What is superficial?
When I grew up and my mother tried to give us some kind of sophisticated education she used to say: “The opinion you are giving me is very superficial.”, in the sense of something negative, something that was not good for me. (We are middle class Germans from Cologne, I should add this here).
Wikipedia quotes: “Superficial is an adjective generally meaning “regarding the surface”. Both in the literal as in the metaphorical sense the term has often a negative connotation based on the idea that deeper parts are also important to consider.”
What my Mother meant was “shallow”, just touching the surface, not enough to bother.
OK, that is fine. But what is the interpretation of “superficial”? Is it really negative or is it a useful layer to scratch and decide if you want to look any further?
I like the term of superficial because it allows a lot of interpretation. Superficial can be positive as well. Superficial can induce to scratch the surface and find a lot below it. It implies a decision. The decision to let things be or to look beyond the surface.
Decision is powerful. You decide what is good for you. Be realistic. You decide what is happiness for you. You can achieve it.
The time to scratch the surface came for when the company where I was working receiving a very good salary for Spanish levels, merged and moved 800km away from Madrid to Barcelona. I could have kept my job moving to Barcelona, that was good luck of course, but not my partner in Madrid.
So this time, because this things happen every x years, I decided to scratch the surface and to go a little deeper. At the age of 43 what could I do when I lost my job? The chance to find a new one at my age was very low with an unemployment rate of 20% in Spain.
So I joined a health and nutrition company as a network marketer and tried direct marketing without knowing anything about it. A very “superficial” way to manage a home-based business, believe me, and one big pitch.
When a Spanish friend of mine introduced Ann Sieg’s texts and Mike Klingler’s tutorials to me they sounded like the possibility to go beyond the surface. The solution. The method to learn network marketing online, attraction marketing, social marketing, video marketing, applicable to my MLM business in order to make it less superficial and to make extra money online. That was the idea behind the surface when I decided to stay where I was and to give up my job.
So thanks to their University I combined my personal happiness and my professional life. I stayed where I was, in Madrid. I took my decision, scratched the surface and found the opportunity to learn, to teach, to read, to write, to make money and to widen horizons.
