Multitasking
Computers allow us to multitask. We can chat with friends while watching TV on the internet. We can chat with lots of friends at the same time. Yet multitasking is not new to our daily lives. Just ask any housewife. Isn’t it that your mother been cooking different dishes for dinner while washing clothes and taking care of you? Without chatting online, we can still talk on the phone while watching TV and doing our assignments. Whether we can multitask or not also depends on our multitask ability. That is if we can handle so many different things without going insane or, at least, sending the message to a wrong person.
Traditional economy vs. Attention economy
Back to the old days when advertising was not popular, people traded by money and products. Thus, assets refer to money and products which they sold. However, in this new era, people do not just do business this way. In order to broaden their sales network, they need a popular, well known by others to represent their products in order to get more attention from potential clients. Look around then you will find lots of international brands have hired well known people from different walks of lives as representatives of their products. Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, Sonali Bendre, Daniel Craig. We can easily name a few. These people have positive image and a huge group of followers. People worship them and will follow whatever they say, just like some people will immediately want to buy the iPad2 right after Steve Jobs’ presentation. Yet one of the problem is they must have and maintain this positive image. Otherwise, they will lose their contracts or bring negative image to the product they represent. For example, years ago, Michael Jackson was the spokesperson for Pepsi yet he was dehydrated during his concert. Immediately, Coca Cola published a simple ad “Dehydrated? There’s always Coke!”
Also, we have to change our mindset to accept that “asset” can be divided into tangible and intangible. Tangible assets refer to money and products. Intangible assets refer to whatever we process yet cannot be valued in terms of money, for example our image, knowledge, connection with other people, etc. There is an old saying, our new saying, about looking for jobs: it’s not what you can do, it’s whom you know.
To be successful, we should think in a broader sense. For example, intellectual property was, and still is, a hot topic. Although it cracks our brains to invite a product, no matter it’s a book, a song or an electronic device, we of course do not want others to copy and make money from our hard-working output without paying us. Yet if we think from a macro view, some people illegally downloaded the song and like it. They want to know more about us and be our followers. Then they will want to buy other things from us. We may have lost something at the beginning but at the end of the day we may be able to gain back what we have lost. Just buy and sell is short term. To make a real fortune is what we want in long term.
