You can learn a lot living with cowboys or ranchers or farmers.
You can also learn by living with hipsters or artists or musicians.
There is a lot to learn from those who live in a small town or the big city or in poverty or in abundance.
There is no one way.
Don’t close your mind.
Repeat: Don’t close your mind.
As a young man, Adolf Hitler tried to become a painter.
Have you ever seen any of his paintings?
Neither have I.
He cashed in all of his assets and tried to enroll into the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
He was rejected twice and was told that he was “unfit” to become a painter and that he should focus on becoming an architect.
As Steve Pressfield has pointed out, it was easier for Hitler to start World War II then it was to become an artist.
We’re not searching for answers. Everything is one click away. Someone already wrote it in a Dummies Guide.
What we need are choices.
But you probably have more choices than you think.
When we say we have no choice, what we’re really trying to say is that there are no more easy choices left to make.
[No one is going to magically give you responsibility, you have to take it.]
Only us.
People.
We are all in this together.
You live your life going forward but you learn from life looking back.
Click. Pop. Aha. Eureka. You make a new connection, a moment of clarity where things make sense.
What’s better, and more seldom, is the moment you realize that you’re wrong. You begin to see that people and relationships and cultures and economies and complex social problems can’t be explained or solved with one simple, easy solution. It’s far more complicated than that. It’s a shot in the gut.
Books that will change your mind: The Gift, The War of Art, The Art of Possibility, The Infinite Game, Understanding Comics, The Blue Sweater, A Whole New Mind, Debt, Linchpin, The Gifts of Imperfection, Persuadable, New Rules, Start with Why, The Design of Everyday Things, On the Road, Self Reliance, Walden, Man’s Search for Meaning, A Million Miles, How to Win Friends, Secrets of Closing the Sale, The Coaching Habit, The Total Money Makeover
In the end, the most important book that you will ever read is the one you write.
The left side of the brain wants everything to be tested and measured. It wants certainties and definite proof. It also takes everything quite literally. The right side of our brain, however, is telling the left side to calm down, stop taking yourself so seriously.
The brain has a difficult time describing and coping with the impossible. So when we can’t explain something the best our brain can muster is “that was lucky” or “what a coincidence.”
Low probability? Perhaps. But there are some things in this world that we can’t explain.
It’s magic when the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts.
It’s how we defy the odds.
We should leave room for possibility, imagination, and wonder. We should hope for things that can’t be seen or explained.
There is always more to explore. As far as we have come in the last 200 years (even in the last 30) there is still more that we don’t know than what we do know. The beauty of living in a universe that is infinite in length means that it is infinite in possibility.
We should be constant seekers of truth. It’s a journey without an end.
They say that Baseball is America’s favorite pastime precisely because it is our favorite way to “pass the time”.
Anyone who spends an hour a day watching television has just demonstrated they have an hour of their time to make something that needs to be made, help someone who needs to be helped, do something that needs to be done.
The world is agressively fighting for your attention. Don’t give it up to just anyone. We have to be diligent if we are going to rescue our time. We need to learn when to say yes and when to say no.
It’s what you do before you clock in and what you do after you clock out that gives you an edge over the competition. Some ideas on lifting where we stand:
Too many organizations are stuck fitting a square peg in a round hole.
Their stuck because that is not what has worked for them in the past and that isn’t how things are done around here.
There are many government officials fighting to keep things as they are, they’re fighting for the status-quo. We wish those days would come back but they’re not.
This idea that you go to work every day and have a job, is a brand new idea. People were scared back then—we didn’t know what tomorrow was going to look like—and they’re scared today. Like the factory 200 years ago, the internet has changed everything again. For good.
New problems need new solutions. If you insist that things stay the same, you are going to be left behind.
I could set up a lab, synthesize the compounds, and extract the exact recipe for Heinz Ketchup. Actually, I decided to skip all of that and just googled it. The secret formula is no longer a secret but success is rarely achieved by copying someone else work. It certainly doesn’t earn trust. Purple ketchup, on the other hand, will earn lots of attention. Alas, no one trusts that purple ketchup is going to taste better than regular ketchup. (They already tried that.)
Coke in the 80’s changed their secret formula, the first time in a century. After 200,000 taste tests, it was clear that new Coke was better than old Coke by every measure. When new Coke unrolled, angry protests and phone calls ensued. Customers were stocking up on thousands of dollars of old Coke in their basements. Why? Coke underestimated the attachment customers had with their tried and true formula. To the consumers, Coke had betrayed their trust. (We fear change.)
Colgate has over 35 different types of toothpaste. All delivering on the same promise. It’s clear, that there are more choices than ever before. Yet, innovations isn’t turning out another flavor of toothpaste. It’s changing how we think about toothpaste all together. (We’re still waiting.)
Grocery stores carry 40,000 different products. Consumers will check out with about 40 items. How do you compete with limited shelf space and so many products? Of course, it’s worse than we thought. Thanks to Google and Amazon, there is unlimited shelf space and unlimited products.
You can focus on buying better shelf space, slashing prices, copying, polishing, perfecting; it’s working for Walmart. (Can you out Walmart Walmart?)
There is an alternative.
You can forget about mass-market penetration, work on the edges, and do something interesting. You could treat different people differently. Yes, the market gets to decide what product is worth buying, but it’s important to remember that there are unlimited markets to work with. (Don’t believe me?) Find the smallest market that you can lead, that you can change. Spread your ideas. Build trust. Build attention.
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