Archives for posts with tag: Health
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To Mask or Not to Mask

April 20, 2021 //
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To mask or not to mask, that is the question. Even after you’re vaccinated.

The swiss cheese model explains how the vaccine is one of several layers we can use against infection, and let’s not forget that many of us are not vaccinated. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

If you wear a mask, chances are it won’t stop you getting infected but it will stop others getting infected by you. Wearing a mask stops you giving it to others, and doesn’t really stop you getting it.

Any marketer worth their salt would wear a mask, because marketers are always thinking about others, putting themselves in other people’s shoes, their customers and the partners.

Put simply, and at the risk of over-generalising: if you wear a mask in public and/or confined spaces, you’re being selfless, and you’re thinking of others. If you don’t, you’re not, and you’re not.

So, you see, it’s not really a question. You should mask.

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Categories Marketing, Self-help

The Inverse Quarantine Meme

April 8, 2020 //
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We’ve all seen those quarantine memes – either the before/after video of the girl bouncing up off her beach towel and flick-flacking her way down the beach into the sea, followed by the ‘after’ shot of the larger lady rolling down sideways and sloth-like, or the ‘day 31’ shot of someone enormous who has eaten the contents of their house – and in fairness some of them are very well done.

This idea that when you’re stuck indoors you eat more, either out of boredom or as a comfort palliative to anxiety, is a common one and one that people who are not used to being in the house all week can fall prey to.

Now is the time to buck the trend and strive for that inverse quarantine meme where your after is way better than your before.

Now is the time to grow that experimental beard, hit the yoga mat or get your kids to devise some indoor circuit training, safe in the knowledge that the only people that will see you are well used to you in a state of mild undress, or with bed hair.

Now is the time to recover those lapsed new year’s resolutions, with minimal distractions, and make a change for the better.

Now is the time to focus on that beach body, even though it might be July 2021, or December 2020 if you live south of the equator, before you can show it off.

Now is the time to resist the cookie jar. Go make a cup of tea or coffee instead, just the way you like it, rather than the awful cuppa Dave in accounts used to make.

Get that quarantine quest for greatness and fitness moving. Remember: when they zig, you zag. There’s cohesion and strength in small numbers, especially when that number is one.

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Categories General, Uncategorized

Avocados

October 15, 2018 //
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I’ve had it with avocados. I’m done with them.

Yes, I know they’re good for me. They’re rich in those omega-thingies and they taste nice too. You just never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes they’re too hard, like cheese, but you’ve opened them now, so you have to eat them. You can leave the other half in the fridge, even with the stone still it, and they take about 5 mins to go off.

Sometimes they’re too soft, and have gone mostly black and bruised, not appealing to look at or taste, so they’re wasted. Even with the health benefits they’re a bit of a lottery.

And then there’s the process of how they’re made, and the vast distances they need to come to service the needs of a consumer in the north west of Europe. Take a look at this video (it’s 12 minutes long, but worth a quick look). An awful lot of the environment goes into creating one of those capricious little suckers, and the ramifications are pretty far-reaching, as you’ll see.

No, much as I like them, I think I’m done with avocados.

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Categories General

Water

August 6, 2018 //
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Water is essential to life, human life anyway. We can’t live without it, much as we can’t live without oxygen. No oxygen and we’re done for in a minute or two. No water and we’ve got a few days of excruciating agony before we slip away.

We’re supposed to have at least 2 litres of the stuff per day, that’s 8 glasses. The more the better too. They say that if you’re 1% down on hydration you might be 25% down on performance.

Me, I can’t stand the stuff. It’s boring, I don’t find it particularly refreshing, unless I’ve had a salty meal or I’ve been exercising hard. I inherited this from my mother. She can’t stand water, so much so that she never bothered to learn how to swim. She’s not shy of the shower, she simply doesn’t like water.

When we were kids we didn’t have water with our meals. We drank milk. I hardly had water as a kid, and I did OK, except I’m on the short side, and I don’t think you can blame the lack of water for that.

About a decade ago, I paid for one of those full health check-ups with a private hospital. It was partly discounted by the company’s health insurance and I felt I should go in for a 50-thousand mile service. I remember scoring very well on the hearing test, nearly off the chart. The doctor said to me in the debrief that my hearing was very good. ‘Pardon?’, I said in reply. I know, I thought it was funny, a had-to-be-there moment.

The doctor didn’t laugh either, but what she did say was that I could take me 8 cups of water in any form I wanted: tea, coffee, cordial. I don’t think beer counted.

This was music to my ears, but I have since heard conflicting reports that it really should be ‘unpolluted’ water. I do track my water intake and it’s rarely 2 litres per day, and usually 50% of it is tea or coffee. Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years.

On the odd day that I do make a concerted effort to up my water intake, I find that I need to use the bathroom almost every half an hour. That’s simply not practical when you’re in meetings, presentations or travelling.

 

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Categories General

Between 7 and 8 Hours Sleep

June 29, 2018 //
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All the sensible advice for being productive and healthy is around getting a good night’s sleep. Here’s a very articulate post on it – and a good book recommendation – from Tom Tunguz.

I’ve written before about my need for 8 hours’ sleep. What I’ve also found is how close I get to the magic 8 hours is important too:

  • Any more than 8 hours’ sleep and I’m in good shape. If I’ve been in the red on sleep the past few days, and I get 8 hours’ sleep or more, then I’m fine. Then it’s simply a better 8 hours’ sleep than normal
  • If I get less than 7 hours’ sleep, I’m feeling OK, but I need to fix it at some point in the short term. I can’t go more than a couple of days with, say, 6 hours’ sleep
  • If I get between 7 and 8 hours’ sleep, I’m shattered! I feel groggy and it takes me a while to get out of the funk

I can’t explain this, and it presents a dilemma if I have to get up a specific time and the 8 hour window for going to bed has just closed. Do I stay up longer and get less than 7 hours’ sleep, as counter-intuitive as that sounds, or do I go to bed anyway and risk the outcome of getting between 7 and 8 hours’s sleep?

 

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Categories General

Male Hygiene

May 21, 2018 //
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I’ve debated for nearly the last five years as to whether to devote a blog post to this topic, whether it lowered the tone of this blog. I raised it with my good lady the other day and she said ‘it’s common knowledge, and it might help in a small way, so publish.’ So I have.

What I’ve observed over my decades of using public or shared toilet facilities is this, and it concerns male hygiene: a lot of men don’t wash their hands after using the facilities.  Horrifyingly, their propensity to not wash afterwards seems to increase when there’s food and drink involved, so in restaurants, bars and clubs.

I’ve never understood this. Your body expels waste products for a reason. Why would you not wash your hands and reduce the risk of infection? Why would you not reduce the risk of infection to others, to the people with whom you’re socialising?

Is it that men can’t be bothered, or is it that it’s more macho not to care about such things? Whether it’s laziness or lack of respect for our fellow man, it baffles me.

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Categories General

Constant Pain

January 10, 2018 //
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We use the word pain a lot in sales and marketing. We don’t mean physical pain of course, we mean business-related pain, and use the word to signify a problem, deficiency or other kind of challenge that our prospective customer needs to overcome. We home in on that pain, highlight it, illustrate the downside of not fixing it, and demonstrate how we’re uniquely positioned to remove that pain.

We also hope that our customer is not experiencing that pain constantly. You’d think we might be, but actually if they’re so preoccupied with that pain then it makes it very difficult for them to focus properly and absorb the reasoning about how we can help alleviate the pain.

There’s an exact corollary in constant pain of a physical nature too. When we’re in constant pain, a pain that medicine or treatment won’t lessen, it consumes every waking moment and makes it almost impossible to do anything productive. That’s why we’re generally in hospital, at the Doctor’s or laid up in bed. Nothing else for it.

I pity those unfortunate people who have to live with constant pain. It must be so hard. I have to imagine you’re preoccupied with managing that pain every waking moment.

Same for the business in constant pain as well. We must work super hard as marketers and sales people to provide a glimmer of quality respite for them to buy into a better future, a future that’s tied to us.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Food Poisoning, Hangovers and Migraines

August 18, 2017 //
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Ever had food poisoning before? The kind where you wonder if you’ll ever get out of this black hole? It feels like someone is drilling you a new eye socket, while at the same time hitting your stomach with a baseball bat. Meanwhile the rest of your body has gone to defcon 3 and is ejecting whatever is inside you from both ends?

Ever had a brutal hangover? The symptoms for me are the same. You can’t control an episode of food poisoning, even if you’re careful, but you can a hangover, so I avoid them wherever possible.

Ever had a migraine? A proper one? Guess what, the symptoms for me are the same. Unfortunately, apart from avoiding certain foods like chocolate and cheese, you can’t really control them either. Besides, who wants to live in a world completely bereft of chocolate and cheese?

The cure for all three aliments is the same. It’s not medication. I’s not really hydration, though that helps somewhat. It is sleep. If. I. Can. Just. Get. To. Sleep. I’ll. Be. OK. It’s really hard to do it with all the pain and the upheaval, but if I can finally get to sleep, I can sleep it off and emerge the other side.

So, in case you didn’t know, you do now. Food poisoning, hangovers, migraines. Same symptoms, same cure.

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Categories General

Baking a Cake

July 28, 2017 //
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I was helping my daughter bake a cake the other day. She wanted help measuring out the ingredients and then she got on with it herself. It was to be a cake for her Ladyship’s birthday, one of those two-sponge affairs with jam in the middle and icing on the top.

I haven’t baked in a long time. I was staggered at the amount of butter that was called for in the recipe. Half a bar of the stuff. Worse was to come. The required amount of sugar filled a desert bowl, heaped.

It reminded me how much of the stuff that we’re supposed to moderate in our diets goes into making the big 5 food indulgences: cakes, crisps, sweets, chocolates and biscuits. I also love the cake mix, the gloopy mass of ingredients before it goes into the oven. Not usually the one to make the mix, I would grab a few scrapes of the remains of the mixing bowl. I had forgotten how much badness goes into these delicacies.

I guess that’s why legislation insists on manufacturers explicitly listing contents of food and also showing the number of calories in a meal. This has applicability not just in the world of fast moving consumer goods but in the broader marketing of both B2C and B2B products. Sometimes we don’t want to know what goes into the making of something. Sometimes we do, so it’s good to have the option.

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Categories General, Marketing

Frostbite

March 22, 2017 //
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On a Monday evening, if I’m in my hometown, I like to play some 5-a-side footie with my fellow middle-aged men, sans lycra of course.

Recently, I went out for a game. I had a sore calf – again – so I didn’t want to let the lads down and decided I’d play in goal. It was unseasonably cold, snowing and sleeting in fact, and I had a very thin, porous set of gloves on. They got wet very early on, and so did my hands.

An hour later, the pain was unrelenting. I can’t remember having colder hands. So much so that I went grey and felt nauseous. I made it home, but my fingers were so cold they felt solid. I had to gradually warm them up, in agony, for about half an hour before I realised I was, in fact, not going to have a heart attack, stroke, or die.

I probably wasn’t that close to having frostbite, and my fingers were 90% fine the next day. I can’t begin to imagine, however, what it must be like to be genuinely very cold indeed for a long period of time. I think the body and organs must shut down and you must literally want to crawl into a ball and die.

I also know now why scaling Everest or Arctic trekking isn’t on my bucket list. Sawing off frost-bitten fingers is not on my top-1000 list of things I’d like to do.

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