Turn offs

As i look around the blogosphere for new and interesting blogs, there are some things that turn me right off.

I do most of my blog surfing on MyBlogLog. I used to use BlogCatalog for that as well, but now they show blogs in an annoying frame, which you have to close to see the URL, which means reloading the page, with a consequent waste of bandwidth.

That's a turn-off in itself. I like to visit blogs whose owners have visited my blog -- if they find my blog interesting, there's a stronger possibility that I'll find theirs interesting. And if theirs is interesting, then people who visit their blog might have interesting blogs, and so on.

But it's a bit like travelling through a maze or a labyrinth -- doing that sometimes leads one down dead ends, and when that happens there is nothing for it but to go back and start over.

There are, however, some warning signs that indicate that a dead end is coming up -- key words that turn me off.

And some of these words are: entrepreneurship, marketing, self-help, self-improvement, personal development.

When I see those tags in a MyBlogLog blog listing, I don't even bother to look at the blog. I know it's going to be a boring dead end.

But there are a lot of blogs like that out there.

My son works in a book shop, and he tells me that the best-selling books are the self-improvement ones.

One of the most popular recent ones is called The Secret. More people seem to buy that than anything else, and from my son's description of the contents I gather its main purpose is to promote the "culture of entitlement" which is already the bane of our society. Its main message appears to be that the universe owes you a living, and you just need to be sufficiently assertive to persuade it to cough up.

A few years ago we went to his graduation at the Pretoria Technikon (now called the Tshwane University of Technology). He studied fine arts, and was a bit unenthusiastic when we said we would like to attend his graduation. When we did, we saw why.

The main speaker pronounced his pride in the institution's greatest achievement: it was the very first tertiary education institution in the world to include the word "entrepreneurship" in its mission statement.

And it went from bad to worse: the lights were dimmed, and the graduands all recited "The Entrepreneur's Creed" together in unison, like 8-year-olds reciting the multiplication tables -- the new secular religion for the masses.

Marketing, entrepreneurship, self-help and self-improvement are the biggest turn-offs I know.

But if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, just write and publish a self-improvement book. Marketing it is one of the easiest things in the world to do, because the demand is limitless.

Better still, write a book about how to write self-improvement books.