Free Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life by Trevor G Blake Page A

nicotine fix can launch eggs and oranges like missiles.
    Media can also be vehicles for propaganda. Anyone with an idea that they want to share with others becomes a propagandist. The father of propaganda, long before the days of television, was Joseph Goebbels. In a famous 1928 speech on the means and power of propaganda, he stated:
    Propaganda stands between the idea and the worldview, between the worldview and the state, between the individual and the party, between the party and the nation. At the moment at which I recognize something as important and begin speaking about it in the streetcar, I begin making propaganda. At thesame moment, I begin looking for other people to join me. Propaganda stands between the one and the many, between the idea and the worldview. Propaganda is nothing other than the forerunner to organization. Once it has done this, it is the forerunner to state control. It is always a means to an end.
    Propaganda in any format can erode the individual mindset, and we have to be aware of its influence on us. Are the opinions you have on various matters your own or have they been comfortably fused into your mind by propaganda?
    I often have this discussion with a relative who has strong opinions about the members of the Royal Family in England. Her opinions have changed over time, depending on the images shown in newspapers and on television. I have met many of the Royal Family personally and formed my own opinion of them from those interactions. My impressions differ markedly from anything you would read in a tabloid newspaper or that my relative repeats thereafter as her own opinions.
    When I remind my relative that she has never met these people, she will vehemently defend herself and her right to her own opinion. She admonishes me, even though in reality, her only source of information is what she has seen or heard through various media, often reinforced by her friends who share the same opinions.
    In reality, since 1997, there has been a concerted public relations campaign run by a prominent global advertising agency, and costing millions, to repair the image of the Royal Family. The goal of the campaign was to “reposition the family into a unifying force.”
    In the same way as someone from Joseph Goebbel’s time would distribute pamphlets to a crowd, the religious, political, and business institutions in our high-tech world use all the vehicles of modern media from television to social networks. Theaim is to form a state of mind, bring like-minded people together, and create a specific reaction. That might be to cause you to send a donation, vote a certain way, or buy a product. It could also be to encourage you to buy a house you can’t afford or invest unwisely in daily stock trading with the money you could have used to start a business of your own.
    In the mid-1980s, prior to the innovation of satellite television, I lived in the United Kingdom, where I was quite satisfied with three television channels. After heated debate, the government allowed a fourth network to start broadcasting. They needed innovative programs to draw audiences and picked up American football. A one-hour highlight show ran on Monday nights and, for the first time, Brits started to get into the game.
    The program quickly got the highest ratings in the lineup. At the end of the season, the producers pulled a coup with the first live showing of a Super Bowl. Some friends and I got into the excitement and threw a party as Chicago played New England.
    Our first mistake was miscalculating the time difference. The game kicked off at close to midnight, by which time most of us were highly inebriated. The second mistake was that no one realized there would be so many commercial breaks. A one-hour game took three hours to play. We had been used to the condensed highlights show and did not expect the game to be so fragmented. Brought up on soccer and rugby, in which the games flow without commercial breaks or time-outs, by the