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Frecklebox Co-Founders Scott Feldman and Mark Sarpa learn how to plan their companys Marketing and draw more people to their web site.

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Can making dreams come true be as easy as this? Is it possible to let go of our doubts? Can it be possible? Is it possible to do it so magically so that it could be as easy as brushing our teeth? This excerpt from the book named ONE by Masami Sato would show us how it can be done in a step-by-step manner, so that one can start walking towards one’s dreams today itself.

We all have dreams. But not all of us have the faith in ourselves, that we can have and live those dreams in our lifetime. Actually, the secret to have such certainty is simple. And the reason why we doubt it so much is also straightforward.

We can now start by asking ourselves the first question..

Why don’t we do the things we want to do?

Often, our thoughts stop our actions. Sometimes the more we think about it, the less we become committed to accomplish what we initially wanted to do. Because the more we think about it, we come up with more and more reasons for not doing it.

Is it then possible to be sure that we will definitely accomplish what we want to do in our life?

Yes, definitely! For a start, let us look at the power of habits..

If we have an appointment for a meeting tomorrow night, we might not spend too much time worrying whether we can reach there or not. We would not be bothered about the likelihood of having a car accident and not being present at the appointment. In the same way when we walk to the bathroom, we may not worry if the toilet would be broken down.

We are always more assured about these day-to-day activities that happen every day. These are the habits.

However, we are doubtful about our dreams

Most interestingly, there are plenty of things we are not equally sure about. Particularly the things that we really want to in life – our Dreams!

Then, what is the secret for the conviction that we will accomplish our dreams?

First: Simply make it a daily habit!

We can begin with being more assured about our actions to fulfil our desires – the type of dreams that really nurtures our life.

For example, if a person’s dream is to make his fair share of contributions to the society, and giving is a big yearning in his life, there is no need to doubt the possibility of being able to make that contribution. Al that is necessary is to make it a daily habit.

Second: Make it as important (and as easy) as brushing our teeth

Realising dreams can be just like brushing one’s teeth. It simply doesn’t feel nice if we do not brush our teeth for pretty long, isn’t it? We can’t bother to spend hours considering which toothpaste we should use or wait to clean teeth till there is some need to do so. We feel a little out of sorts if our teeth are not clean. So we clean them. That is all!

Coming back to our example, if giving is so important to us, we have to ask ourselves certain questions: What if giving is in fact of as much importance as brushing our teeth? What if it is making us feel good? What if it is helping to maintain our health?

No matter whether we have a lot or very little just now, we can definitely start giving it and sharing it with others today. No matter how seemingly unbelievable it is to fulfil our dreams, we can start proceeding towards them today. We should view it as something crucial, a priority issue that we should practice every day! Then we would feel unhappy if we don’t do it. Just like brushing our teeth.

and Third: Give first, then we will get back

When we are ready to give first before we have even got what we yearn for – what we are dreaming of – we are sending a strong message to ourselves which says, ‘there is enough, and more will come.’ It lets us know the joy today – the joy of sharing.

If you want to be wealthy, be munificent. Then you are sure to be blessed with abundance. If you are intelligent enough to do so, do not hesitate to teach others. Then you will learn more. If you feel like giving, just give the whole of you. And do it without expecting anything in return. Just let go. The act of giving is its own reward. The simple satisfaction of giving.

So do not be afraid to share and give what you have, for it will not hinder you from achieving your purpose, whatever it is. It will only make you achieve your dreams quicker. And your journey there will be full of joy.

But surely habits are much smaller in scale, compared to our BIG dreams?

Just do it, don’t be concerned about the ‘scale’

Because anything can take place in life. We might get started in a pretty simple way. And these simple things might lead us to another act, and form there to another. Our confidence in our simple actions and executing them one by one constantly takes us forward. But if we feel that it is unfeasible to do something now because it is simply unachievable, it is unlikely to ever happen.

The power to achieve one’s dreams has always been there, and will always be there. Those who have managed wonders, sensations, and real joy, already know this. They go on using it.

Visions and miracles do not happen accidentally. We choose to create them.

So, would you probably start going towards your dreams today?

Contents are excerpted with minor modification from ONE, a book written by Masami Sato. To get a free copy of ONE, visit www.B1G1.com and start sharing the joy of giving. Feel free to use or republish the content of the above article, fully or partially, as long as it is preserved in its original content, with proper attribution to Masami Sato and www.B1G1.com.

Discover more about how Buy1GIVE1 (BOGO) can transform your business using Cause Marketing.

Definitions of words often change quite quickly these days. In the distant past the meaning of words was often set in stone. Today the meaning can change in a blink. With new faster ways to communicate with wider and more culturally, socially and education

There is a growing global movement where consumers are asking businesses to take care of the things that they care about. The request is mainly tacit and despite it being an ironic request it non-the-less signals that we are in a time of change. Consumers these days want their ‘goodies’ but they don’t want the environment to be destroyed in the creation of their ‘goodies’. They want cheap products but they do not want workers to suffer to create those cheap products.

Until recently there was no real answer to this complex puzzle but today one actually exists. It exists in the reforging of a simple single word – GET. Today there is a new movement of consumers wanting to get and at the same time give. They are reforging the word GET into the word GIVE.

Every day I receive a notice from Google Alerts for two words – B1G1 and BOGO. It tells me all the new places that these words are being used on the Internet. I can now see that the new meaning of these words is coming alive ‘poco a poco’ [Italian: poco, little + a, by + poco, little].

B1G1 and BOGO, despite sounding like characters from a Marvel comic are acronyms for Buy One GET One free. You buy one and they give you an extra one for the same price.

If you look on Wikipedia you will find these definitions for BOGO (there isn’t a definition yet for B1G1 – there will be soon when I write one!):

* An acronym in the retail industry that stands for Buy One Get One. For example, you could say “Buy 1 DVD, Get 1 FREE!

* An acronym in slang British that stands for Britons Of Greek Origin or Greek Britons.

* Bogo, Cebu, a city in central Philippines.

* An alternate name for the Bilen ethnic group of Ethiopia or their language, Blin.

* An alternate name for the Bilen ethnic group of Ethiopia or their language, Blin.

* The mascot of the ITESM CEM.

* BogoMips, an unscientific measurement of CPU speed

* Bogosort, an ineffective sorting algorithm

BOGO Lights – torches that give

There is an organisation in the USA called SunLight Solar founded by a gentleman called Mark Bent. He has created a special torch that not only is an amazing and robust solar-powered light; his company also gives a free torch to a family in need in developing nations for each one purchased. If you look on their website you will learn about their “BOGOlight”.

“The BoGo – our Buy one/Give one – program has successfully provided lights to many, many thousands of people in the developing world, changing lives because of your purchase and participation.” – BOGOlight.com

Mark Bent has flipped the BOGO acronym upside down when he started to use the word as part of his product name. For him now and the thousands who buy his lights, BOGO today means Buy One GIVE One. Each person gets to give a light every time they buy one for themselves. So now with each sale people who do not have the benefit of electricity can tap the power of the sun to support them in their lives.

There are many other well known and less well know businesses now doing Buy One Give One giving or transactional giving as it is becoming known. Some of the famous ones are One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) and TOM’S Shoes. Some of the less well-known ones (in the USA at least) are based in New Zealand, Australia and the UK – Earthstar Publishing, Maple Muesli, Blinds Couture, Figure 8 Body Chains, Sunsplash Homes, Honestly Women magazine and Thavibu Gallery based in Thailand are just a handful of special businesses that are heading the Buy One Give One movement.

There are many Buy One Give One businesses now uniting under the common brand banner of Buy1GIVE1 managed by a Singapore based social enterprise which is becoming the home of transaction-based giving. Any business in the world can now integrate Buy One Give One giving with ease. It’s like a ‘CSR plug-in’ allowing a business to instantaneously start giving from each and every sale, starting from just 1 cent. It’s also no longer about giving an equivalent product to someone else. Instead it is about contributing to a project that resonates with a company’s activity. For example a restaurant can feed a child, a television retailer can give a cataract blind person the gift of sight (Get Vision-Give Vision), a magazine publisher can plant a tree every time they sell a subscription and a property developer can build a low-cost family home for those in need (Buy1BUILD1) – the list is simply endless.

The stats now add up saying consumers do care. The 2008 Goodpurpose global study of consumer attitudes revealed that nearly a huge 68% of consumers would remain dedicated to a brand during an economic slump if it supported a charity cause. This study also highlighted some other key points as well such as:

* Half (52%) of consumers globally are more likely to recommend a brand to others when it supports a good charity cause over one that does not.

* and 54% would champion a brand to promote a product if there was a good cause behind it.

* Consumers are now voicing a clear desire for marketers to associate their brands to social causes. 42% say that if two products or services were of a similar quality and price, commitment to a cause outranks factors like innovation, design and brand loyalty when selecting one brand over another.

Turning Getting into Giving

The new concept of Buy One GIVE One is starting to replace Buy One GET One as the global giving movement led by Buy1GIVE1 ripples out. Right now if you search for the terms B1G1 and BOGO you will find that websites that do Buy1-Give1 giving are on the first page of Google results. Certainly with the large consumer demand shown for products from companies like TOMS Shoes, BOGO lights and OLPC – One Laptop Per Child, this tide is set to continue and spread.

I did a recent Google search to find the top 25 keywords associated with the keywords BOGO and B1G1. The results were interesting indeed seeing none of them contained the word Give. You can see the results below. It will be interested to repeat this experiment in 12 months time to see what changes. Consumers are now starting to drive significant change and despite them wanting to receive free gifts (as in traditional BOGO/B1G1), they equally want to help others and the environment. This feeling is validated by 2008′s Goodpurpose global study.

Here are the search results:

Free, networking, boots, groups, music, dallas, togo themes, wallpapers, buy, applications, skins, values, coupon, African, gift, photography, blogging, discount, sharing, shopping, pics, join, prose

Transaction-based or transactional giving

Unlike normal charitable giving Buy One Give One giving is transactional. What is meant by that is: every time you buy something you give something. In the case of SunNight Solar they give a physical light for every light sold. In most cases, businesses that become part of this special form of transaction-based giving, give in a different way. At Buy1GIVE1, giving can start from just USD 1c contribution per sale. At this amount no business in the world can say they cannot give and 100% contributed goes to the cause.

The amount contributed from each sale is not the point of focus with Buy1GIVE1 transaction based giving. The focus is instead on the story and sharing the simple joy of giving. In the end, if you think that 1c is not a lot to contribute and is unlikely to make much of a difference think again and consider the following idea.

From its origins in Ethiopia, where the main coffee production is still from wild coffee tree forests, coffee consumption has spread globally. Brazil is still by far the largest coffee producer in the world producing on average 28% of the world’s total coffee. In 2006 Brazil produced enough coffee to make 216,400,000,000 (216 billion four hundred million) espresso coffees. If we were to calculate across global production then we get a daily global consumption of around 2,117,416,830 cups of coffee – wow. The figures are somewhat hard to track down but let’s guess that 40% of the world’s coffee is sold and consumed in coffee shops then we would get that 846,966,732 cups are sold commercially each day globally – nearly 900 million. This would equate to about’5,485,714 cups in the US on its own seeing they purchase around 21% of the world’s coffee.

Now imagine that for every cup of coffee sold a child was given clean drinking water from its own well. It costs just 1cent per person per day to do this. Any coffee shop could afford to contribute this amount from the sale of a cup of coffee. Instead of clean water a coffee shop could contribute for the education of coffee farmers’ children, costing from 23cents per child per day. The options and stories are unlimited as well as the potential difference that Buy One Give One transactional giving can make to the lives of many.

Transaction-based giving is the story of a thousand-mile journey starting with a single step. Digging a well costs a few thousand dollars, however when you break the cost down it only takes the sale of a single cup of coffee to give clean water to a single person for a day1. This is the incredible and simple power of transactional giving. It is like the compound interest of giving – a little turns into a huge amount very quickly.

So many companies are used to doing things on their own. Doing transactional giving is no different. A company can go out find a cause and start doing Buy One Give One giving. And yet they are missing the point when they do this. Buy1GIVE1 giving is about sharing the joy of giving and not trying to change the world. As soon as you step up and say you are going to change the world then the world will step up and challenge you. Within a heartbeat a company would experience the sharp scrutiny of the media inspecting their every move. And yet when a company steps up and says it is supporting what its customer want and joins with others in its industry to do that in a win-win way, the story is different. When companies choose to join together under a commonly recognised banner/brand they can have a powerful joint effect. The ripple that a single company creates is added to that of another and the ripple grows into a tidal wave that benefits so many. This is the power of giving and doing things together.

The final power of Buy One Give One transaction based giving is that everyone wins – the consumer wins – at no extra cost to themselves they have made a difference through their purchasing choices – the business wins in so many ways – and the worthy cause or charity wins because they can now receive small amounts from many sources all aggregated and paid as a lump sum from a single source if done through the Buy1GIVE1 service.

A new start

If you go and check Wikipedia.com today for the word BOGO you should find that a new definition has been added. It’s time for a tide-change – a change from focusing on GETTING to working with GIVING. I added this small addition to Wikipedia’s BOGO definition: “… an acronym in the Marketing industry that stands for Buy One GIVE One.”

Just imagine our world where every time you shopped and bought something you gave something – automatically and seamlessly. This is the simple joyful magic of transaction based giving.

This is the world I want to be part of.

And remember – you don’t ‘get’ giving till you get giving.

References:

http://www.buy1-give1free.com/index.php/Partnering/Worthy-cause-charity-projects.html

http://www.goodpurposecommunity.com/

http://www.tesco.com/greenerliving/what_we_are_doing/ethical_clothing.page

http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html

http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html

http://www.goodpurposecommunity.com/

http://www.dep.org.uk/globalexpress/13/page1.htm

Footnotes: 1 Daily cost per person is calculated by taking the average cost to dig a well, dividing it by its average expected life without major maintenance, divided by the number of people in the community benefiting from the well on a daily basis.

Discover more about how Buy1GIVE1 (BOGO) can transform your business using Cause Marketing.

Part One of Three

This collection of beautiful quotes that will inspire you to awaken your curiosity about the mystery of life is excerpted from “ONE”, a book by Masami Sato, the founder of Buy1GIVE which is a global giving organisation sharing the joy of giving. The quotes in this first edition include topics that are profoundly related to our everyday lives, such as mystery, judgment and connection. This article is the first part of the 3 “ONE Book Life-Changing Quotes Series”.

On transforming judgment

“Judgment often has very little relation to reality.”

“Actions and words don’t always accurately reflect who we are. Every single one of us has had the experience of wanting to undo what we did or said.”

On the mystery of life

“It’s very, very clear that we don’t need to know all of the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of life to keep living on this planet.”

“There are so many things we don’t understand in life. In spite of that lack of understanding though, we often enjoy experiencing those things.”

“Seeing is important but trying to figure out everything isn’t necessary.”

“The scientists are not here to reveal the ‘truth’ because we are here to seek it forever. They are actually here to complicate the game (of life) so that we can have more questions and enjoy the game longer.”

Connection

“Connection is the core of everything. That’s what life is. Connection.”

“Every single thing we do is to satisfy the need for connection.”

“We cannot feel unhappy when we are feeling totally connected. It’s impossible!”

“We are designed to constantly seek ways to connect to each other and to a greater purpose.”

“‘solutions’ coming from fear and doubt may not be the most effective ways. We end up feeling more and more disconnected from each other.”

“We can only truly celebrate the victory with others when we win together. Then we feel connected.”

“This is the game called ONE. The aim of the game is to ‘connect’! We keep connecting until we all become ONE.

Discover more about how Buy1GIVE1 (BOGO) can transform your business using Cause Marketing.

The secret of attaining what one wants has been revealed. It is just the simple act of giving. The basis of this is explained in the background of the classical dictum “Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?” Chicken and the egg, continuously forming the cycle of life and renewing it, is a profound example of giving and getting what one wants: the circle of joy. This idea is fully analyzed in the resonant voice of Masami Sato, the author of the book ONE.

As human beings, most of us have yearnings for different kinds of things. And of course, the fundamental principles of economics tell us that while needs are unlimited, resources are not. This makes us think that the more resources we have, the more yearnings we would be able to satisfy. As such we tend to safeguard our resources. We would then feel that giving away these resources or splitting it between many would lessen the portion that can be used to get what we desire. This is the conventional win-lose strategy that is being played out.

Is this true, then?

What if the answer turns out to be “no”? What if it in fact contradicts the secret of attaining more? What if the secret of attaining more is in itself simple – by giving more?

You can get something simply by giving. Just like you can have eggs by breeding chickens. Just like that. Natural. Automatic. And it’s an absolutely joyful experience.

First of all, let us begin with some analogy to explain things.

Chicken and Egg – The Cycle of Life

Many a philosopher has come out with this question from the beginning of time, “Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?”

The answer to this endless discussion is simple: It actually doesn’t matter because both chickens and eggs are here now. But if we want to have more great outcomes, we can choose to start somewhere.

Giving and Receiving: the Cycle of Joy

What happens, if we pose a different question? “Which comes first, giving or receiving?”

Again, for better results, we have to begin somewhere. Giving away things to others is definitely far simpler than attempting to get it first!

What happens if we are trying to get it first?

If we hope to have something, surely we would try to acquire it. And once we get it, we would cling on to it. This is surely natural – it makes sense rationally.

But the actual result of ‘trying to get’ is mostly not ample and actual long term benefits.

For example, hoping to see others happy is not at all about deriving joy from them, or manipulating them to become happy. It is about how much happiness we can give them and thereby share with them. Full stop.

So how do we begin to get what we desire?

By starting from the other end of the circle- by giving generously!

When we are ready to give away first before we have even got what we hope for – what we are dreaming of – we are sending a strong message to ourselves which says, ‘there is enough, and more will come.’ It lets us feel the joy today – the joy of sharing.

All that is required of us is to give out the love in abundance to others. It would somehow come back to us. Giving love is the only way to be completely loved. When we recognize others for the big things they do and great credentials they have, again it would come back to us. Others accept us because we accept them.

In the same way, if we wanted to have enough in our life materially, financially and emotionally, we just need to share the things we want generously with others.

Some are ready to give more physical things like time. Others opt to give what they can spare financially, like money. Those who give more (time, money, compassion, love, thoughts) have these things in abundance because it is the surplus. And surplus is the natural law of life.

Remind oneself of the rules of the game.

Rule one: never hope to get anything in return when a thing is given.

When we have the expectation that giving should create ‘getting’ something back, we get upset when we don’t see the result coming back immediately to us. We may even hold unpleasant feelings towards the recipient of our gift. And clearly, holding a negative feeling for someone is not a pleasant or kind thing to do! So we can feel the real joy of giving when we’re doing something for others knowing that we’re simply doing it for ourselves-we’re doing it for our own joy!

Losing to succeed, giving to receive.

In the beginning it may look as if we are losing. However, at some stage we recognize that taking things without giving is not an acceptable life pattern. And we have been aware of it all throughout. That is why tithing has been a normal part of the lives of many people who were leaders. And they did not do it with any fanfare so it was not done to gain popularity. It was done because it was a way of life.

Just take a look around. ‘Simple’ forms of life on the earth do it routinely. The bumblebees fertilize the flowers in return for the honey they take from them and ensure that the flowers bloom profusely. Habitually. That is the rule. They do not do it consciously. That is why they maintain nature’s balance, without even trying.

Giving is just being who we are, it is just like having; not greater or lesser. No difficulty, no conditions attached, just releasing oneself.

The real secret of getting more can be summarised in two steps: Give first, and do not expect anything in return.

When we let go and give open-handedly, what we require would come to us. On its own.

Find out more about how Buy1GIVE1 (BOGO) can transform your business using Cause Marketing.