As I write this you may have seen the story of Ted Williams. He was a guy that over the past few days has gone from being homeless,  living on the street and sleeping in some shrubs to being inundated with offers of work. Why? Because he has a great voice. Actually let me rephrase that – he has an amazing voice that puts the slickest radio announcer to shame.

Don’t believe me? Take a listen for yourself

So is his voice the reason I’m writing this post? Well as much as it is a great voice, actually no. What I wanted to write about is the reaction to this story.

I first saw this story in the feel good news segment at the end of a cable news sh

ow. It did its job -  I felt good. But over the past two days the story has changed . Williams has gone from being discovered to being exploited and now being attacked.

At first everyone came out and the support for him was positive. He has gotten over 8million hits on that video above as I write and still the majority of people have felt endeared to this story of redemption. But for the news networks its not good enough for them to show the same story for a second day. So after having been flooded with offers, sites like the Smoking Gun have pointed out that surprise surprise Williams had a drug and alcohol problem which had also entailed problems with the police and going to jail. Does this really surprise anyone and more importantly does it really take anything away from the feel good story?

Howard Stern and some other commentators  have gone on to claim that the whole thing is a set up and the guy is a fake. It seems many people are trying to point out everything wrong with this story rather then appreciating that the guy got lucky and got a second chance. Good luck to him, he took action with his sign (see pic) and put himself out there. He dared to do it.

Ted Williams putting himself out there.

Some people want to destroy

There are two ways to gain people’s attention  -  either build something up or pull something down. Some people like to make it their mission to pull down others, point out flaws and dig for faults. In the online world they are known as trolls, but don’t be fooled  – they exist everywhere.

In my own seminars when we have an audience of around 500 people I often hear from my promoters about a few people who sit in the back and criticize what ever I’m talking about and claim that they know it all and could teach better than me. Very rarely will any of these trolls come up or challenge me in person, but they will try and infect as many people as they can at the back of the room and they take great offense when people there to learn tell them to shut up.

I’ve seen the exact same thing in other peoples seminars such as Tony Robbins, Harv Eker and Frank Kern. These trolls are more focused on pulling others down rather than trying to build something up.

You need to put some people out to attract others in.

See anytime you put yourself out there in public you are going to get people who come along and try to pull you down. Its part of the game and the fact is that if you aren’t getting some trolls then you probably aren’t pushing hard enough. I know out of every audience I speak to that roughly 2-5% of the people there will vigorously dislike me and what I have to say. Guess what?  I wouldn’t have it any other way. See if I tried to please that 2-5% of the people who don’t like it, I would end up losing the 35% of people who are my hard core raving fans.

There are always going to be people who don’t like you and want to criticize you just for the sake of it, whether you are a speaker, a blogger, someone trying to make a change at work or even a homeless guy looking for a second chance. What ever you do don’t let it stop you.

The ultimate mind trick is to accurately read someone’s mind and know what they are thinking, with out any fancy card forces or magic tricks. This is often achieved by frauds and scam artists using a technique called ‘Cold Reading’. When I first learnt NLP I modeled ‘Cold Reading’ from two sources and found it to be extremely effective at making people think that you could read their mind and tell their future.

At one party I went to I took out a normal deck of cards and used them as prop while I used cold reading to read all my girlfriend’s friends. Later in the night many people came up to me and professed that I had been the best fortune-teller they had ever met (this was in an Asian culture where people going to a fortune teller, was quite common).

For me I did it as fun exercise to check the ability that I had modeled and I deliberately set up an empowering future for all of the people I worked with, yet unfortunately many people use it, to claim to speak to the dead, talk of magic abilities and generally to get large sums of money out of people.

While we can read many of the things in peoples minds (such as they way they are thinking and style of their thinking), we are still unable to read their exact and precise thoughts. UNTIL NOW that is.

As science gets better and better at learning how our brains work we are starting to see some truly amazing milestones in the technology of brain scanning.

This story from CBS 60 Minutes shows exactly how far technology has come to being able to make this simple little feat available to computers and perhaps in the future everyone, including the government.

Watch CBS Videos Online

What is really interesting in this story is the whole concept of reading people’s intentions. Will the future be something like the movie ‘Minority Report’? Will people be scanned before getting on a plane to see if they have the intention to blow up that plane?

As the rate of our technology advances, I wonder if we are advancing at the same rate as a society to handle the many ethical issues related to this kind of technology.

The future is always interesting.