Saturday, April 01, 2006
Becoming a Guru: First Steps
There is no text book to plagerise, no website to lift ideas from. This step-by-step guide is coming our of my guru brain.
If you follow these steps religiously, I can guarantee you'll look and act like a marketing guru. But you may not be accepted as such unless you pay me for aspects of this training program that will not be free. (This is your first lesson in Marketing Guru Economics.)
Step One: You can't simply come out of the closet and announce that you're guru like you can announce that you're gay. (Though I guess you can't simply be gay on your own. You're not really gay until someone else lets you be gay with them, in a gay sort of way, if you know what I mean...)
Bad analogy. The point is that one does not confer guru status upon one's self. It must be conferred upon one by others. This is the important first point. A few people saying it is not enough. You must reach critical mass in public opinion. So it's a kind of brand job that you do on yourself. (Now you can see why they call me a guru.)
Step Two: To become a guru, you must have the desire to be a guru. It is true that some have gurudom thrust upon them. but if they cannot stomache the thought of assuming the onerous duties that come with the title, they quickly slip off into comfortable obscurity. A guru is a professional celebrity and must enjoy being on stage 24 hours a day. Every word you say is inspected for "guruvity" (which is the origin of the modern word "groovy", first applied to the original guru of the atomc age, my friend the Maharishi - pronounced "Maharshi" - Mahesh Yogi, who was a physicist before becoming a guru. I studied advanced guru with him.)
Step Three: Once you have established your intention to become a guru, you must look for a model to emulate. (Or you can follow the posts on this blog. Before this course, aspiring gurus had only the example of others to follow.) Either way you can learn a lot from models. My first model was Hugh Mackay, social researcher who appears on radio telling us what "mum" in the suburbs is thinking about all sorts of issues. If you asked the average 'mum' in the suburbs to name a social reasearcher, they'd name Hugh. That's the model I followed. Instead of quarterly reports from the frontiers of consumer society, I had my column in the only serious monthly magazine in my industry. Other models reveal other ways to guru status. David Ogilvy wrote a book called "Confessions of an Advertising Man" which was mostly fluff, but in the 60's people were fascinated by the subject and there weren't many books about it. And Ogilvy was a copywriter and wrote wonderfully. He admitted to me afternoon in Versailles that he wrote the book solely to attract clients and appear serious. That's an educated Englishman's way of saying "I wanted to become a guru." We deal with he book as guru tactic in a later post. Choose a model from any field. Look around. There are so many to choose from.
IN OUR NEXT POST: Point 4, etc. ¶ 1:19 AM
If you follow these steps religiously, I can guarantee you'll look and act like a marketing guru. But you may not be accepted as such unless you pay me for aspects of this training program that will not be free. (This is your first lesson in Marketing Guru Economics.)
Step One: You can't simply come out of the closet and announce that you're guru like you can announce that you're gay. (Though I guess you can't simply be gay on your own. You're not really gay until someone else lets you be gay with them, in a gay sort of way, if you know what I mean...)
Bad analogy. The point is that one does not confer guru status upon one's self. It must be conferred upon one by others. This is the important first point. A few people saying it is not enough. You must reach critical mass in public opinion. So it's a kind of brand job that you do on yourself. (Now you can see why they call me a guru.)
Step Two: To become a guru, you must have the desire to be a guru. It is true that some have gurudom thrust upon them. but if they cannot stomache the thought of assuming the onerous duties that come with the title, they quickly slip off into comfortable obscurity. A guru is a professional celebrity and must enjoy being on stage 24 hours a day. Every word you say is inspected for "guruvity" (which is the origin of the modern word "groovy", first applied to the original guru of the atomc age, my friend the Maharishi - pronounced "Maharshi" - Mahesh Yogi, who was a physicist before becoming a guru. I studied advanced guru with him.)
Step Three: Once you have established your intention to become a guru, you must look for a model to emulate. (Or you can follow the posts on this blog. Before this course, aspiring gurus had only the example of others to follow.) Either way you can learn a lot from models. My first model was Hugh Mackay, social researcher who appears on radio telling us what "mum" in the suburbs is thinking about all sorts of issues. If you asked the average 'mum' in the suburbs to name a social reasearcher, they'd name Hugh. That's the model I followed. Instead of quarterly reports from the frontiers of consumer society, I had my column in the only serious monthly magazine in my industry. Other models reveal other ways to guru status. David Ogilvy wrote a book called "Confessions of an Advertising Man" which was mostly fluff, but in the 60's people were fascinated by the subject and there weren't many books about it. And Ogilvy was a copywriter and wrote wonderfully. He admitted to me afternoon in Versailles that he wrote the book solely to attract clients and appear serious. That's an educated Englishman's way of saying "I wanted to become a guru." We deal with he book as guru tactic in a later post. Choose a model from any field. Look around. There are so many to choose from.
IN OUR NEXT POST: Point 4, etc. ¶ 1:19 AM
