Hi and welcome to my blog-slash-website. My name is obviously John Scott and I live and work in Seattle, with time also spent in Seattle.

Internet Marketing

When it comes to internet marketing, I got into the industry in 2002. I had been a framing contractor for several years, and then started a website to get referrals from the internet. I paid an SEO $3,000 to optimize my website and all he did was change the page titles and page text to include the keywords. This is when Google was still relatively new and SEO’s were optimizing their pages to be keyword-dense. They had not figured out that Google’s algorithm was all about the text of the hyperlink. After my $3,000 investment got me nothing, I set about reverse-engineering Google’s algorithm and was one of the first people in the SEO industry to realize that using your keywords in the text of links made all the difference.

In order to share my knowledge of SEO and marketing in general, I started a webmaster forum at webmaster-forum.net. That eventually evolved into the V7N Webmaster Forums, where we had 40,000 members and nearly one million posts by the time I sold the website in 2008.

My marketing knowledge goes beyond just optimizing sites for Google – which is done by doing both on-page optimization and link building by putting out viral content – and includes general marketing of the kind you learn from Kellogg on Marketing or Kotler’s Marketing Management. Brand building is important. It is key to identify the niche you can effectively dominate and generate a realistic plan for dominating that niche. These days, I employ what I can the Beast Strategy to market a product or service online. The beast strategy is a funnel for conversions that creates brand awareness, engages the prospective clients, and in the end retains them by identifying and serving a superior Unique Value Proposition (UVP). I always ask my clients to read a few marketing and branding related books, chief amongst them The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR by Al Ries. When you hire me, I become part of the team and your staff are expected to be team players involved in the whole marketing process.

My internet marketing services are satisfaction guaranteed. Either you are happy and I keep your money, or you are not and you get your money back. In all my years as a marketing professional, I have never been asked for a refund. 

Personally Speaking

Personally, I am a father, a marketer, a published philosopher, and a coffee drinker. My oldest child is 32 years old (Hi Nadya!) and my youngest is 18 years old (Ossu Angie!). I have four sons and two daughters, whose welfare I pray for daily. And yes, that means I am religious. I am a born-again Christian and proud of it.

You might think that I am a Japanophile or a weeaboo, from the fact that I have lived in Japan on-and-off from the time I was 14. I am not a Japanophile. I have never been so confused as to mistake myself for a Japanese person, even though I spent my formative youth in Tokyo. I am proud to an American and a citizen of the Western world with all the values that the West is known for.

I like many aspects of Japanese culture which I like and respect, but there are obvious faults in the Japanese culture, too, which I will never turn a blind eye to. Japan does many things right. Especially noteworthy is the Japanese appreciation for good food. Japanese do bread better than the French who they emulate. They do Chinese food just as good as the Chinese do. They do cheeseburgers better than any American does. They do pasta better than Italians.

Japanese also have an underlying idea of honor, which is not universally accepted by Japanese themselves. Amongst many Japanese, the idea of samurai honor is held in disdain as a revisionist view of Japanese culture. Many Japanese think of the samurai as bullies and thieves.

Another thing the Japanese do well is discipline. They have a high tolerance for pain and they are pros at suppressing their own feelings in order to honor traditions, such as is seen in the tea ceremony or traditional dance (odori).

But the Japanese tradition can preserve a perverted sense of group identity over individual identity. Japanese public education and society in general teacher that being typical is good. They say “平凡が一番” which can be translated as “mediocre is best.” That is how Google translates it, but that sounds negative to Westerners who have been taught that aspiring to be the best at whatever it is they do is the best. In Japan, 平凡が一番 has no such negative connotations. It is better translated as “to be average is best.” I seriously take issue with that part of Japanese culture. It is forced down the throats of Japanese children in school, where acting in coordination with others is held in high regard. My Japanese first wife said of the Japanese education system, “it is perverted.” I have to agree with her.

And that sentiment matches my philosophy, which is one of political and moral individualism. I do not believe that Marxism is an inevitable outcome for society, as Marx believed it was. The idea of class warfare is an old and cheap substitute for intellectual activity. Despite popular opinion to the contrary, I believe that humans are not herd animals. Herd activity is mob behavior and it often represents the worst kind of activity that humans engage in. Personally, I have never been a herd animal. From the time of my early childhood, I always was aware of being alone and unique in my beliefs and goals. I never shared my identity with others.

When I was a child, I had a crisis when I was in third grade. I had discovered an old abandoned graveyard in the outback of East Wenatchee, Washington State.It struck me as absurd to live a life dedicated to some purpose, because we all die anyways and those people in that abandoned graveyard were forgotten, no matter what they had achieved in life. They had lived and died in obscurity and without affecting any great difference here on earth.

There are many possible purposes to life. All are meaningless. Some people find their purpose in love, but love never lasts. Some aim to be respected by the community, but do they really deserve respect? Don’t they have the same flaws that everybody else has, but they hide those faults and in the end live a lie. They don’t deserve respect.

Some people pursue fame. Fame is precisely the opposite of what I want. Who wants to lose all their privacy and become known to all? So what is a horde of nincompoops know who you are? Does it offer any benefits?

Riches also stands as a candidate for one’s purpose in life, but from what I could tell as a teenager, riches require a lot of work and sacrificing a lot of leisure to obtain them. And once you do obtain riches, friends and family as well as your enemies are always trying to take some.

Thus I realized that no good reason exists for which we ought to live. Life became absurd, without purpose.

When I moved to Japan as a 14 year old, I found that Japanese youth valued experiences above all else. They tend to be existentialists, unbeknownst to themselves. They believe in individual freedom and responsibility. They believe that meaning is self-created, and life has no inherent meaning. They believe in seizing the day. Japanese youth of the 1980s believed in no wasting time with meaningless endeavors. They aimed to live each day to the fullest, eating fine food, watching good movies, attending concerts, traveling to interesting places, and generally amassing a wealth of worthy experiences. They sought adventure. I adopted this philosophy as soon as I was exposed to it, back in 1984.

I had another crisis when the school I attended attempted to teach me the multiplication tables as truth. I knew that truths are particular. There is a cup of coffee on the table. That statement could be true if indeed there was a cup of coffee on the table. But 9 X 9=81 is not truth. It deals in abstract objects not found in the real world. That cannot be truth, despite Bertrand Russell’s statements to the contrary. Truth requires a correspondence between a statement and real objects in physical reality. Math therefore cannot be true.

On October 17th, 1987, at the age of 16, I killed my long term girlfriend, Yoshie Matsuoka. Yoshie had taught me a lot about life, and was a wonderful person. She taught me not to say anything if you cannot say something positive. She also taught me that a man is only as big as the stone he stumbles upon. She was an exceptionally good person.

I spent 12 months in solitary confinement while the trial was under way. This gave me time to think. And I wanted to think. I wanted to know if what I had done was objectively bad. So I considered the word “good”. I discovered that there is no objective meaning to the word “good” – people use the word to describe something that is useful to some or another purpose, regardless of whether the purpose itself is objectively good. And the are no objectively good purposes.

I did, however, discover that, objectively, I had no right to kill Yoshie. Rights derive from consent and I had no right to kill Yoshie, and she had in no way violated my rights in such a way as to give me the right to kill her. Having realized this, I realized that I wanted to be judged and sentenced according to the truth of the matter. When the prosecutor and my defense attorney had both presented their cases, I was given a chance to speak and I told the court that I was indeed guilty of the crime and that I deserved harsh punishment, and would not appeal.

However, the victim’s mother, who I was somewhat close to, asked the judges (there are three of them in Japanese superior court) to sentence me to a reasonable term that would allow me to rejoin society soon and become a “rippa” (立派）or “upstanding” member of society. Accordingly, because of the request of the victim’s mother, the prosecutor asked for, and was granted, a sentence of 3 to 5 years of hard labor.

In prison, I learned a lot. It was the best thing for me. People talk about prison as something that is counterproductive and not ideally suited to justice. The Japanese penal sysytem teaches inmates that they ought to control themselves. Otherwise, the authorities will control you, and that is unpleasant. I was out of control before my arrest. I was picking fights with people. I was driving drunk and wrecking cars and a motorcycle. I hit a schoolgirl with a friend’s motorcycle and left the scene. I was entirely wild, and prison was needed to tame me. My time in prison taught me to think first. It also taught me to work hard, in order to be eligible for early release. I worked so hard that the prison administrators made me “hancho” (班長, team leader) of the paper factory there in prison.

Prison also gave me the chance to study philosophy. My father bought the Great Books of the Western World from a Britannica saleslady. This allowed me to study Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, David Hume, etc. I also enjoyed reading the classics, such as the plays by Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Shakespeare, etc. The prison library was also stocked with good books.

After three and a half years in prison, I was released on parole. I was immediately deported back to the States where I became manager of a Japanese fast food restaurant in the University District of Seattle. I got the position purely based on my ability to speak Japanese and act like one. The idea was to save up and start my own restaurant, but I soon discovered that living on those wages, it is impossible to save money. I also came to doubt the wisdom of starting yet another restaurant in a market where restaurants regularly fail. This posed a problem for me because I was not happy to make little money. Some people are okay with low wages. Some simply want to put in 8 hours, call it a day and go home and have a drink. But I wasn’t one of those kind of people. I wanted nice clothes. I wanted nice shoes. I wanted a nice car. After a bit of soul searching, I decided to pursue a career in construction.

I went out to a large job site on a Sunday and made an offer to the contractor in charge, who was a framing contractor. “Teach me everything you know and I will work cheap.” The contractor accepted my offer and I started work the next day. The contractor taught me everything about framing in less than 3 months. I saved up enough money to buy my own tools and started doing piece-work. After a couple years of piece-work, I had enough tools and cash to start my own construction company and run two crews. I hired mostly illegal immigrants from south of the border, and paid them cash. Running a single crew, I could take home $5,000 a week. Running two crews – when the market was there – I could make $10,000 a week. Not bad for an 8th grade graduate.

And as for being a published author, you can buy my book here: What I Believe and Contra John Rawls. I should mention in advance that is is a commonly misunderstood text. Some readers have accused me of being a moral relativist. That is not who I am. I am a more absolutist in the vein of G.E.M. Anscombe. She was a 20th-century British philosopher who argued in her famous paper “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) that moral statements—particularly those related to duty, obligation, and moral law—are essentially meaningless unless they are grounded in a divine lawgiver (God). I agree 100% with Anscombe.

I mentioned that I am a coffee drinker. I should clarify and say I like shots the most. I once got a voucher from Starbucks for a free drink. I asked how many shots I could have and they said there was no limit. So I got a venti latte with 12 shots. Sometimes I don’t even get the lattes, and just order straight up shots. Starbucks has a good French roast in my opinion. It is less burnt than their espresso blend, and has a nice oily constitution. Tully’s has fine espresso, too, in my opinion. One coffee that I especially like is black coffee from Doutor, a Japanese coffee house.

I define myself as a web marketing professional, a philosopher and a coffee drinker because I believe the less one does, the better he can do it. I am not a jack of all trades. I believe than the fewer endeavors one undertakes to do, the better they can do those endeavors they choose to do.