second award-winner was the self-published Principled Profit: Marketing that Puts People First, which I brought out back in 2003; it won the Apex Award for best book in the PR industry. Since so many of my readers are not part of large organizations, and since awards provide lots of credibility to independents who win them, it might be helpful to go over some tips on how to win awards. Next month, we’ll look at how to make the most of your award victories.

I am a big believer in third-party credibility. Awards are part of that package along with endorsements (Principled Profit was endorsed by Jack Canfield and more than 80 others), foreign rights sales (India and Mexico for this title, Italy and Turkey for the subsequent Wiley revision/expansion), press coverage (in addition to a Publishers Weekly review, this book was mentioned in dozens of articles), special sales (1000 copies sold to Southwest Airlines, making the book profitable the day it printed), etc. It shows that other people think you do a good job. In the ever-more-crowded publishing universe where there might be thousands of titles in your niche, this is critical.

Sales of this title were not stellar. But I think the overall package of credibility was a key factor in selling the rights to Wiley—which published an expanded and updated edition in 2010 as Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green—and again a few years later to Morgan James (Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, 2016). Because of these rights sales, I had to take the original self-published edition out of print, but that was fine.

Determining which awards to enter involves several factors: Whether it’s a fit, how many other entrants will be competing, overall quality of the product, the cost of entry… I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my first award-winner, published by Chelsea Green, had a very elegant design. That inspired me to hire a design team for Principled Profit after doing my own interiors on two previous self-published books. And that, I believe, is part of why my books started winning awards. I’ve always done very well-written, useful books, but my first two self-published books had poor design standards with covers done by people with no book experience and interiors I designed myself.

Does it matter that most people haven’t heard of the awards I’ve won? I don’t think so. There is a huge difference in top-tier vs. second-tier awards, e.g., Newberry, Caldicott, National Book Award, Booker Prize that absolutely everyone has heard of vs. Ben Franklin, Foreword BOTY (Book Of The Year), or Ippy, which are extremely respected in the indie publishing word but not beyond it. In terms of market effect, I don’t see much difference between the second tier and the third tier, where they are not widely known even in the industry. A skilled marketer can take good advantage of all of them. My Apex was a third-tier award, and I have fourth-tier awards on at least three other titles. Even those are just as good in getting prospective buyers to take another look, and that’s really why I do them.

My advice to you: Enter awards where your chances of winning are higher. If you’re producing a quality product, there may be opportunities in the industry vertical as well as the horizontal category (books in my case, perhaps green manufacturing or music or customer service or tasty food in yours). Apex Awards are given in many categories within the PR industry. I suspect that very few books were entered in the Best PR Book category that I won, so my chances were much better. If I found a book award in the green or social entrepreneurship space (as opposed to a green or social entrepreneurship category in a book contest), I’d enter my current Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World in a heartbeat.

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Our Earth, Our Species, Our Selves: How to Thrive While Creating a Sustainable World by Ellen Moyer

Rarely have I come across a book that so closely mirrors my own thinking. But our lenses are different. In my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World—and in three earlier related books—I look at the power of business to heal the world. Moyer looks at how consumer-citizens can do the same thing.

Also, I made a deliberate choice not to dwell on the gruesomeness of our situation and the urgency to change; I figure that information is widely available. Moyer spends several chapters on what’s wrong before moving to how we fix things.

If you’re in business, I recommend that you read both. They complement each other nicely.

On to the specifics: Before delving into the problems, she gives us a vaccine of optimism in the introduction—starting right on page 1 with a magnificent, empowering quote from Buckminster Fuller: “The best way to predict the future is to design it” and pointing out, correctly, that “changing course is not only doable but it is not so difficult as we may think—and it can be fulfilling.” (p. 3)

Fuller is only one of dozens of my favorite luminaries she quotes or cites. Her list includes environmentalists like Wangari Maathai, Wendell Berry, and Jane Goodall…human potential geniuses including Barbara Marx Hubbard, Deepak Chopra, and Jean Houston…activists from Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Mandela and Robert Reich…prosperity folks such as Marci Shimoff, Jack Canfield, and Napoleon Hill…deep thinkers like Einstein, Pope Francis, and Bruce Lipton—to name a few.

This list shows the breadth of her holistic approach. It’s not either/or but all, and. Instead of focusing on one necessary evolution at the expense of all the others, simultaneously pursuing world change and a healthy environment, exploring the 90 percent of our brains most of us don’t use, achieving financial comfort, expanding our compassion, and all the rest of it. Yes, we can have all this and more, and it’s actually easier to get there holistically.

Refreshingly, she doesn’t see a grumpy, hoarding billionaire as financially healthy (p. 105). Having money without happiness does not make you a success in her eyes (or mine).

That insight is part of a nice section on happiness. Quoting Gandhi: happiness is when our thoughts, speech, and actions align (p.99). Fun is transient; happiness is ongoing; both are important (p. 106). Quoting Shimoff: happiness is more likely to bring success than financial success is to bring happiness (p. 109).

She makes some connections that I didn’t know. I had no idea that we squander half our water to cool electric power plants (p. 30)—we wouldn’t need to do that if we’d switched to renewable energy—or the horrifying statistic that 1.8 million children per year die a thoroughly avoidable death from lack of water or lack of unpolluted water (p. 31). We waste water in many other ways, too, including far too great a share of irrigation water (p. 73). I’ve been saying for years that there’s no shortage of water or energy—but we deploy them poorly. So poorly that she sees climate change as a massive civil rights violation against the poor (p. 118).

I also didn’t know that the $5.3 trillion in global fossil fuel subsidies accounts for a full 6.5 percent of global GDP—more than we spend on health care! Eliminating those subsidies would reduce CO2 by 17 percent and eliminate 50 percent of pollution deaths—while hastening the transition to clean, renewable energy, which is already cost-competitive if you take away the fossil and nuclear subsidies.

And she points out that the lone wolf doesn’t usually create the sweeping change we need. Cooperation with each other and with other species, not ruthless social Darwinism, makes us fittest (pp. 43-46).

Speaking of wolves: I love her description of the many positive ripples resulting from wolves’ reintroduction into Yellowstone (pp. 62-63). So in pursuing any big goal, we need to factor in all the costs and all the benefits.

That means rethinking absolutely everything—and setting big goals that let us get out of either-or thinking and into all-and. We can switch to fully organic and leverage that to eliminate food scarcity; the UN says this would double our produce supply (p. 150). We can fund the space program and fund human and environmental needs, but not if we box ourselves in with small thinking and limiting stories (p. 141).

Combining “high-tech and high nature” (p. 148), Here’s her four-part formula for creating this kind of systemic change:

1. Exercise the Precautionary Principle to avoid unintended consequences
2. Work upstream to eliminate problems in the first place
3. Change from centralized to distributed systems (solar is a great example)
4. Use a holistic approach

A lot of this is about mindset. One great example: shift our thinking from “environmental protection” to “rights of ecosystems” (p. 177). But even as we build a new castle in our corner of the sandbox, we can’t ignore the soldiers at the moat. Reich notes that if we give up on politics because it’s too corrupt, we collapse the buffers protecting the planet and most of its people from corporate and government rapists who would plunder without limit (p. 185). But citizens, leading through creative nonviolence, can create leadership where governments eventually have to follow—and according to Paul Hawken, the environmental movement is the largest people’s movement in history (p. 191). When just 15 percent of us (p. 199) combine our vision of possibility (pp. 195-196) and our outrage at the status quo, (p. 198), change happens.

And then maybe the whole world will start to look like the remarkable success story of Bhutan (pp. 200-201). Years ago, Bhutan looked beyond Gross National Product to Gross National Happiness—and manifested massive improvements in sectors including democracy, health, environment, carbon, and energy.

This is only a tiny taste of the wisdom in Moyer’s book. Read it, buy it for friends, apply it to the business world by also reading Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, and put the lessons of both books into action.

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