As you know, I’m sufficiently arrogant to find praise from others mildly distasteful, which is why I post very positive mailvoxes. However, this hagiographic effort was both sincere enough and serious enough about the reader’s lessons learned here to justify a link.
How many times in your life do you get to interact with someone who’s truly infamous?
And we’re not talking about a little notoriety here. We’re talking about so unspeakably abominable that his enemies tremble at the sound of his name.
I’m not even kidding.
The adversaries for the man we’ll be talking about today often refuse to print his name. It’s as if they fear it might conjure him up like some monstrosity from the deepest bowels of the internet.
Behold, a colossal miscreation from the void, some sci-fi horror experiment gone completely wrong, the most hideous behemoth of the digital deep! And it demands to feast on the flesh of its enemies!
It’s a good start, right? And now we have official confirmation from no less than Google itself that I am dangerous as well as notorious. Anyhow, to the lessons:
After a decade of curiously watching Mr. Day chisel at the marble, I’ve learned a thing or two. Best of all and as always, what I’ve learned, in business, leadership, and life, has been tested out in the field, in real life.
Building a Business
The experts make a lot of mistakes to capitalize on
The Patreon fiasco mentioned above is a huge mistake. And a huge opportunity for those willing to take advantage of it. And as we saw this week, corporations are serving up an endless buffet of entrepreneurial opportunities at the moment. But whether it’s your mortal enemies or your business competition, you’ve got viable possibilities for hitting back or building an alternative.
There’s strategy, and then there’s logistics
If I had a dime for every strategy meeting I’ve been asked to attend, I’d be an international bank. What became of most of those strategic plans? Nothing, absolutely nothing. The corporations and consulting firms love cooking up useless strategy plans. But Vox Day taught me that deploying your plans, taking stock of the real means you’ll do it, is just as critical as your scheming. It’s the only way to rise above mere bullshitting.
Marketing, including SEO, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
Once upon a time, slick, well-financed, and professional won the race. But those days are gone. What’s most interesting about Mr. Day’s website is that he admittedly knows nothing about SEO. Or advanced website metrics. In fact, he seems unaware of large swaths of the marketing industry. But with his kind of site traffic, you can see that the marketing industry is clearly jerking itself off.
Business is war by other means
Although I suspect Vox Day may disagree, business organizations are just as much political organizations as anything else. Corporate espionage, protection racketeering, dark intelligence services. What separates governments from private enterprise is more paper-thin than you might imagine.
And if you’re going into business today, you may want to study up on military history as much as business models. His career shows that it’s not always business as usual. And in this way, you can have a better real-world understanding of power and might.
It’s particularly interesting that he picked up the link between business, politics, and war before I read, much less posted, anything about Unrestricted Warfare. The part about strategy and logistics is even reminiscent of what the Chinese authors of the book believe to be one of the essential principles of that 5GW.
When setting objectives, give full consideration to the feasibility of accomplishing them. Do not pursue objectives which are unrestricted in time and space…. Every objective which is achievable is limited. No matter what the reason, setting objectives which exceed allowable limits of the measures available will only lead to disastrous consequences.