It’s just like the Communist Manifesto, but with fewer gulags

I left my apartment and tuk tuk, taxi and scooter drivers slowed down to offer me rides.

I turned the corner and waitresses wanted me to come into their restaurants.

Another street and it was Thai massages, tours of temples that aren’t on the map, or “Nike” shoes for a whole lot less than you can find in Foot Locker.

Then at the conference, it was wall-to-wall entrepreneurs. And as you may know, entrepreneurs don’t arrive at work at nine A.M. and wait for the boss to tell them what to do.

They sell. And if they don’t sell, they don’t pay the rent.

So there I was, nine days in a city surrounded by hustlers.

And then I met Aga from Poland.

On the second day she gave a short talk from the stage about her business. Something about fitness.

I didn’t think much of it. More than a few people there were selling personal training, or exercise programs, or weight-loss apps.

But I decided to check out Aga’s website.

And I was surprised.

She was selling something, but she didn’t start with the usual “Buy my stuff and here are three reasons why.”

Instead, she started with a manifesto.

What’s a manifesto?

Well, Karl Marx had one. But for a couple million people, that didn’t work out so well.

A slightly better manifesto was The Declaration of Independence. It said that we are all born with basic rights that come from God, not from the king.

Coincidentally, I’m reading the Steve Jobs biography (the one that’s big enough to kill a small dog). And this weekend I read the part where he came back to Apple in the late ’90s.

And his first advertising campaign as the new CEO began with a manifesto. It was part of the “Think Different” campaign (see even native speakers make grammar mistakes).

Maybe you remember, it began:

And now I preset it to you, for the first time ever…