What do YOU believe?

Yesterday, I wrote a friend a long email. It was about smoke, mirrors… and common sense.

We live in an increasingly cluttered world, where we are forced to seek shortcuts to make sense of the growing volume of information and knowledge around us. We must learn to critically analyze and make sense of what people say about the things that concern us.

Yet, that is no longer easy.

People confuse us, sometimes intentionally and at other times just incidentally. But we end up not knowing what to believe.

There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors stuff going on all around us - and we need to rely ever more increasingly on our innate common sense to see through the mists and perceive the ‘truth’.

What brought on this line of thought?

Well, one thing is this discussion I recently participated in at the Warrior forum, related to the new blog traffic widget, Blog Rush

If you don’t have time to read it all, and only browse the last 2 pages, you’ll notice many levels of ’spin’ on what most common sense folks would call ‘reality’.

There are people explaining how the system can be ‘gamed’ - giving details about how anyone else can learn to - and saying it was to ‘help’ the owner of the program understand weak spots. (Really? How interesting!)

There are people accusing the programmers who left such weak spots for being incompetent. (And you’d do it differently, much better, right? Well, why haven’t you? Or when are you going to?)

There are others defending them by saying these ‘weak spots’ were left ‘deliberately’ to attract spammers out of the woodwork, so they could zap them. (Ha, ha, ha… that’s a good one!)

And then there are others saying that’s just marketing spin, that such obviously glaring mistakes happen only when programmers think they’re too smart! (Hmm… so we should hire programmers who believe they’re dumb?)

Judging from the discussion, what is a discerning reader to think?

Seth Godin wrote an excellent book with a provocative title: “All Marketers Are Liars”

The thrust of the message is NOT that marketers tell ‘lies’, but that people believe what they want to, depending upon their ‘world views’ - and smart marketers take advantage of this reality.

For those who believe BlogRush is the next best thing since sliced bread, the goof ups and glitches are just ‘beta problems’ that will be solved soon, or even ‘intentional bait’ to weed out scammers.

For those who believe BlogRush is a flop, a failure and a waste of time, it’s a poorly conceived plan executed by incompetent programmers with over-hyped marketing spin.

For those who believe BlogRush deserves more study before a judgement can be made about it, what matters is the few bits of data and results being shared from the network participants - since it helps them arrive at a decision to keep it, or drop it.

Yet, EACH BELIEVES in his or her ‘truth’ - though the ’smoke and mirrors’ have distorted and masked portions of it!

It’s true about every bit of information that’s presented to us, in various formats and media - the TV channels, newspapers, magazine stories, even personal messages and emails. Each message carries a ’spin’, depending upon the person sending it to you, and the angle or point of view they are approaching it from.

How can you make sense of it all?

Easy. Rely on your most powerful tool that’s kept you alive, safe and happy for YEARS - your common sense. It’s a beacon that cuts through the smoke and mirrors and reveals the truth… if you let it.

Maybe not naturally, instinctively, easily. You’ve got to give ‘common sense’ a chance - even if it means going against the popular trends and fashions. Look at situations objectively. Make predictions, and then test your conclusions against what happens later.

If what you predicted didn’t come true, look back at what you may have missed - and LEARN from the experience. The next time around, your common sense will be an even better, more reliable guide.

But here’s what’s sad, and will keep the ’smoke and mirrors’ crowd in business for a long time to come…

Common sense is NOT common!