“Permission marketing” master Seth Godin makes a point today in his excellent blog that happens to speak volumes for network marketers: consumers have a long memory for abuse.

His post, “Just Because They Say It,” is about an emerging company in the cell phone industry–a business famous for its lousy customer service. This new company, says Seth, seems like an excellent, caring, high-quality enterprise. And, he adds, they have a climb ahead of them:

“You'd think there'd be a line out the door for a service like this one. But my guess is it'll be a slow growth curve.

“The challenge to a marketer that chooses to enter a market with a miserable history of customer abuse is obvious: you can claim to be better, to be unevil, benevolent even, but people just aren't prepared to believe you. It doesn't fit the consumer's worldview.

“You could be the honest politician or the quality contractor or the direct marketer with no fine print and no spam, but you better be prepared to prove it over and over before we believe you.”

Did you catch the operating phrase here? “The consumer’s worldview.” If your prospective customer or business partner has a “worldview” that says what you do for a living is a little wonky, it’s your job to present compelling evidence to the contrary — not in what you say, but in what you do. They’ll be watching. Closely.

Here’s the corollary that Seth doesn’t mention: in situations like this, once you do change someone’s worldview and gain their trust, you don’t just have a customer — you have a champion.

P.S. With the release of my new book, the Zen of MLM, we’re also going to launch a new ZenofMLM blog, which will be devoted exclusively to an online conversation about the world of network marketing. Once that happens, I’ll devote all posts to that blog exclusively to network marketing-related matters, and all posts to this blog to matters concerning my other books, writers and writing, and life in general. Until then, I may mix it up a bit.

Last night I took a quiet Sunday night off to watch the film Bobby, Emilo Estevez’s lovingly crafted homage to Bobby Kennedy. The entire film takes place on June 4, 1968, tracing the lives of various “ordinary” people in the Ambassador Hotel, spinning a dozen or so of these disparate threads and then weaving them all together in the film’s fateful closing moments of Kennedy’s assassination. I was six days shy of my fifteenth birthday on June 4, 1968. Watching it now, all these years later, made for powerful viewing. Even as fifteen has turned slowly into fifty, the decades in between have not reconciled me to the losses. I still can’t quite accept the fact that JFK, MLK and RFK, men who embodied such profoundly earnest hopes, were stolen away in three wisps gunpowder. It still makes me cry.

Then I went to bed, slept and forgot.

I awoke to a warm, breezy Monday . . . and the news that the campus of Cameron Johnson’s alma mater, Virginia Tech, had just gone through the deadliest shooting rampage in our nation’s history.

Old history last night, new history this morning.

“History”–too often the word is defined by extremities of horror.

Still, humanity has a way of groping through to the other side, to that state Viktor Frankl calls “tragic optimism,” even while reeling from an event like this morning’s. Our hearts feel like they’re breaking, as our prayers and anguish go out to the victim’s, their families, and the entire Tech and Blacksburg community. And with those same breaking hearts, we feel that much more of an imperative to find and execute new and greater acts of kindness. To contribute to a larger legacy of decency. In an awful yet mysteriously salvific way, unspeakable events like these prod us to become better people.

In the last page of his legendary little book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl writes about those “saints” whose acts of kindness form a sort of polar balance for others’ irredeemable acts of cruelty:

“It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”

So it goes.

That’s the three-word refrain that peppers Kurt Vonnegut’s most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), a mantra he drops with laconic grace every time a death occurs in the course of his narrative. Though he famously pledged never to write another novel after that one’s publication, he broke his promise time and again–happily for us. His most recent book was a 2005 collection of autobiographical essays entitled A Man Without a Country. Vonnegut died Wednesday at the age of 84. So it goes.

John Irving, who studied with Vonnegut (and happens to be one of my favorite novelists), said of his teacher, “He is our strongest writer, the most stubbornly imaginative. He is not anybody else, or even a version of anybody else, and he is a writer with a cause.”

Despite Vonnegut’s profoundly and at times bitterly satiric thrust, he was never preachy. Like Mark Twain, he despaired over the cruelties and stupidities of the human condition, and (again, like Twain) lovingly wrapped his fierce critiques in the best delivery system of all: humor.

Toward the end of A Man Without a Country, he wrote: “All I really wanted to do was give people the relief of laughing. Humor can be a relief, like an aspirin tablet. If a hundred years from now people are still laughing, I’d certainly be pleased.”

Yet the essence that shone through his writing, more than any other, was his gentle cheerfulness. He was truly a delightful man. Here is a passage from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965):

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies–‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

Famously agnostic (it’s hard to call him “atheistic,” given his profound reverence for the Sermon on the Mount; his term for it was “Free Thinker”), Vonnegut wrote in A Man without a Country, “If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say ‘Kurt is up in Heaven now.’ That's my favorite joke.”

Kurt is up in Heaven now.

A friend recently asked me to participate in an online forum where we were asked five intriguing questions. I offer them here with the suggestion that you answer them first for yourself, before reading on:

1. What is the most pressing problem to solve globally? Why?

2. What is the most pressing problem to solve locally, in your own surroundings? Why?

3. What is your biggest fear about the future? Why?

4. Name three global leaders who will set the next decade’s course. Why?

5. What is most important in life for you personally? Why?

Here were my answers:

1. What is the most pressing problem to solve globally? Why?

People’s short-sighted, limited, us-or-them view of the future.

Everything we do is colored by strongly–possibly even determined–by our picture of the future. If our view of the world is of a place of dwindling supplies, a zero-sum game in which only the fittest, most aggressive and snakiest survive, well, there goes the ball game. All the people who have most positively affected humanity and the planet–the Gandhis, Franklins, Wilberforces, et al.–all acted from a view of the future as one of unlimited possibility, and especially, as being on a course of elevation and continual, everlasting betterment for all. And then, there is the futureview of a Kenneth Lay. Different picture, different actions, different results, different world.

How we see the future becomes the future. We need visionaries.

2. What is the most pressing problem to solve locally, in your own surroundings? Why?

How kids treat each other in schools, and how they are treated at home. That’s where it all starts.

3. What is your biggest fear about the future? Why?

That I will not get to see as much of it as I might. (Note to self: live longer.)

4. Name three global leaders who will set next decade’s course? Why?

This is really hard, because most “global leaders” respond to the course of events, more than setting them, and those who actually do set them tend to be either fairly unknown, or to arise unexpectedly from relative obscurity. (Rosa Parks–who knew?) But to stop evading the question:

a. Wen Jiabao, the Premier of the People’s Republic of China. Actually, a confession: I am nowhere knowledgeable enough to have a clue whether this guy is truly influential or not, but it seems to me that China is the 800-pound gorilla right now, and whatever they do for the next ten years, the rest of the world will have to deal with. They’re going through probably the most dramatic and gigantic (in sheer numbers) transformation in history. Yipe.

b. Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan. Again, a disclaimer: this might not be the guy. Bashir’s in charge of one of the diciest and most delicate flashpoints in the flashpointiest region there is. But it could be that some other African leader emerges as more critical. As the world’s economic tide has moved from India, to China, I think Africa’s next. Africa is the next decade’s China.

c. Me. Ha! you say. Poppycock! you say. Why cite myself as “global leader who will set next decade’s course”? Practical reasons: it makes more sense to think of ourselves as cause than as effect. If things are going to change, they might as well start somewhere, and that might as well be here. Besides, it’s good to have influence over an influential world leader, and the only person I have much influence over (at least, so far as I’m aware) is myself.

(If you didn’t already put yourself on that list, I encourage you to do so.)

5. What is most important in life for you personally?

Truth, the pursuit of excellence, beauty, love, great food, humor. In that order. Only maybe “love” comes first. Or maybe it’s “humor.” Or maybe, “decisiveness.” Wait, that wasn’t on the list.

A: I wrote about all three of them in a post called “Telling the Truth” over at Cameron Johnson’s blog. For the next month or two, while Cameron’s busy running around the country doing the media thing, I’m going to be showing up there regularly as a guest blogger (probably once a week or so).

This weekend I made the drive up to New England and finished the audiobook version of You Call the Shots. I really must write voice talent Bill Dufris a note to thank him for doing such a superb job. (The audio version is so unabridged he even reads through the entire twenty-three-page Appendix, “Tips for Getting Started.” Does not include the “Acknowledgments,” though, alas.)

This weekend Networking Times did a promotional blitz for the book. I got a kick out of the e-letter’s first sentence: “There are two groups of people who should read this book: 1) anyone between the ages of twelve and twenty-one; and 2) everyone else!”

I guess that about covers it.

I’ll post the full text of the promo letter on the “Magical Mystery Media Tour” section.