Читать книгу Jump Start Your Brain - Doug Hall - Страница 15

Great ideas shake things up. They deny precedent and redefine the world. An idea has to break rules to be wicked good. If it doesn’t, chances are it’s been done before.

When an idea is not new and different, it’s just another face in the crowd. When a number of companies sell the same product or service, they’re dealing in a commodity market. Commodities sell for commodity prices; that is, they don’t sell for much. New and different ideas are where the money is.

The same principle applies when you are the product. When I was fresh from the University of Maine interviewing for jobs, I sought to stand out from the crowd. Where my classmates carried textbook-perfect one-page resumes, I presented a scrapbook of my business ventures and copies of press clippings. I performed a magic trick I called Merwyn’s Magic Bunnies and gave the interviewer a set of sponge bunnies for his very own. Despite a C-plus academic record, I landed as many job offers as my blue chip classmates.

“Inventing is the great theatrical art of ‘what if.’”

– Richard Saunders

A good example of a product that contradicts history is the classic board game Trivial Pursuit. Back in the day when it first surfaced, back in 1983, it broke a lot of rules and cut deeply against the conventional wisdom.

• It was a board game for adults, and “everyone knew” adults didn’t buy board games.

• It sold for $25, and “everyone knew” board games had to sell for less than $10 to succeed.

• It was a trivia game, and “everyone knew” that trivia games didn’t sell.

As it happened, one board game buyer, Bill Hill, vice president of research and development at Selchow and Righter, saw some magic in the game.

“I played it and found it fun,” he told me. “It was a trivia game but you didn’t need a huge amount of knowledge to play it. The packaging, the game play, the entire concept was fresh and original for the time.”

“In today’s sailing races, they have all these rules that restrict you. They tell you how to set every one of your ropes. I think I should be able to do whatever I can to win, no matter how dumb it may seem to those young folks, as long as I don’t have an engine or a larger boat or sail.”

– William H. Holder (my great grandfather)

It’s human nature to discourage the new and the different. Human nature weighs heavily toward history while neglecting to take into account history’s lesson—namely, that break-throughs—those things that contradict history—are what change the world. I’m all for respecting history, but I also believe in creating it.

And with that, we’ve arrived at the next self-evident Eureka! Truth.