• Because the amount of money you possess is not the measure of your success. A change in paradigm.

    Are you a success longing man or woman?

    If so, then you are probably inheriting the old paradigm
    of success. The paradigm of your parents and grand parents
    who were taught that a successful individual is that of a person
    who has a lot of money and who can buy anything.

    You have probably watched their videos, read their books. So did I.

    I was looking for that kind of success, to become the next Bill gates,Warren buffet, Steve Jobs, LarRy ellison,. etc
    Then there came Elon Musk, and people like him , who inspired
    the Millenial generation to seek social impacting amd disrupt society
    to become millionaires along the way.

    What if I told you that those definitions of success are profoundly wrong
    and outdated?

    You would probably not believe me, and think I am just some extravagant
    hippie, because my idea does not fit with your definition of success.

    Allow me to explain , just as I would allow you to explain yourself.

    Take a look at the platform LinkedIn which is nowadays seen as THE platform where millions of professionals connect and make business with each other. No serious professional nowadays would dare not to have a LinkedIn profile, because it is there where you can find all the public info about people and businesses in the world and offer their services to you and vice versa.

    LinkedIn started small, and the founders are now super rich. Seems like a perfect success story, one that would satisfy not only my generations X expectations , but also those of the Milenials, who are out there to make an impact., and looking at LinkedIn , it really made a big one, just like Facebook, or Twitter.

    But don’t get me wrong, somehow something is not quite fit in all of this. This company now owns the profiles of all the people who depend on its platform to find a job, and clients, to make their money.

    From small individually owned companies to big corporations, they are all there to use the contact connection features it provides.

    Sounds great, doest it? It does! It gives the owners of the platform a lot of power! Wait but ,what if suddenly the world is facing a situation like the current covid19 pandemic, and suddenly you are not allowed to say anything against the official mainstream media and government view of the problem?

    Well, in a freedom of speech society you would not risk anything, as you would have the freedom to say whatever you like as long as you respect the platforms community guidelines, which are mostly based on common sense.. But, suddenly , the government forces Linkedin to censor any point of view that goes against theirs, for “security” reasons. You now risk of having your profile and page on LinkedIn removed, because the board of directors are still subject to censorship and the orders of their government.

    -“Nah,this can’t happen, we live in a democracy! “- Well, it seems this is what is now happening.

    This is what happened precisely to Brian Rose, the owner and main figure of his Business called “The London Real” because he published an interview to the controversial worldwide known writer and speaker David Icke, whose theories of conspiracy are not at all well regarded by the systems establishment.

    This establishment orderer LinkedIn and YouTube , to remove the content of the whole channel without previous warning, and let Brian Rose in a situation where he could not reach his subscribers who willingly were following the channel and all his interviews.

    Now, maybe if his interviews were promoting hate or anything against the common rules , then it would be fair to censor it, as not respecting the terms of use, but the worrying problem is that they did not, they are all in respect of the policies, but not of the establishment of the one percent elite who literally owns the world with their big corporations.

    Then, in the light of this event, can we still say that LinkedIn is a true success story? Can we say the same for other platforms like Facebook and YouTube whic so blatantly are erasing a fundamental human right called freedom of speech and of opinion, as they are also following the censorship campaing against dissent perpetrated from obscure meeings between our governmentws and corporations?

    Now, yes I know, that you are probably thinking that well, in some cases, freedom of speech needs to be limited for the good of all society. But think twice , who decides what is good and what is wrong for society? Is it each reader, viewer, subscriber or is it one governmental, organisation who deems to have the right to decide what’s moral and what not on behalf of everyone ?

    Just see that the Spanish inquisition, or the South African apartheid regime or Nazi Germany , and all of the moments in our history, where one regime decided what had to be considered right and what wrong.

    Sadly, we are now facing a very similar situation, not an exaggeration.

    Do you consider then that Hitler was a successful man ? Because he reached enormous power indeed. Do you consider Mao Tse Tung alsto to have been a successful person, just because he succeeded to impose communism in China and become the most popular person there?

    Should we allow the goal to be a justification of the means to that goal , or would we need to abide to “human ethics and human rights” in order to truly reach human success?

    Now, think of Mahatma Gandhi,Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and many others who fought with their lives to help millions selflessly., without looking to gain millions of dollars in reward.
    Do you think these people were successful, even if most of them were detained , tortured and even assassinated?

    I hope you get my point, we have to be very careful when they give us the examples to follow. Irecomend you to use a magnifying glass on what people say about what success is.

    The new paradigm of success.

    The new paradigm of success is one where you no longer crave for money and power, but you crave to make a positive impact in the world, in order to do as much good as you may possibly can to as many people as possible, respecting their civil and human rights and empowering them to do the same.

    In this paradigm how would you disrupt what already has been made but with the new paradigm in mind?

    For example, in the case of LinkedIn and other social platforms I can imagine a new way to socialise digitally in which we are not censored and have our freedom of speech removed by a centralised power .
    This could be achieved by using the power of blockchain technology . This technology can decentralise such a platform so that it does not belong to any company or corporation to decide what is to be published, but by the users themselves.

    Linux , or how to get paid doing good stuff

    Who is Linus torvalds? He is the man who created the Linux operating system, the first open source and collaborative operating system, for which he was never paid, and the best of it is that he started it as a side project.

    Now Linus is a millionaire when it was not even his aim at all. How did he get there? Because he got so many donations from people who wanted to see his project come to live, that he never had to deal with problems with the money! Because he is such an expert on the system he can literally earn hundreds of thousands just in consultancy. /

    For me he is clearly a true successful human who started his dream of creating a better operating system, one that was free to use and trasnparent, as opposed as Windows or Apple.

    His operating system is now seen as the best operating system in history, and beats Microsoft Windows by miles in terms of flexibility efficiency, and security. Also, know that Android and IOS are both based in Linux.

    Why did Apple and Google not choose windows? Because tech pros know how bad Windows is , but for the common user who doesn’t know a thing about computers, it is good enough.

    If Bill gates is the second richest operon on the planet, is because most people don’t have a clue about computer operating systems, and because he got help from the government, because weather you like it or not, windows is spying on you , and the NSA loves this.

    You see now that it is possible to be a millionaire doing a good deed for your society, without detroying anyones lives , environment, or helping greedy individuals get ritcher at someone[s expense?

    So what is success?

    Success is not the measure of how much money you can make , or how big your business becomes. Success is how much good you can make to help the world become a more humane place to live.

    To be a successful entrepreneur, you don’t need to aim solely at becoming rich. What’s essential is defining yourself as someone who provides ethical service to both society and nature.

    Any other definition of successful entrepreneurship could be seen as a failure, as it neglects the importance of becoming a morally upright individual. Thus, the true goal of life lies in striving to be a good human being while contributing positively to the world.

    Are you up to be the next Linus Torwards, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John Fr Kennedy. david Attenborough and people like them?

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  • Sales of some vegetables have soared by up to 300 percent following moves by a number of New Zealand supermarkets to ditch plastic packaging.

    A group of New World supermarkets have abandoned the use of plastic wrapping for virtually all of their fruit and vegetables in a project labelled ‘food in the nude’. Pioneered by the New World store at Bishopdale in Christchurch, it has led to stunning sales figures.

    Read more from the New Zealand Herald

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  • What would the world be today if no-one had ever denounced the lack of justice surrounding irresponsible or even criminal practices? Well probably hell on Earth! If no one had ever exposed the crimes against humanity done by Hitler in the 1930s, or its counter communist part Stalin? We would probably live in a truly Orwellian world where no one would have freedom of speech or thought.

    Sadly, we are living in the capitalist equivalent of an Orwellian nightmare, where people are so free, they can buy and eat whatever crap they want and throw away their garbage unpunished, filling lands, oceans, and rivers with deadly chemicals, polluting our planet, and jeopardizing the future of our descendants. How irresponsible is that? Well, too much!

    Remember that big supermarket chains have the ultimate responsibility in deciding which brands they sell. Many supermarkets have created their own brands to increase their profit margins with white labels, but they don’t do it to protect the environment at all. When will supermarkets start to cure their shelves in favor of socially responsible brands?

    Their power is enormous, and the brands know and use all of their lobbyist resources to reach their goals and gain more distributors at all cost.

    We, conscious consumers, who care for our planet need to lobby as well, and boycott with our buying decisions, but it seems this is a slow battle, and we need to take action in other ways, exposing the supermarkets who are accomplices to bad brands like Nutella, who is alone responsible for a large part of the Indonesian rainforests, habitat to orangutans, to be destroyed in order to plant palm oil. Palm oil which they use to make their product less expensive but still keep an attractive consistency in exchange for our natural biodiversity and the habitat of thousands of endangered species.

    If supermarkets keep aiming at reducing costs at any social cost and without moral and legally binding obligations, with a shortsighted view of the future, the environment will keep suffering.

    Imagine mountains of trash coming from a Carrefour supermarket every day. Banana plastic wraps that you take to your kitchen, from there, to trash landfills or incineration facilities or exported to a third world country to be discharged into the sea, very probably ending up in the food chain and sooner or later into breast milk fed to babies.

    Studies have shown that nano plastics generate genetic and hereditary diseases not only in children but also in descendants. No wonder why there are more and more genetic hereditary sicknesses. For now, you may be lucky, but if the trend continues, by polluting our food chain you may find your family inheriting such diseases as well.

    Another company that seems to have followed Carrefour’s bad practices is Mercadona. One only needs to walk around the fruit and groceries section to see how wrapped in plastic all their stuff is. What annoys me is when you read a sign saying you need plastic gloves to manipulate fruits.

    Mercadona, how much more plastic do you want us to waste ?

    When you buy bread, you also get the typical paper wrap with a small transparent plastic window. Really??? Is this really necessary? NO!

    Our grandmothers did not need plastic to wrap the bread, so why do we?

    Is it really so important to be able to see the bread inside? Can’t we just trust the supermrket and see it at home and if it’s not what we wanted, take it back or never buy it again?

    This horrible practice can be observed in other supermarkets aswell, like BonPreu or Lidl. Bonpreu is a Catalan company proud to portray its Catalan origin by supporting local producers but does little to protect the environment from plastics, as they share similar bad practices as Mercadona.

    The cashiers are still commanded to offer the plastic bags to the customers. This is also done at Carrefour and Mercadona . This tactic is perhaps aimed at generating extra income from the bags which are sold 5 cents each, adding an extra hundred thousand euros per month with this simple but polluting tactic.

    Lidl is a German supermarket chain. German companies have the reputation of being greener than the rest, but this does not apply outside their borders most probably as you can see the same bad practices aswell.

     

    Conclusion
    The supermarkets are great accomplices of the socially irresponsible brands. They are the ones who help them to get to the public, and their decisions influence the consumers as well.The costs reduction strategies are always a highest priority for them and cutting out on waste management spending, their benefits are even higher for their investors.

    If we  select the brands which are the most socially responsible when we buy we can force the supermarkets to benefit them.  Nonetheless in my opinion we should force them to comply with zero waste management systems  reducing the use of single-use plastics, etc. Its up to us to reinforce the movement and gain public attention and influence if we want to create a healthier and greener future for our families.

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