Why People Fail: Help, I Can't Escape the Box Where I Put Myself!
The fast food industry adopted the drive-in window concept from banks. I guess a McDonald’s executive, who was sitting at the bank drive-through one day, thought, “I don’t think we can fit the milkshakes in these tubes, but…” NetJets, the leader in fractional jet ownership, now owned by Warren Buffet, owes its birth to the vacation time-share industry. The microwave in your kitchen was not originally intended to go there; Litton, its original manufacturer, believed no consumer would buy it, and built them only for restaurants. When was the last time you heard of Litton?
What do these stories tell you? Successful businesses live or die by cross-industry “borrowing” of ideas and that inspiration more often comes from outside the box than from within a company. Ordinary businesses remain ordinary and their owners earn only ordinary incomes-and work too hard for them-when those owners, foolishly and stubbornly, mentally stay in their tiny backyards. Breakthroughs come from bringing fresh ideas found the outside to the inside of a business, and applying them in new ways. You choose to limit or expand your income by the way you reject or embrace ideas found far afield from your present modus operandi and industry norms.
The vast majority of ordinary businesspeople, with ordinary incomes and never-ending ordinary complaints about how hard they work, but how little they gain, and being unable to compete with the bigger and cheaper…have this in common: they obtain powerful information from this publication and waste their time and energy in the non-creative activity of finding all the ways it can’t and doesn’t apply to them.
Some people have such teeny, tiny, calcified, crippled imaginations that they can only appreciate an example precisely matched to them-“Oh, that won’t work for me because her restaurant sells pizza and I sell Chinese food; hers is in a medium-sized city and I’m in a small town; and it often rains where she is located, but it’s sunny here. I need an example from a Chinese restaurant in a small town where it’s hot and dry. Fools remain stuck in the very limiting, “my-business-is-different” box, thereby, negating the value of 99% of every successful strategy, example, model they see or are presented to them.
My client list is, fortunately, chock full of people who think in very opposite ways. They become rich by finding the non-obvious opportunities, living creatively, and adapting tried-and-true, winning strategies from outside their boxes. They attack each issue of my newsletter and book I suggest they read with yellow hi-liter and bias for action, not closed mind. They are willing, even eager to “re-imagine” their businesses, while others have the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins’ attitude: I’m not interested in adventures-they make you late for dinner.
One of the most successful marketing strategies of all time is called “gift with appointment.” Today, it brings new patients into dentists’ offices, affluent investors to financial advisors’ seminars, and new homebuyers to developments and resort communities; and it’s in play in hundreds of fields, helping to create millions of sales appointments every week. To the best of my knowledge, it came from a woman named Estee Lauder, the cosmetic entrepreneur. I wonder how many people from how many different fields ignored it for how long, because: “Anything having to do with selling lipsticks and perfumes could not possibly apply to MY business. MY business is different.”
