Taiko drumming increases my joy!

Our venue at The Civic in Stourport on Severn — Photo by Daryl Barber

[embed]https://youtu.be/nHI7Y6BFcs4[/embed]

Thanks to a new friend Chris Sanson, who we visited in Devon during August of 2018, I’ve taken up Taiko Drumming.

Taiko is the art of Japanese drumming on very large drums and performed in a group format. It’s electrifying to watch and even better to play.

I played on a conventional drum kit, when I came to the UK in 1977. I then joined a punk band in London in 1978 and we even recorded a very poor demo tape in a studio in Islington. We didn’t have a name for our band, so I named it ‘Islington’, listen to our recordings below! I loved drumming. But life took over, a possessive girlfriend didn’t like me leaving her behind and she had no interest in my craft. I gave it up. Probably the biggest regret of my life I can recall.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1DrvSW1_WqgpoUTGv1Aexzc7Cyn22-8i[/embed]

But the regret has now turned into joy. Chris showed me what Taiko was all about, explained it and I knew that I had to do it. Upon returning to the Midlands after our trip to Devon, I searched to web to find a local class or group. There were none!

Except a class, one hour drive away. I booked on it and have been a student of Taiko now for the best part of 6 months. I attended my weekly class in Church Stretton, Shropshire, a monthly class in Bearley, Stratford upon Avon and I have even convinced my teacher, James Barrow of Taiko West, to open up a class in my local town Stourport on Severn in February 2019.

We’ve been interviewed on local radio twice (BBC Hereford and Worcester), you’ll find the interviews below, and have had a great attendance so far with booking for the next 3 months looking really strong.

[embed]https://www.mixcloud.com/stayingaliveuk/wyre-forest-taiko-bbc-hereford-and-worcester-interview-with-michael-de-groot/[/embed][embed]https://www.mixcloud.com/stayingaliveuk/wyre-forest-taiko-bbc-hereford-and-worcester-interview-with-michael-de-groot/[/embed]

I love Taiko and I look forward to many years of practicing, learning and performing with my groups in the Midlands.

Come and join us.
www.facebook.com/wyreforesttaiko
www.stayingaliveuk.com/wyre-forest-taiko
www.styin.me/wft-registration

Happy drumming!

Michael de Groot

Do you enjoy the adverts?

Most Social Media feeds have become a feed littered with adverts and I’m not even talking about the paid adverts that appear there, although there are of course millions.

As Social Media Marketing World winds up it’s series of keynotes, its highfiving, the back slapping, littered with sound bites and good vibes towards everything Social, the objective of it all was really to learn about how to get more money out of consumers.

I feel like being sick in my porridge. Denial is the key word here, every Social Media Marketer is in denial of the damage Social Media is doing to humankind, the exploitation of our democracy and our choice to choose our own consumerism.

Not only will they be coming back to their communities with new ideas on how to con their connections, they will be delivering their workshops to teach others how to do the same and charge handsomely for the privilege.

I used to be a huge proponent of Social Media when it all appeared dubbed as Web 2.0. I spent many hours learning this skill and teaching others too. I’m totally guilty and was taken in by it all. However little did they know how they were going to use it to grow their gold reserves. It took a while for them to realise where they were heading towards themselves and then they discovered that our desire to be able to communicate with friends and loved ones via a digital medium meant that we were very very happy to share our most intimate details, thoughts and desires, including our anger and frustrations.

Global mental health is a rising epidemic and we already know that Social Media has a massive part to play in this rise. I first wrote about this in 2013 in the non-significant journal of psychology, an article titled ‘Do Social Networks Sell Drugs?’.

We also know that Social Media has been used to manipulate voters to elect Donald Trump as president, possibly the biggest abuser of democracy the free world has ever seen. It has also been used to deliver ‘Brexit’, the Social Media mastermind that came up with the slogan ‘Take back control’, Dominic Cummings, portrayed by the brilliant Benedict Cumberbatch in ‘Brexit: The Uncivil War’.

Molly Russell’s father Ian says he believes Instagram is partly responsible for his daughter’s death. Molly Russell committed suicide whilst being active on Instagram and she is just one of the reported cases we know of.

[embed]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-46966009/instagram-helped-kill-my-daughter[/embed]

Whilst I appreciate that Social Media has also been responsible for much good in the world. The Ice Bucket challenge, that went viral on Social Media to raise awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). It raised a lot of money for the charity, which supports the sufferers of this disease. There are I am sure thousands of examples where Social Media has been beneficial for many.

However, there is a huge underlying motive for the owners of these platforms and that is to make money for it’s shareholders.

Printing money from your content, your discussions, your fears, your mental health. If you knew the extent of the exploitation that’s taking place you would leave these platforms overnight. But you don’t, even though you realise at some level that this is happening, we are in fear of missing out (FOMO) and the platform owners know this all too well. They’ve built their technology to ensure that this is the case constantly.

As a result most business owners now believe that Social Media is the ONLY way now to promote their products and services and they are spending billions in doing so.

But not everyone has millions to spend on advertising and they are using the newsfeed to post their adverts for free and that’s why the newsfeed has become the advertfeed.

In years to come the newsfeed will disappear completely, it doesn’t have the value it once had. Community discussions will grow and replace it, I call it the ‘Group Chat’. These aren’t that new, they have been emerging on messaging apps, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Snapchat and Instagram.

But we don’t need to be beholden to these platforms, you can look to create your own community chat forums, just like the ones we used to have in the good old days. We may have to pay a small amount for them, but I promise it will be worth it in the long run.

Happy advertising!

Michael de Groot

Examples of Leadership in the world today!

Leadership is potentially the most difficult human trait any human has to perform and try to master. Unfortunately most of us will never realise our potential.

We are all leaders in our own lives, you don’t have to be managing people to be seen as a leader. Leadership is evident in your deeds, in your words, in your writings, your actions and behaviour towards humankind.

In the past week, we’ve had many opposing examples of leadership in the world. Without going into massive detail, I’m sharing some of the top level detail of those leadership examples.

The first leadership example is by Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, whose outstanding leadership amongst one of the worst terrorist crimes to take place in her country, has been incredible. Her compassion and decisive gun law changes is a great example of leadership in government. Let’s hope that many leaders in the world will look to copy her leadership style.

The second leadership example is by Theresa May, UK’s Prime Minster, whose leadership style is quite interesting indeed. I am sure you have heard about Brexit and it is quite an emotive topic in the U.K. and has been for at least 6 years, when leaving the EU was first promoted by the previous Prime Minister, David Cameron. Theresa May went on national television to complain about parliament for not voting for her deal. She also takes everything very personally and uses the ‘I’ word regularly. She rarely says ‘we’, suggesting that she is the only one running the country, which of course can’t be further from the truth.

The third example is Donald Trump, who will go down in history for potentially the most famous president of all time. He loves the limelight and if he doesn’t get it, he goes on Twitter rants. His latest rant was a series of 29 sequential tweets in one rant sitting. It almost seems as if he is unable, unwilling and incapable of actual speaking with people. He uses Twitter to hide behind and believes he can reach his supporters in this way.

In summary one great leadership example and two poor ones.

Hopefully you will chose example one to take forward into your journey of leadership.

Success!

Michael de Groot

The British Lion is in pain!

I wonder if David Cameron (Ex Prime Minister) gets a good night sleep to think that he persuaded the UK electorate to vote for the Tories (Conservative Party) and would make sure we would get a referendum to decide whether to stay in or leave the European Union. We are actually all Europeans, we live on her continent, but we may not all be ‘Europeans’.

The EU government run by non-elected officials who are at best administrators have never really had the UK interests at heart.

If their reaction and language has anything to go by, it proves that the UK should not be part of their administrative process. The cultures between the countries in the EU are so diverse and apart from having the same currency and some of the same labour laws, basically the countries and its people are very very different. A united EU has never been a true possibility and now with the UK out of it, it will never happen.

That Theresa May (Prime Minister at time of writing) believes that she can force the elected members of parliament and the UK constituents to lay down and accept a deal that she agreed, without initial consultation, is unacceptable to the democratic process in the UK. To then complain that MP’s use their democratic right to vote against an unacceptable deal means that she is lost in her own power.

Words like ‘you the Public’, in a recent address on TV (20 March, 2019), shows that she is so far removed from the ‘Public’ and our lives and how all this seems to be about her. I say this because if you listen carefully Theresa May uses the word ‘I’ very often.

In scrolling through Twitter, I discovered a tweet promoting a petition to revoke article 50 (Brexit) and when I clicked through to it, the amount of signatures that were being added were running at some pace. I looked in the morning at around 6.30pm and there were 392k signatures, now looking 3 hours later, there are 632k signatures, 240k added in just 3 hours.

The government must have a debate in the house if it reaches 100k signatures, I think this has been surpassed 6-fold and it will likely reach the millions.

[embed]https://twitter.com/TheAeronut/status/1108420667056291842[/embed]

It all started with David Cameron back in 2013, when he promised an in/out referendum. 6 years later and the British Lion is in pain.

[embed]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21148282[/embed]

Michael de Groot

BBC a series of repeats?

I know the TV is now classed as an old-fashioned way of absorbing entertainment. We’re now spending potentially more time on YouTube and Netflix compared to watching traditional TV programming.

However here in the UK we pay a TV licence fee directly to the BBC who is, allegedly, adverts free. The cost of this is around £13 per month, give or take a few pennies. This is double of what we’re paying for Netflix, not insubstantial I thought.

The BBC is a national institution in the UK, many regard them as the best TV in the world, which of course includes their news channel and many radio channels, both national and local. They have done a decent job of introducing BBC iPlayer in order to allow us to catch up on programmes we may have missed and also access some box sets of past series. We have been enjoying Cuckoo right from the start, as we had not seen it previously.

However Netflix is also transmitting many series that originally have appeared on BBC TV, so wondering where the value is now?

My complaint however is that the BBC is starting (maybe I had not noticed before) to repeat programmes that had either been aired the previous day, albeit on a different channel and even a topical news comedy series, which had aired last year.

If we wanted to watch programmes again, surely we can just watch it on the BBC iPlayer app?

[embed]https://twitter.com/stayingaliveuk/status/1108260621106196480[/embed]

Furthermore the BBC is also planning their own streaming service in partnership with ITV (UK commercial channel) called ‘Britbox’. I suspect any box sets that currently are available on the BBC iPlayer will probably transition there and then we’re expected to pay for that as well?

[embed]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47383559[/embed]

Anyway just disappointed with the BBC’s (The Beeb) programming to air repeats.

Michael de Groot

Surveillance Capitalism, a definition;

An excerpt from the book ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales;
2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification;
3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history;
4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy;
5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth;
6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy;
7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty;
8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

---

Michael de Groot

Eros battles Manneke Pis

Eros & Manneken Pis — #weeklycartoon — Michael & Josh

Listening to all the nonsense discussions between the EU and the U.K. in connection with Brexit, I imagined the Eros statue in London Piccadilly Circus, shooting arrows at the Manneken Pis statue in Brussels and that’s exactly what our latest cartoon shows. Enjoy!

[embed]https://youtu.be/XRtSGPWYkh4[/embed]

Michael de Groot

All your content on Social has been lost!

It no longer makes any sense to post on Social Media. What purpose is it serving you? Are you advertising or are you showing off? At some level it meets a need in you to be recognised, looking for affirmation or even looking for attention. But all the content you have posted in the past 10 years has been lost, you are not able to retrieve it, unless you are writing on a site like this or on your own blog. This will be my strategy going forward. Writing in places where a permanent record is kept, where I can download my writings, which after all are precious and I have invested time, effort and thinking time towards.

Michael de Groot

I used to be a serial networker when I first discovered the practice in 2005 after leaving…

Hugh MacLeod

I used to be a serial networker when I first discovered the practice in 2005 after leaving corporate life. I had been convinced that ‘network marketing’ (MLM) was the future and signed up (mug) to a project that operated in the telecoms industry called Euphony Telecommunications. Needless to say the company no longer exists. The concept was getting people cheap calls by plugging their phone into a box, which re-routed the call and you could save hundreds on your bill. I was convinced I would be the next telecoms millionaire, they promised it after all.

After falling out with friends and family who did not want to support me, they’re supposed to be your warm prospects in MLM by the way, I needed a new strategy. And hey presto business networking was it! I was introduced by someone, no idea who and I’ve never forgiven them either, to join BNI. Another mistake. Pay a big amount for a substandard unhealthy breakfast and pretend that you can give business to lawyers, printers, will writers, insurance brokers, accountants and financial advisors. They clean up at these events, because, well, every business needs those services right? Wrong!

This started my decade of being a serial networker and apart from the odd bit of loose change, I never made any substantial business from them. So I changed my approach and outlook.

I see networking events as places where I can build relationships with like-minded people. I have actually made some really great friends for many years now and I did get some business from them and ‘some’ is the key word. I am grateful of course I am, but it’s never long term sustainable business. It’s just that they wish to be nice to you.

I see networking events as an opportunity to learn from others and use any tips that I may pick up for my own personal and growth. I go to see what I can give and not what I can take. I go to listen to the people I meet instead of touting what I have to sell. Invariably I strike up a better connection with someone when I let them speak first and I ask questions to uncover their story. After all people’s stories are the most interesting part of who they are.

And that’s why I was inspired to start my own podcast ‘Share Your Story’. You can listen to it here; stayingaliveuk.com/podcast.

But, nowadays I see so many networking pundits, my new name for the organisers of networking events, spouting on about what you might be missing out on and the potential business you are losing by not attending their events. I like meeting people because working on your own can be a very lonely experience but there’s nothing better than being in the office, getting orders and working on your own projects because at the end of the day it pays the bills.

Networking costs on average £5k per year for most businesses. Be interesting to note what your ROI would be on that.

I wrote an article on this very topic back in March 2013 if you care to read it; https://www.stayingaliveuk.com/blog/2013/03/does-business-networking-deliver-sales

There is a questionnaire too, so feel free to complete it here:
http://styin.me/networkingresearch2

Have I been cured of my networking addiction? After a long while of not going to any events, it slowly creeped up on me again, like some virus. I must confess my amount of networking has increased to a level that I’m questioning myself yet again.

These are the events I have been known to attend regularly:
Tech Wednesday — It’s an evening event so I convinced myself it doesn’t interfere with my day. Silicon Canal — Another evening event and I did the same with that one. Maker Monday — Oops another evening one. Fiverr Community — Oh my god another evening one and the same excuse! Actually I haven’t been attending the Silicon Canal and Tech Wednesday events for quite a while because of other personal interests, like Taiko drumming and Yoga, so maybe I’ve only been going to two events per month after all. Not too bad then.

But then I am being told across Social Media that I’m missing out by not going to Phoenix Lunch, Gem Media Lunch, Coffee & Natter, Chutney & Chat, Cereal Network and many many others. The ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO) brigade is well and truly at work and it does take a lot of effort to stop being persuaded to go to all of these events, spend a fortune on expenses and lost productivity.

I’ve decided on just one networking event per month and that will be in the evening and it will be based purely on who the speaker is going to be at that event. If they don’t grab my attention, I’m not going. There you have it, I’ve decided.

So now, just breathe Michael…

Michael de Groot

Hellboy Tusk lashes out

Theresa May & Donald Tusk — Wonderwoman and Hellboy — #weeklycartoon — Michael & Josh

“I’ve been wondering what that special place in hell looks like.”
~ Donald Tusk — EU Council’s President. Guardian article.
His comment inspired our latest cartoon; Hellboy (Tusk) meets Wonder Woman (May).

[embed]https://youtu.be/lFFKTZ1pnms[/embed]

Michael de Groot

A Dog’s Brexit

Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May — A Dog’s Brexit — #weeklycartoon — Michael & Josh

It’s not boring in the U.K. is it? We have a Brexit shambles. It took me days to think of a cartoon to sum up the current state of ‘fear and doubt’ in this country and then it came to me a ‘Dogs Brexit’. Enjoy!

[embed]https://youtu.be/odWCdWf3Wh4[/embed]

Michael de Groot

Theresa May is like Oliver Twist

Theresa May like Oliver Twist — #weeklycartoon — Michael & Josh

Theresa May has had to go begging to EU ministers to get more clarity on the Northern Ireland ‘backstop’, she also went begging to her own conservative parliamentary party to remain confidence in her. It reminded us of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The question is does she actually deserve more? It inspired our latest cartoon. Enjoy!

[embed]https://youtu.be/yDok-YQy88k[/embed]

Michael de Groot

The tech revolution — hurting or helping?

Hugh MacLeod

Well that depends on the eye of the beholder, the person who just was trolled, spammed, hacked or they had their private data stolen, because they trusted Facebook or Google or Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram and all of the others who exist and don’t exist yet.

When you have a service, which is free to the user and the prime objective is to get as many eyeballs as possible on the platform, so they can parade it in front of advertisers, you have just created a toxic recipe for disaster.

Why?

Because now the same platform that has billions of users, becomes very attractive to governments at large. Ever wondered why not one single government in the world has taken any serious action against Facebook? Because they all want access to the public data. I have sat through presentations where cyber security professionals can walk all over Facebook in nano-seconds and deliver the kind of intelligence on people they would have only dreamt of years ago. Mark Zuckerberg will be loved and hated always.

Loved because now criminals and charities can get in front of millions. Loved because governments are able to manipulate audiences. Brexit and Trump come to mind and they are the ones that grab the headlines.

If you believe that Facebook can police the millions of users that create bad stuff, the so-called bad actors, think again and again and again. They may tell us they have employed thousands of employees staring at screens, trying to catch the bad actors.

What’s the solution Michael?

It’s so simple, you will be amazed why it has never been done before.

Verification!

Instead of spending millions on having people stare at screens, trying to catch bad people in the act, good luck with that, have them spend the time verifying every single user, whether existing or new and especially the new (hacking) kind.

Everyone should have a verification tick. Governments can do it with all citizens, well most of them anyway, so why can’t these platforms adopt the same approach.

Sure it will slow down the user growth and billions of dollars of income, but it sure would be a guarantee that bad actors would find it much harder to keep adding fake accounts all over the place.

Yeah I know, it will never happen!

Happy scrolling!

@stayingaliveuk

ps. And then I found Yoti and kiwanja on here.

Homeless in Retirement?

S.A. Seafarer July 1966

That’s the sad situation with Andrew. Andrew is 75 years old, a retired first officer in the British Navy. I met Andrew whilst volunteering during the health and well-being week, organised by Crisis Birmingham Skylight in the week leading up to Christmas 2018.

Andrew is very talented, he started by sharing some funny stories (jokes), which are great and he knows a LOT of them.

He shared a little bit of his story with me.

Being a British Officer in the British Navy meant that he sailed the open seas for many years. He shared just one such journey with me. It was the S.A. Seafarer that stranded off the coast of South Africa on July 1st, 1966. Most people were hoisted off by helicopter and this is when Andrew’s journey began in earnest.

As he was an Officer in the Navy he had a passport that allowed him to stay in South Africa, so in effect he was repatriated there. I know very little of what he did after that, except that eventually he retired into a home in South Africa.

S.A. Seafarer August 1966

Unfortunately the home closed down, which meant he had to go back to England, which is when his homeless journey started.

Living in a hostel in Birmingham, he doesn’t wish to have his own house now, he can’t deal with the hassle and why does he need any belongings at his age?

He seems content in the hostel, but nevertheless he is still homeless, living with other people who are deemed homeless too.

Should this be his outcome after having served in the British Navy for many years and now left to live out his few years left in the world inside a hostel? Surely there’s something seriously wrong with how we handle our homeless in this country and possible even the rest of the world. How did we manage to get such parity between the rich and the poor?

At Christmastime, there is a lot of guilt and many reports about our homeless situation in the U.K. and then it all goes quiet, and we forget about the plight of the homeless. Not charities like Crisis, they continue with their work, assisting the homeless to get off the street, out of temporary accommodation, provide education to develop new skills or dormant skills, help them into permanent accommodation and into a vital job of work.

And that’s not all, they campaign heavily with the government and members of Parliament to change the law and improve outcomes for these vulnerable citizens in our communities. They have a 10 year plan to end homelessness in the U.K. and you can download a copy here.

Show your support, by talking to anyone who might be homeless, it’s likely there might be several in your own private network, but you won’t even have noticed them, they’re not all on the street.

Thank you!

Michael de Groot

Theresa May - Brexit Legal Advice

#weeklycartoon — Theresa May #Brexit — Michael & Josh

Cartoon 48/2018.

The biggest national (UK) debate is #Brexit. Sigh, it’s getting to everyone and most of all it’s weighing down heavily on the UK Prime Minster Theresa May. Her ducking and diving and trying to stop the publication of legal advice, reminded me of a cartoon we did earlier in the year. We just changed the words. Enjoy!

[embed]https://youtu.be/KIwnISaG8hM[/embed]

Michael de Groot

Will Facebook exist in 5 years time?

In jail with Facebook — Michael de Groot

Mmmm, not sure actually. They’re getting a fair amount of stick at the moment and probably justified. When a big tech company who is making billions of dollars and has been found to lack integrity, the house of cards starts falling down pretty quick.

A couple of people I respect highly, Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher are definitely doubling down on Facebook and especially Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and Facebook’s board of directors.

Money and greed allows many misdoings to be buried in deep graves, however there are many journalists who love digging and digging deep. Couple that with disgruntled ex employees and you have a rich recipe for the truth to be exposed.

How do you deal with that truth? Well, Mark calls it ‘BS’ and Sheryl, well Sheryl is just hiding, because she managed to make a few million dollars from her books and her books are all about authenticity and integrity. To just say ‘we should have done better’ doesn’t cut it any longer when it gets repeated over and over. By the 3rd time you get a bit sick of it and wonder, actually what’s going on? What is the truth? We really want to know.

Why?

Because Facebook has made billions from our data, we kinda want to know what’s going on, especially as our data gets stolen on a regular basis. It’s serious stuff actually.

I was a massive fan of Facebook back when they started but in February 2018 I decided to uncouple myself and stopped posting, stopped being active, deleted the app from my phone, adjusted all the advertising preferences and minimised my personal details on my profile, basically deleted most of it. But not everything and didn’t close my account and that’s because my wife wants me there, so she can tag me!

I also decided to delete Instagram and WhatsApp, both Facebook products now.

Those actions has improved my emotional wellbeing significantly, I stop seeing all the fake news and adverts that my network posts, because that’s in the main what happens. Our lives have never been as good as they appear on social media. It’s sad actually very sad, I have compassion for our need for love.

Of course it does some good too, I get that, but the bad far outweighs the good. Remember you heard it here first. I give them 5 years, tops and although they may still exist as I really don’t believe they will completely disappear, I do believe it will be a totally different experience, reduced, more private and less adverts with maybe even paid profiles to stop the ads.

Enjoy it whilst you can!

Happy Facebooking!

Michael de Groot

---

More interesting reading on the topic by Gina Bianchini, which I discovered after I wrote this.

[embed]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-era-over-gina-bianchini/[/embed]

Yoda gives advice for #Brexit

Yoda — #weeklycartoon — Michael & Josh

Whilst witnessing the hashtag#brexit fallout, the debates and hysterics in the media, the finger pointing among politicians, the fear amongst business leaders, the doubts discussed in homes and at business networking events, the great guru Yoda came to my mind and his famous quote: ‘Do or do not, there is no try’. It sums it up perfectly for me. It inspired our latest cartoon.

[embed]https://youtu.be/vEVLoUyGZWg[/embed]

Michael de Groot

Brexit Pizza Plotter — Michael Gove

Michael Gove — #weeklycartoon — Michael & Josh

There’s a group of 5 MP’s who are in the UK government and are plotting against the Brexit withdrawal agreement. They have been given the name ‘Pizza Plotters’, which is such a great title. Presumably, because they get together plotting their plans whilst eating Pizza. It conjured up this image in my head of a man standing on Regent Street, London, dressed as a Pizza and promoting a discount Pizza. Michael Gove has the best face for such a Pizza man!

[embed]https://youtu.be/-diqWHZzVfk[/embed]

Michael de Groot

The Time Doctor

Mike Gardner

The Time Doctor is such a great name for a business which taught us all how to make better use of the short hours we have in our day and even in our life. His name is Mike Gardner.

Today (Monday 19th November, 2018), I heard the news that Mike passed away on Sunday 18th November, 2018, whilst he was out running with his wife. Running was his passion. He was a proud cardiac athlete.

I still remember the day that Mike walked into a room at St. Andrews Hotel in Droitwich. I was hosting a networking and training session called Social Media Monday on behalf of a networking group called TLC. We gave free advice to small business owners how to better leverage their social media to get in front of potential new clients.

Mike joined the session, to learn I guessed, but instead he gave, he gave so much invaluable advice to the people in the room, so many nuggets and knowledge. Mike was a fountain of knowledge and what was great, he didn’t mind sharing it so openly with us all. He was a breath of fresh air. So many business people guard their knowledge like it’s the Crown Jewels. Not Mike, he shared all of his knowledge freely.

Business had been good to him, he used to say and his mission was to give something back to his local business community.

He took this even a step further, he volunteered to run a business networking group himself, called Coffee & Natter based in Bromsgrove to appeal to the surrounding small business community. He used to openly state at the start of every meeting that his mission by organising and hosting this event was again to give something back.

At every step of his business journey he wanted to give back. What an amazing and generous chap he is.

At one of the Social Media Monday events Mike attended he mentioned he would unlikely make it the following month as he was expected to receive a hip operation. A hip operation, he was a young man and I was perplexed about this news. I think most of you will know the story. It didn’t work out too well for Mike in post operation, he suffered a number of heart attacks. But he survived them all and managed a remarkable quick journey to recovery.

Mike’s incredibly positive mindset meant he kept a record of his journey in hospital and shared it openly on Facebook for everyone to witness and read. It was so inspiring to read about his recovery and also some set backs, his trips into hospitals and his journey to full fitness.

I guess if you call yourself the Time Doctor, time will inevitably catch up with you as it will with all of us. They say the best are taken early and there is no doubt in all of our minds that Mike was one of the very best we have all experienced.

RIP Mike Gardner.

They call you the Time Doctor
But you’re much more than that Mike
You definitely had time for everyone
You even had time for our plight

You told us we only get 24 hours
So decide how to spend it wisely, you said
You gave us free tips and ideas
And all because you just wanted to give back

Your love for the RAF was clear to see
The way you presented yourself was impeccable 
We learnt so much from the way you conducted yourself
We’ll miss your teachings that’s for sure

Believe us when we say you’ve left a definite legacy
Yes Mike, you can be proud of that
Everyone who knows you, now has a bit of Time Doctor inside of them
Etched inside their beating heart

Michael de Groot

Give Way!

Road Signs created by Michael de Groot

There is a great line that originated in Star Trek in connection with an alien race called The Borg. ‘Resistance is Futile’.

So what does it actually mean?

The refusal to accept or comply with something. Incapable of producing any useful result; pointless. So “resistance is futile” means that refusing to accept what is happening is pointless, and you should just give up.

In fact when you push your hand against mine, what do you feel?

Resistance!

Whenever you push against something that can push back, you receive resistance. Ever felt you could never win that argument? You got it, it was resistance. So what do you do, keep pushing and keep getting resistance? Probably not, it may actually be quite debilitating for you.

I was sitting in my car one evening at around 10pm, waiting to give someone a lift and ahead of me in the darkness was a road sign and the sign seemed huge to me and the words beamed out at me, sharing with me a huge message and the message was ‘Give Way’. It’s the British version of the ‘Yield’ sign in the USA, that’s why I included both in the image.

So what did I take away from this?

Giving way doesn’t mean being weak, it doesn’t mean giving up, it just means allowing what is. Sometimes it’s tough to do this and allowing things to just be. We and I’m including me in that have been told throughout our lives that you have to take action, you must do something if you want to achieve your dreams, nothing else will happen unless you do. But when you move into a space of allowing, into a space of yielding/giving way, the right things may just come your way.

Less resistance allows for better outcomes.

Happy giving way!

Michael de Groot