If you’re reading this blog - AimforAwesome.com you are likely different from most of society. I’m going to make some guesses about my readers that isn’t based on anything other than knowing that you seem to like the articles I’m churning out for you here.

See if any of these apply to you…

• You’re driven to do something better with your life… or to maintain your current level of greatness.
• You’re probably college educated with a Bachelor’s degree or more. I write at a fairly high level so I know that high school dropouts are not likely visiting this site en masse. I know there are some of you that have not graduated high school - and that’s neither here nor there. Your desire to make your life a little bit more AWESOME by reading this blog is all that matters. Though I don’t have the names, you can google “famous persons without high school diploma” and find some nice results.
• You’re a bit more intelligent than the average person. I’m guessing that the average IQ level of my readers falls between 110-130 mostly.
• You are older than 20 and younger than 65.
• You are mostly men. I write about far more men topics than women topics since I am a man, by all definitions. Ha ha!
• You are a thinker. You are a questioner. But you know what? You haven’t questioned something yet… and that is, whether society and the advertising conglomerates that are feeding you ads in your TV, newspapers, radios, magazines, over your computers and cell phones, PDAs and loudspeakers, billboards, photos, signs, and the rest of it are smarter than you.
• You’ve already accepted that they are smarter than you and on to a good thing. How do I know this? I know you’ve likely fallen for the game that they’re playing with all of society. Those at the top of society, those that are successful monetarily have fallen for the game head and foot.

I know your desires…

I had the same desires for a long time in the USA. I know your desires because I know EVERYONE’s desires that live in the USA. A broad statement yes? Desires don’t differ all that much among individuals in a society. Our American society has been victimized so profoundly… we’ve been psyched out over the years… To our credit it has taken billions of dollars in advertisements to do it, but despite our hard to crack psychology we’ve been cracked and hacked and we’re now complete pawns to the advertising industry and their evil plans for us.

America is funny.

We have all these subgroups in America that want to appear as if they are against the typical people in society… that they are anti-American society… not pawns in the game… I’m talking about subgroups even in high school… in about 8th grade there is a subset of the students that will start smoking. When asked why - it’s “because I can” or “I can do what I want”.

Looking just one step closer to the “why” and we find that they are the ones that REALLY want to be accepted by someone, because they aren’t getting enough of it. Typical ways for students to be accepted is to be part of some group.

There are those that play sports… each sport has students that are well-bonded and get a lot of positive reinforcement from their friends.

There are those that are the “smartest” - the “brains” they were called back in 1984. The brains were the good looking smart people that joined debate team and played stupid trivia and thinking games that allowed them to travel to other schools to compete while the rest of us suffered through Political Systems class with Mr. Lucas.

There are the funny people. The funny people might not even have a whole group of funny people, but the may. A kid could literally stand on his own and not have a group if he’s funny enough. He might not play sports or join any other group, but, by being funny he gets acceptance and a lot of positive feedback from so many different groups that he can stand on his own if he wishes. That’s the exception.

There are the fashionables in high school always a group of girls, sometimes they are cheerleaders, and sometimes just a group whose parents can afford to buy them the latest fashions so they can always appear to be at some higher level than the rest of the students in their grade.

There are the geeks. These are the not good looking people that are interested in technical things and are amazed at things like calculators that do advanced functions. They are amazed and consider it magic until they read enough books and figure out how to build their own calculators. These students, if they begin wearing Matrix trenchcoats band together and sometimes plot to shoot the other students. Bad joke.

Then there are the smokers. Some of those further refine by being the ones that take drugs.

When kids get older and they finish with school they may move into other groups… there are many adult subgroups too. There are the people that are artsy… they love to dress differently but not really differently, they just copy what they think they saw from the 1950’s. They rip their jeans and make safety pin zippers and things. They paint their own clothes and call it unique and anti-fashionable. It’s all a very lame attempt at making themselves a different sort of fashionable among themselves so they can get some positive feedback like the other adults that wear Armani and Donna Karan.

There are guys that get fat, smoke, drink a lot and buy a motorcycle. They are anti-advertising and are quick to tell you how they don’t succumb to the usual advertising ploys… some of them call themselves thinkers or skeptics. Then, they go and buy the loudest motorcycle that exists on the planet, a Harley Davidson, which is also one of the most expensive, some as expensive as new cars now… so other people will look at them and they’ll feel special too. Everyone seems to have this need inside that makes them want to be special. Even if you’re special for a socially negative or societally negative reason, it’s still “special” and it counts for some reason.

There is the Abercrombie and Fitch group that want to appear as if they are not really trying to dress as anything fashionable, but they have the uncanny knack of consistently dressing in a very similar style to each other. They further refine with gross exaggerations of attempting to go against the grain (pulling their jeans half-way down their butt) that really just serve to make them a stronger subgroup with clearly defined needs to be looked at.

There is the pierced group that either wants sympathy or something, I’m not really in-tune with what they’re looking for except acceptance among each other that they all feel the need to hurt themselves to prove that they can take physical pain as well as the mental pain that has been building there for years and maybe decades… They wear leather or some other drastic fabric and they do crazy things to their hair… why? So others look at them and they get SOMEBODY to look at them as nobody was before.

Into which group do you fall? This wasn’t an attempt to cover all the different subgroups in America, but you can probably place yourself into one that you either see here or that you can create and assign yourself into.

You know what every one of these groups has in common?

They are all marionettes (puppets) to the advertising industry that has so shaped American society that we look at everything they do as the definition of what American Society IS. We think we’re living like “Americans” if we act in the way that the advertising conglomerates have been pushing us to live.

That’s really sick to me.

It makes me want to spit…

Billions and perhaps TRILLIONS of dollars have bought the minds of the general public. Yours, mine, your mom’s and your grand mom’s.

While Americans think we are smart because we can “see” instances of advertising that is trying to change our minds and cause us to purchase… it’s too late. There is already a change because the first thing that has already changed is the “NEED” to purchase something else… the NEED to get something better, something different, something newer, something more trendy, something more expensive, something more…

Well, just MORE.

Let me try to clarify with an example…

We think we’re smart because we see that Lexus has used a fancy metallic gold lettering in their ad for the new SUV they have in a 4 page spread in Time magazine. We say to ourselves… ha, they have so much money that they can afford to spend that on their ad… We think we’re smart because we recognize the attempt to persuade us based on some glitzy looking lettering in the ad.

But, the real manipulation of your mind took place much before you saw the ad. The real manipulation by the advertising industry as a whole took place over decades as you grew up and watched what your parents, friends, and co-workers did over the years about buying cars. They bought too much car, and upgraded their cars when they really would have been MUCH better off financially to keep their present car and ignore what everyone else is doing.

The fact that you took even an extra 1 second to look at the fancy Lexus ad means that the car industry has already won your mind. Why would you look for even 1 second longer than necessary to keep thumbing through the pages if you had no desire to upgrade the car you presently had? In your mind is this idea that upgrading your car is always something that is a way to keep you on top of society… in good standing so to speak. It’s like if you were thumbing through the magazine and came across this ultra suave concrete mix powder that was setting the construction industry on FIRE. How many extra seconds would that ad grab your eyeballs for?

For me, none. You too?

You know why? The concrete industry is not something I saw many ads about. They know they are not for EVERYONE. Cars are for everyone. Shoes and clothes are for everyone. Soda, for everyone. Computers, for almost everyone. The car industry has been working you and spending billions of dollars over the years to make you, not just buy their cars on impulse… that happens a lot, but not everyone is fooled that way.

How nearly everyone IS fooled is that they’ve already bought into the idea that getting a new car is a good thing for your standing in society, for your happiness, for your safety, for your well being, and for your peace of mind…

THAT is where they’ve already bought us.

Not just the car industry either. What about the diamond industry? How many American girls will accept marriage without a diamond ring? Not that many. You know why? Even though a girl might accept a ring that isn’t a couple months of the guys paycheck, she knows something…

It should be that expensive if he really loves me and I’m worth it to him.

Yeah, they think this. I was engaged to my son’s mom at one time… I gave her the ring in a very unique way… and you know what? I saw the disappointment in her eyes when she realized it was only about .35 carats and worth $2000 USD. Yep, I KNOW I saw disappointment in her face and in her voice. Positive. It bears revealing that her first husband gave her a ring that was easily 1 carat and very good quality, I’m guessing the ring was around $10K. If it were up to me I’d have given her a gold band… but you know, it’s NOT up to me… it’s up to whatever standard was created in the minds of Americans that are going to get married. The girl thinks her worth is tied up in that ring! Is that the silliest thing you’ve ever heard? If you’re a guy, maybe. If you’re a girl, you understand.

Here’s another example… how many of you bought the video IPODs? This is something I’m totally lost about. It started for me with the MP3 players. Here are my questions…

1. Why do you think you’re going to enjoy watching a 2 hour movie on a screen the size of your palm? Remember when the large screen TV’s were such a fad? Oh wait, they still are. How did we go from that idea to the complete opposite idea that watching a 1.5″ x 2.5″ screen is something cool and something fun to do? I watched some short videos on my friend’s 80GB IPOD and I had to laugh right there as I watched. Even on that screen it’s not perfect graphics. If that screen was RAZOR sharp like the screen on my recent e65 Nokia slider phone I might be able to begin to understand. However, it was horrible to watch. There was obvious artifacting in every scene and all areas of the image on the screen. He paid something like $700 Canadian dollars for the thing and I thought - that’s nuts, he could have bought a NICE computer here in Thailand instead. That computer would have an AWESOME screen and DVD dual level recorder, DUO chip, Intel Centrino, and just a cache of other things that when compared to the cigarette case sized IPOD that played micro video and mp3’s was 19 times more valuable in terms of common sense.

2. Why do you think people bought them?
Answer. Apple has created this subgroup of applets - people that think Apple is the bees’ knees. These applets think that anything Apple does is to be praised and worshipped… and purchased at all costs.

3. How did Apple accomplish this?
Answer. Apple tapped into the geeks that didn’t understand IBM computers and that felt they wanted to go against the grain. The grain being Microsoft’s huge “we do everything that you need the computer for” mentality… and so they swung hard the other way. They supported the only other option at the time… Apple computers which had ‘nice styling’ and colors. Their marketing campaigns were genius, and though they too have spent over a billion dollars in advertising, they have created a group of applet clones that don’t even question with common sense WHAT they’re doing - they just buy up every stupid thing Apple creates because to them, if they own it - they are seen as desireable among other applets. This increases the concept known as “face”. Applets gain face among the other applets if they own more of Apples products.

All kinds of people are subject to becoming non-decision making dolts that buy whatever a company is selling…

Harley Davidson did it above. Alien computers are a hit among gamers for their whacky ads and styles of computer cases. Nike has done this wonderfully, expanding from shoes to all manners of clothes, bags and accessories.

So, the point of this post is that we need to be SMARTER than we are. We think we’re smart, and we’re not. We’ve already fallen for the advertising industry brainwash. They now OWN all of American’s mindset. We accept without question that items that are better, newer, faster, more colorful, have more exotic materials, are lighter, smoother, softer, flashier… are what we NEED.

You don’t NEED what the advertising agencies are pushing. You don’t NEED to have this general concept about Americans and what we NEED. You must decide for yourself what you need. You must be smarter than those geniuses that spent billions of dollars to outsmart you. You MUST be. You CAN’T be the marionette anymore. Don’t let them pull your strings. YOU pull your strings. ONLY you pull your strings. If someone tries to pull your strings, you cut off their hand.

Otherwise they’ll own you and your children…

GET OUT!

Best of Life!

..

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