Success has never been so simple to understand and yet so difficult to execute.
The dots of our ideas, products, and services along with technology are quite easy to connect today. It’s the fine arts and humanities dots we’re forgetting to connect.
Ashton.Gustafson
Pause by the orchid. Listen to the bluebird sing. Be love.
Category Archives: Leadership
The Science of LINsanity
If you turned on the TV for five minutes this weekend, you were introduced to a new name – Jeremy Lin. Lin is the latest superstar of NBA playing for the New York Knicks.
Why do we love Lin? Easy answer – His story.
At age eighteen Lin knew his art (putting a ball in the hoop) was remarkable. Longing to play Division 1 basketball, but he couldn’t seem to be recruited by the big PAC 10 schools in his area. His response? With a 4.2 GPA, he shipped every coach in the Ivy League a DVD that was a highlight reel of his art (putting a ball in the hoop). Brown and Harvard offered a spot on the team, and Lin chose Harvard.
At twenty-two and armed with a degree in economics from Harvard, Lin entered the NBA draft. However, he found himself out of luck again. No team took him in the draft.
Nevertheless, he got an offer to play in five summer league claims and showcase his art (putting a ball in the hoop). Five games later the Golden State Warriors offered him a spot. A year later he was waived by Golden State.
Jan 17, 2012 – just a month ago, Lin was playing in the D-Leaugue.
Jan 20, 2012 – Lin gets recalled by the New York Knicks.
Feb 4, 2012 – Lin had 25 points, five rebounds, and seven assists—all career-highs—in a 99–92 Knicks victory over the New Jersey Nets.
Feb 14, 2012 – Lin became the first NBA player to score at least 20 points and have seven assists in each of his first five starts.
Today – The Knicks are scrambling to sell replicas of Lin’s No. 17 jerseys and t-shirts, and the sales and traffic for their online store has increased more than 3,000%.
Lin never has never allowed his art to die and, now, here we are talking about it.
Take art to the marketplace, fail. Take art to the marketplace, fail. Take art to the market place, succeed.
Triumphal Story is the science behind Linsanity and all great products, services, and ideas.
Picture It
We’ve got to picture it before we can paint it.
We’ve got to paint it to prove if it will work.
- Picture – To dream, create, think, or conjure up an idea, system, model, process, or service. I.E. – we’re looking for “it”.
- Paint – To do the work it takes to bring our idea, system, model, process, service, or “it” to the market place.
- Prove – To measure the response from painting “it”. Only the markets have a voice here.
We’re finding we need more pictures. It’s a numbers game. Always has been – always will be.
Keep dreaming, keep creating, keep pushing, keep moving, keep looking, keep questioning. Your “its” will come.
The markets are massive, the painters are plentiful, but the thinkers (picture makers) are few. They see how things are, and thus see how things could be.
Picture, paint, prove. Repeat. Picture, paint, prove. Repeat. And so forth…
A Roundabout
Get out of bed.
Now focus.
Focus leads to awareness.
Awareness connects us to seeing how things really are.
Seeing how things really are will give us vision for possibility and change.
Vision leads to clarity.
Clarity will lead us to our purpose.
Our purpose gets us out of bed.
Music Sharing
Google search “Chicago Hotels” and you will receive about 162,000,000 results in 0.34 seconds.
Google search “Dallas Realtors” and you will receive about 22,400,000 results in 0.21 seconds.
Google search “Las Vegas Restaurants” and you will receive about 130,000,000 results in 0.29 seconds.
Google” search “Music” and you will receive 1,730,000,000 results in 0.33 seconds.
Options for a lifetime.
This is why word of mouth will forever outweigh pay-per-click, television, radio, billboard, and print advertising.
We simply don’t have the time to sift through the millions, and sometimes billions, of options that are now at our disposal.
If we’re serious about building brands and services that shake things up, change things, “dent the world”, and get talked about – then we must bend over backwards to be the answer to –
- Where should we stay?
- Who should sell my home?
- Where should we eat?
- What new music are you listening to?
We will always give more weight to the guy on our right that we ask these questions to than we will the Google search in our hands.
I cannot recall a time where I, personally, found a new band or musician to listen to. Someone has always introduced us.
Put another way – the music, if it’s good, will find us. There’s something in us that can’t hold back sharing good things.
Are your followers sharing your music?
Ashton.Gustafson 