Questallia

I am amazed of how popular iPods are. Their spread is really viral, and so is the information about them. There are millions of sites about iPod, statistics regarding iPods, online stores and the famous iTunes with its online music store.
Solutions Research Group, this summer, published the results of a study concerning the digital music market that reveals trends that should put a smile on Apple’s face, as maker of the iPod. According to the report, the iPod’s marketshare has increased from 53% to 68% from 2005 to 2006. Creative Labs is in second place with a whopping 6% of the market. Go Apple!
The report also indicated that:

• Ownership of digital music players has more than tripled, from 8% in 2005 to 27% in 2006
• The number of men owning digital music players has jumped from 18% to 28% in the last year
• The number of female iPod users has tripled from 2005 to 2006
• Almost half of all Americans (45%) downloaded music one way or another, up from 31% last year
• 23% of Americans paid for a song download in 2006, up from 8% in 2005.

See Playlist’s article for more information.

Coming back to the need for an iPod, after some thinking I came to the conclusion that I won’t buy one for myself, because I can’t find the appropriate time to use it:

1. When I move myself from a place to another, I’m driving the car. In the car, I use the mp3 player, so I don’t need the iPod

2. When I’m at home, I use my computer to play music, I have some nice speakers, so the sound is good. As I live alone, I don’t bother anybody with my music

3. When I’m in a meeting, I don’t listen to any music at all. I imagine the face of a client if I stepped inside wearing my headphones and started to talk very loud, to cover the music in my head :).

4. When I’m talking at the phone, I can’t use the iPod (it is easy to figure out why)

5. When I’m taking a shower, I can’t use it either

6. When I sleep, I don’t want to use it

7. When I’m out with friends, I can’t use it, because I want to have a conversation with them; this is why we meet

8. When I’m at the theater, I won’t use it, because I want to hear the play

9. When I’m shopping, it is useless, as the shops play their own music quite loud, so an iPod would do no more than offering you mixed tunes

10. When I’m swimming, I can’t use it (obviously, especially that I use water to swim in)

Nevertheless, I imagine some situations in which an iPod would be useful, despite the fact that I can hardly see myself in none of them:

1. Jogging

2. Travelling by public transport

3. Mountain climbing

4. Fitness workouts

5. Attending boring classes

6. Skating

7. Bicycle running

8. Waiting at a doctor’s cabinet

9. Working in an open space office

10. Constipation

(for some situations above, business books can be an alternative to iPod)

Do you remember the days before Internet, when we used to play bridge with the computer? Although the game was OK, the bids made sense, many times we felt like something was missing there. It was the lack of human touch, the gut feeling that makes you disobey a rule from time to time, the small mistakes that give flavour to our actions. When Internet was here, such games like bridge were available online, with real partners. It felt so great!

I read a post today, on Problogger, in which Darren Rowse brings into attention the power of the virtual space, which makes possible things such as successful associations or close friendships between people who never met in real life. He challenges the readers to name the five bloggers they would like to meet in real life. I see this invitation as an opportunity for me to thank a few people who changed the course of my life, although I never met them in person. Here is my list of bloggers I would love to have a chat with:

Guy Kawasaky - because of his charming smile and because whenever my friends come to me with business-related troubles, I can always redirect them to a page on his blog, in order to substantiate my words to them.

Darren Rowse - because many times, when reading his posts I recognize myself in his early blogging experiences. Besides, he is so happy sharing his experience and knowledge with all of us, that I really think he can make a great friend and an enjoyable company. (I remember myself 10 years ago, selling software to some clients: my biggest joy was when the client did not know how to handle well programs such as Excel - I was delighted to show them all kind of tricks and I was so happy that they liked them, that I did not care about all the unpaid time I spent on that). Darren’s work made me set up a business of consultancy for corporate blogs in my country, Romania, which has barely 2000 blogs, out of which, maybe less than 10 are corporate. I took this decision yesterday and I am positive it would prove right over time.

Later update: I was way ahead the times with this enterprise. Nobody saw the need to have a corporate blog in 2006 in Romania. Today, in mid-2008, even the country’s president has a blog!

Seth Godin - because of his half-headed self-portrait. Not to mention here that I would have so much to learn from him that I cannot express now in words. As I have some 5 years experience in marketing, I would enjoy to discuss with him some case studies (mainly the ones where I failed to deliver, as I’m sure I did not learn very much out of them)

Hugh MacLeod - because of his ugly but expressive drawings and because I’m sure that if we met over a couple of beers, he would make a special drawing during that meeting - I would love to see that process.

Steve Olson - because he is a good story teller and he was one of the first people who welcomed me on Stumble Upon. His blog is quite new, but I’m sure that in a couple of years it will become one of the references of this community.

I have a special mention here: many thanks to Steve Pavlina for his outstanding work. Actually his blog determined me two months ago to shift the direction of my personal business, from training and consultancy in real life, to blogging full time, with a strange certitude that I’ll reach some profit before all my savings were gone for good on the deep blogging waters. When I came across his blog, I spent about one week staring at his words and realizing that this is what I want to do from now on, at least for a while.
Yet, I would not want to meet him in person, because I have the strange feeling that he writes for a million people audience and not for one person at a time. I’m not saying this is bad, but it just happens that I’m not very fond of crowds.

If I’ll ever meet one of the persons on this list, I’ll remember once more that everything is possible. All we have to do is grab the opportunities as they pass by.

As I was stumbling upon my favourite sites this morning, I came across a post in Steve Olson’s blog, called How to break a negative thought pattern. Briefly, it was about a chain of negative thoughts generated by a computer monitor which broke. The idea was that the first negative thought attracted several others, generating frustration and anger. Then, by attracting a positive thought, this was followed by others, also positive, creating a better state of mind.

One reader had this comment: “I don’t understand what’s wrong with negative thinking. Some things really suck and should treated or thought of as such.

I have a question here: if those things suck, then why should our feelings suck, too? Anger and frustration do not fix things faster, actually they do not fix things at all. Blaming also is not constructive. It doesn’t matter is we blame others or we blame ourselves, it is still a state of pure complaining, which prevents things from moving on.

What if, instead of thinking of the past, we shifted our thoughts to future: OK, this annoying thing happened; what can I do to fix it?
Let’s take for example Archimedes: what if instead of crying EVRIKA, he would have started to think: “Oh, I spilled water all over the bathroom; my wife is going to kill me!? We would have never heard about Archimedes’ law, would we?

My point here is that winners in life never complain or blame. They just think solutions and act, and this is routing fortune and happiness their way. On the contrary, abusive men attract only misery and anger, and so they lose the battle for happines from the very beginning.