Do You Have a Job or a Calling?

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There’s nothing quite so inspiring as seeing someone embrace their work in the pursuit of excellence, or in service of a greater mission. And there’s nothing quite so moving as witnessing small acts of excellence, generosity, and kindness. Often the most moving and inspiring stories are about competitors who become comrades, or everyday people taking deep pride in their work.

There’s this beautiful story of high school runner Meghan Vogel, who helps her fallen competitor, Arden McMath, cross the finish line of the 2012 Ohio State Track meet. And then there’s this story of quiet dedication and inspiration Martin Seligman recounts in his book Authentic Happiness…

Years ago Seligman was visiting a dear friend in the hospital. His friend Bob Miller was a vibrant, joyful man, and at the age of eighty-one still an avid runner, tennis player, and gregarious person. Miller had been hit by a truck while running, and now lay in a coma for the third day in a hospital bed.

The neurologist gently asked Seligman to consider Miller’s “advance directive” order, and consider removing the life support system. Seligman was distraught considering the possibility that his friend would never rise again. He asked for a moment of quiet, the doctor left the room, and Seligman sat down in a chair to watch the orderly working in the room.

The orderly was quietly rearranging art on the walls. He took down a calendar, pinned up a Monet print, and then took two Winslow Homer prints from his bag and placed them with consideration on the walls. Next to Miller’s bedside he taped a photograph of a Peace rose.

Seligman gently asked the orderly what he was doing, and the man replied, “My job? I’m an orderly on this floor. But I bring in new prints and photos every week. You see, I’m responsible for the health of all these patients. Take Mr. Miller here. He hasn’t woken up since they brought him in here. But when he does, I want to make sure he sees beautiful things right away.”

In Martin Luther King Jr’s “Street Sweeper” speech he said,

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry… if you can’t be the sun, be a star. It isn’t by size that you win or you fail. Be the best at whatever you are.”

Some people have jobs, some have careers, and some have callings. A calling is a pursuit of something greater than oneself, and often the path which creates the greatest inspiration for others.

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Screen Shot 2016-01-24 at 2.45.37 PMShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. He is also the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes and his new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion, October 4, 2016).

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Why We Learn Faster When We Love It

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I have never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it … I have written because it fulfilled me.”
– Stephen King

Practice doesn’t make perfect. There is no perfect. Great practice will hone the good habits, and get rid of the bad habits. Poor practice is practicing your mistakes over and over until they’re ingrained.

By now, most of us have read, or heard of, the 10,000-hour rule, in which 10,000 hours is the magic practice barrier after which we get to be experts and gurus. Unfortunately that has been a misrepresentation of the work of K. Anders Ericsson, and his colleagues from Florida State University from the 1990s. Ericsson never claimed 10,000 hours was the magic expert barrier.

However, research does support the idea of reinforcing “time on task.” In sports, most believe today the best coaching and training involves increasing the amount of “touches on the ball” instead of an older style of coaching in which players stand around watching a demonstration and then take individual turns doing one activity. A poor practice looks like kids standing in lines. A good practice has everyone involved.

We learn by watching, but we learn faster by doing.

Very recent research examined 88 different studies on the effects of practice over time and concluded that practice does count, but much less than previously argued by Malcolm Gladwell and others. Practice certainly matters, but other factors were equally important such as the age in which the activity was introduced, and how much the participant enjoyed the activity. In one example, children reported thirty times higher reading comprehension when they also reported enjoying the reading.

A successful person continues to look for work after he has found a job.

That may come as no surprise, but keep that in mind when making project and task assignments in your professional work. Yes, if you make task invitations that are a stretch but that people might enjoy, that’s an invitation for excellence. But when you offer project and task invitations for activities people detest, you are far more likely to get mediocre results. And research seems to suggest that no amount of arguing for pluck, grit and perseverance, will improve results when the task presented is against their skill set.

In an interview with Scott Turicchi, CFO of J2, a 500M dollar technology company, he said he very intentionally moves team players to different positions within his organization so they have the benefit of seeing different sides of projects and understand the greater picture of any particular project or deal in the works.

As Scott described, there’s an even more important reason to working in different roles, other than job experience and perspective. The most valuable reason is to find what you love, to find the intersection of what you are good at, and what you love to do. Scott said that the kinds of people he likes to hire are those who have passion for their work.

And how are you going to find your passion if you don’t try something new?

Your beliefs don’t make you a decent person, your actions do.
– Maya Angelou

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Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of thought-leaders and authors. He is also the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Signs of an Impending Bozo Explosion

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It’s true that often those who are the most assertive in their own promotion and compensation get what they ask for. But their promotion doesn’t necessarily make them more effective leaders.

According to Jean Twenge, Ph.D., co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic, “People who are narcissistic want to be leaders. They don’t necessarily make better leaders, but they want to do it, so they’re more likely to end up in those positions.”

Often those recently appointed to a position of higher authority succumb to what’s known as the Power Poisoning Effect. It’s a term coined by researcher Deborah Gruenfeld to mean literally poisoned by power. In her research she found that those newly elevated to positions of power often exhibit these symptoms:

  • Give greater value to their own ideas and initiatives
  • Give lesser value to the ideas of those around them
  • Think that the rules no longer apply to them
  • Have greater difficulty controlling their own impulses

Sound like any corrupt politicians or exiled executives you know of?

Leadership that can’t be questioned ends up doing questionable things.
– Jon Acuff

It turns out that grandiose bosses who demand attention, take credit, possess little empathy, and belittle team members, are more likely to deliver worse results than leaders who support and nurture their teams. Unfortunately this same group of self-aggrandizing attention-seeking blowhards are also more likely to be paid more than their peers who seek advice, and give praise, support and resources to their team members.

That’s right, It’s an odd paradox to discover that the least effective and most toxic leaders are also the same ones who are financially rewarded the most. These are leaders and managers who often consistently refuse to hear negative feedback and build teams of stooges. It’s a sure sign of an impending Bozo Explosion.

In their study entitled “The detrimental effects of power on confidence, advice taking, and accuracy,” Kelly See and her colleagues discovered that those leaders who consistently ask for the opinion of those around them often do have less personal confidence in their own decision-making but are viewed by others as better leaders precisely because they ask for opinions. And because they ask for the advice of those around them, these leaders are more likely to make better decisions.

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Seek out, and work for, those leaders in the organization who actively ask for opinion or dissent, and then are willing to act on that advice even if it contradicts their own initial impulses.

2 Small Things that Make the Biggest Difference

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Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul. – Douglas MacArthur

Imagine a race in which you don’t know where the course is, what you might be asked to do along the way, or even how long the race will last. Imagine that when you sign up for this race, you are told, immediately and repeatedly, to quit before you even start.

You are warned you might die. And even if you don’t die, you don’t have what it takes to finish anyway, so you shouldn’t bother showing up. The emails from the race director say “Stay home. You don’t have what it takes.”

The brochure reads:

A positive outlook on life is mandatory. Whiners and complainers need not to apply. This is not the race for you. Awards will be presented to those that finish. We don’t plan on handing out too much. No refunds.

During the course of this “race” which has no finish line, you may be asked to dig up a tree stump with your bare hands and then drag it ten miles to the top of a mountain, where you will be greeted by someone who asks you to memorize poetry. You then drag the tree stump down the mountain six miles to somewhere and recite the lines. You get it wrong. You hike six miles back to memorize it until you get it right.

The 2013 version lasted three days. Less than 15% finished. Genius, talent and education are the least of the discerning factors.

Why do some people accomplish more than others of equal intelligence? This was the question Angela Duckworth and her colleagues posed when embarking on a study in 2004 to measure people’s level of “grit.” Surveying the available research regarding traits beyond intelligence that contribute to success, Duckworth and her colleagues found it lacking in the specific area regarding the influence of possessing this quality, which they defined as follows:

We define grit as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina.

Grit is the combination of two characteristics:

  1. consistency of task
  2. perseverance through adversity

The researchers initiated their own study to develop something they call the “Grit Scale.” After generating a series of questions intended to measure “grittiness,” (for example, “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge,” “I finish whatever I begin”), the researchers set up a questionnaire on their website, www.authentichappiness.com. Their results reveal higher levels of grit correlate with higher levels of education. The results also showed that grit tends to increase with age. Those individuals with high levels of grit also tend to have fewer career changes. Yet more surprisingly, those identified as possessing high levels of grit often had high grades in school yet scored more poorly on Standard Achievement Tests, suggesting that, despite lower scholastic aptitude, their perseverance and tenacity yielded stronger overall academic results.

The study gets even more interesting when the researchers decided to apply their Grit Scale to the 2004 incoming class of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Just getting into West Point is famously difficult. Entrance requires a nomination from a member of Congress or from the Department of Army. Once accepted, each entering cadet is evaluated on the Whole Candidate Score, which takes into consideration school grade-point average, Scholastic Aptitude Test results, physical fitness, class rank, and evidence of demonstrated leadership ability.

This comprehensive evaluation process for those applying to the academy is necessary to help the academy predict not only the graduation rate, but also the likelihood that entering freshman will finish an arduous summer entrance session known as “Beast Barracks,” or more simply “Beast.” Nearly 100 percent of the freshman cadets also took the Grit Scale test in 2004, and its results proved to be a better predictor of whether or not a cadet would survive Beast Barracks than the military’s own sophisticated and complexly designed evaluation tests.

It is these two small simple things: perseverance and passion for long-term goals, plus a willingness to remain tenacious in the face of adversity that can make all the difference.

[photo: Bethany Hamilton photographed by Noah Hamilton]

Giving Leadership: Why Influence and Inclusion Matter More Than Ever

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Paul Hiltz, President of Mercy Healthcare, might be the toughest interview I’ve had recently. But for reasons you might not expect.

It’s not because he isn’t articulate. He is widely praised for his ability to clearly communicate a compelling vision of the future. His mind is sharp. His ideas are clear. His voice is calm and assuring.

It’s not because he’s too busy to talk to me. He answers all of his email personally and promptly, and gave me his personal cell phone number and encouraged me to call with any questions. I called him once without a scheduled meeting, and after we said hello he asked me if I had a couple minutes to talk. I called him, and he asked me if I had a few minutes to spare.

It’s not because he conceals key parts of his business which he can’t share. Not at all. Paul is known as constantly initiating projects of transparency, and building education campaigns to ensure that everyone clearly understands how the business works. He once hired financial consultants to conduct workshops to teach everyone how the healthcare business works.

And it’s not because he is inaccessible tied up in the boardroom, or in meetings. Quite the opposite. Paul spends almost the entirety of his time in the hallways, having lunch with patients, or families of patients. The staff describe him as constantly visible both in the hospital, and in the greater community.

The real reason Paul is such a tough interview is because most of the time when I ask how he led a big process reinvention, or developed a remarkable financial turnaround, or constructed an entirely new service roll-out in the hospital, he tells me I should talk to this department head, or that nursing administrator, or the other communications director. Every time he tells me it was really their doing. Paul tells me, “She took the lead on that.” Or, “He made it happen. Talk to him.”

So I talk to them. I interview the people Paul points me to, and they all tell me the same thing. Yes, they were part of the equation, part of the team, but they all point back to Paul. It’s Paul’s leadership, they say.

They say everyone in the hospital is simply rallying around his clear vision of a comprehensive and high quality healthcare environment – a healthcare system fully integrated with the greater community. Everyone understands the goal, and everyone is committed to the mission. One of the doctors in the hospital system described Paul as “a healing leader” – a leader who is able to heal wounds of distrust, heal the lacerations of broken communication.

Welcome to a new style of open leadership – a leadership style that believes in:

  • influence not coercion
  • collaboration instead of individual heroism
  • treating employees they way we want customers treated
  • continuous, not episodic, habits of learning
  • giving, not taking, credit
  • assuming accountability, but giving autonomy
  • building inclusive, not homogeneous cultures

Paul Hiltz represents the epitome of a 21st century effective leader who guides not directs, influences not commands, and encourages instead of threatens. He has managed to galvanize the entire organization around a higher goal by constantly giving credit, and constantly giving the spotlight to someone else.

The 8 Sources of True Confidence

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Whether you think you can, or you can’t — you’re right.
– Henry Ford

Confidence. That elusive je ne sais quoi quality. It’s like art, you know it when you see it. You know it when you feel it. The thing is, confidence isn’t summoned on demand from the heavens. Confidence isn’t brought on by clenching your fists. Although you can strike a power pose and allow a burst of dopamine to create a burst of confidence, true and profound confidence comes from …

Preparation
One way you can step up on the field, on the stage, or at the meeting with strong confidence, is if you have done the work that will set you apart. Being prepared ranks as one of the highest confidence measures among professional athletes. Competence is almost always a strong predictor of confidence.

Visualizing Past (and Future) Performance
Recollecting past positive performances can give you a confidence advantage. When you take a moment to recollect a time in which you were previously successful, you’ll fuel a sense of confidence that you can repeat that success. Just as powerful is visualizing future success. Common among high performing professionals and athletes is visualizing the events unfolding in the most positive light. Wayne Rooney does this before every soccer match:

“Part of my preparation is I go and ask the kit man what color we’re wearing — if it’s red top, white shorts, white socks or black socks. Then I lie in bed the night before the game and visualize myself scoring goals or doing well. You’re trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a ‘memory’ before the game. I don’t know if you’d call it visualizing or dreaming, but I’ve always done it, my whole life… you need to visualize realistic things that are going to happen in a game.” (David Winner interview)

Great Coaching
There are many aspects to great coaches that can instill confidence, but the greatest coaches have the ability to be honest, specific and positive all at the same time. Honest, in that they don’t ignore the behavioral or performance weaknesses of the people they coach, but instead address weaknesses head on. Great coaches provide correctional advice that is both specific and positive.

For example, if you are practicing a presentation and constantly turn your back to the audience and read bullet points, your coach might say, “You know your content. Turn and face your audience and smile. They can read your bullet points on their own. Or even better, tell your audience a story that illustrates the bullet points on the slide.”

Innate Advantages
If your team is simply bigger, faster, and stronger, you will likely show up with more confidence. Just don’t let confidence become arrogance. If your firm simply has more capacity and resources than the competition, your team will likely enter the proposal negotiations with more confidence.

Social Support
First-time parents, exercise clubs, cooking classes, and OCD groups all get together for one purpose: to support each other through a specific change, or toward a specific goal. When you feel a little lost or unsupported, that’s a good time to reach out to those in your work or community who are experiencing the same pain point. You aren’t as unique as you think, and you can bet someone else is going through the same issue. Asking for help is the first sign of strength.

Competitive Advantage
The sun is in their eyes, the field is tilted, their lane is full of gravel, or the competition simply has a crappy internet connection. Recognizing a competitive advantage is a valuable source of confidence. The key is you have to do the diligence to recognize the advantages you might have. This is when competitive sleuthing can be valuable to help you both recognize, and articulate clearly to the customer what your advantages are.

Self-awareness,
Contrary to the old wisdom of positive self-talk such as “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can,” using positive questions is much more powerful as a confidence booster. If instead you say to yourself, “Can I do this?” you will have to answer the question in your mind and be specific about how you will overcome the obstacle, win the debate, or conquer the challenge. Be both positive and explicit in your self-talk is much stronger than simply repeating “I think I can.”

Trust
Could be the biggest factor here in team settings. I once watched a dynamic, high trust youth soccer team crush a team of hand-picked all-stars. The all-stars been told that each of them was amazing, so they played like that. The kids passed the ball as little as possible and selfishly worked for their own glory. The other team was a team – a team that had built the strength, experience, and trust of each other over years of working together. They were never told that individually they were great. They had built their wins by always relying on each other.

Quitting is Easy. Living with Quitting is Hard

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Your son doesn’t like 7th grade band? Let him quit. French IV is too hard? Drop the class. Training for that marathon is too hard? Just quit. Feeling frustrated or detached from your work. Quit. It’s easy. Tired of not making progress on your writing project? Drop it, lose it, let it go. Yah! That felt good.

Go to Google and start typing “top reason to…” The #1 result is “…quit my job.” Don’t misunderstand. There are plenty of valid reasons to quit your job including toxic cultures, lack of professional growth, and more.

But remember when you quit something you have to live with quitting, so you should have a pretty good reason. Because while quitting might feel thrilling and easy, it’s hard to go back. Not impossible, mind you, but pretty hard. I once heard a story about a rich guy who kept giving so much money to his alma mater they named the football stadium after him. Why did he keep giving so much money? Because when he was a junior at the University he quit the football team because practice was too hard. He has regretted it for over thirty years.

It’s also important to distinguish the difference between quitting and taking a break. Since 2000 I have started a marathon training plan almost every year. I’ve only made it to the starting line twice over the past 14 years but I always start the training plan. Last year my wife and I got up to 18 miles and stopped. With the kids’ schedules it was too time-consuming. But if I bail out midway because of injury, travel or time constraints, I don’t think I’ve quit the sport. I just had to adjust to changing circumstances.

Or to take a work example, some of the happiest and most successful people I know have a portfolio life in which they change careers and take sabbaticals in the middle of their careers. It’s not impossible, it just takes thoughtful planning.

There are legitimate reasons to quit something, but commitment to hard work is not one of them. Legitimate reasons to quit include:

  • It’s making you sick: Stress-inducing work, school or sporting environments are intolerable. You can try to turn it around and be the change you wish to see in the world, but if the toxicity is overwhelming, I think it’s OK to quit. Because you bring that stress home, and infect your family and friends. Your health, and the health of the people you love, is more important than your job.
  • It’s a professional dead-end: Unfortunately it’s becoming increasingly common to pigeon-hole workers into particular jobs, roles and responsibilities. It seems gone are the days to working your way up through the mailroom and getting job experience throughout the organization – the kind of professional experience that leads to personal and professional growth. Companies with the highest retention, highest levels of innovation are when people get to work in varieties of positions in the company. Or as they say on the soccer field, when you play different positions, you “see all sides of the ball.”
  • It’s devoid of challenge: The saddest expression I heard recently was describing people who “quit and stay.” Meaning of course, they have emotionally and psychically checked out, yet remain in their job, punching a clock, either for the money or the simple inability to conceive of doing anything else.

But don’t quit because “it’s too hard.” That place where you feel challenged – that spot right on the edge of your capabilities where you have to step up your game – is the place where you are at your most creative and productive. When you feel right on the edge of what you are capable of, that’s where you’ll learn the most.

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Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building powerful human and digital learning experiences based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Grab a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

You are Successful. But Distracted. Possibly Bored. What Happened?

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You are successful. You worked hard for years with laser focus developing unique and sought-after expertise that no one else could quite replicate at your company. It paid off. You are highly valued. People ask your opinion. They invite you to join projects. They buy you drinks.

But lately you are distracted, almost bored. It’s not that you don’t have lots of projects going on. You do. Actually a ton of interesting people and projects keep arriving at your feet. They are all fascinating and exciting, and brimming with opportunity. For five minutes.

The problem is they aren’t your projects. They are someone else’s. And while their enthusiasm is contagious and fun, in the end it’s their project, not yours. And for that reason the buzz doesn’t last. You became sought-after and valuable because of your unique and unparalleled expertise. And that success has brought opportunity. And those opportunities have created distractions which leave you unfocused, drifting, and wondering when you can get back to what you love. Which is hard to do since all of these enticing opportunities keep presenting themselves.

Only Do What Only You Can Do: You became passionate, and excellent, and sought-after, by focusing the bulk of your time on only doing what only you can do. In other words, taking on the kinds of projects and challenges that you are uniquely predisposed to do.

Let’s take a few tips from choice expert, Sheena Iyengar, on how to bring some discipline to your decisions.

Step 1: Write down all of the things that you do in a given work week. What is extraneous, redundant, or can be offloaded to someone more qualified? According to Sheena, it should be at least 50%, ideally 75%.

Step 2: Of what’s left on the list, ask yourself, “When I work on this task do I experience greater frustration or greater joy or reward to others upon accomplishing it?” Of those items high in frustration, you want to 1. do quickly 2. offload, or 3. just stop doing. Because remember that tasks you find frustrating, someone else finds easy or rewarding.

Step 3: What’s left should be tasks in which you create greater value than frustration, produce greater joy than pain, and build greater value than distraction. Categorize them by type of task. Ah, you just learned something about the types of things you do.

Step 4: Finally, of what’s left in the high impact, high value, high reward, low frustration category, ask yourself, “Am I the most qualified person available to be doing this?”

You have now arrived at Only Do What Only You Can Do. In this place you have found the intersection of skill, passion, and impact. In this place you love your work, learn quickly and deliver high value to the team around you. In this place you can recapture your mojo.

But this does not give you license to become a prima donna, or shirk shared obligations. There are always chores that need to be done by any team, and you likely have specific deliverables that make you yawn every week. Step up. Lean in. It’s what keeps the trains running.

My suggestion is to remember what made you valuable in the first place, and not lose sight of honing that expertise.

Start one small act at a time. Try our course Small Acts of Leadership to build action into your life every single day.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Buy a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

You don’t have to choose between creative and valuable

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creative_designAndy Cohen was a marketing ad agency guy back in the day when Direct Response TV ads were considered tawdry, cheap ways of marketing. The kind of TV advertising that kept asking you to CALL NOW! It was the domain of late night used car and vacuum salesmen. Brand businesses wouldn’t touch it.

Andy helped change all that. He and his colleagues wrote award-winning ads for Clorox, Chase Bank, Club Med, Time Warner, American Express, among many other marquee name brands. Their mantra was never compromise direct response volume for the sake of creativity, and never compromise creativity for the sake of direct response revenue. In their mind, both had to be elevated together in tandem. In their mind, they believed they could build brand integrity while simultaneously elevating ad impact and revenue. They demanded innovation of each other in pursuit of excellence.

Andy had an idea for a short Direct Response TV spot. It goes like this: Man wearing a suit in a city somewhere. Closeup on smiling face. Voice of God narration: “Why are you so happy? Did you recently find a high margin, low cost investment offer? And you’re excited about how hard your money is working for you? You must have discovered the new bond offer? No? Oh, it’s trading at $5 and returning 13.5%. its not too late…you can still get on board…”

Meanwhile the viewer watches the individual’s face start proud, smug and happy, and gradually go to sad and appalled that he was missing out, and then back to a sense of urgency and opportunity. Only at the very end the viewer hears a voice say, “Hello, Merrill Lynch. How can I help you?” Andy’s design of the ad spot relied on the notion that the man’s facial gestures convey more urgent emotion than dialogue.

Andy showed this ad design to his boss who said it was crap, terrible – a waste of thought, and told Andy to go make something valuable. Andy didn’t throw the idea in the trash. He kept tweaking it to make it better.

Lesson 1: Believe in the power and novelty of your ideas.

Meanwhile their client, Merrill Lynch, was in a pinch. They had purchased a billion dollars worth of bonds from the government and needed to move them, fast. They were sitting on a billion dollars worth of uninvested static assets. So at the next advertising meeting with Merrill Lynch, Andy pitched his idea.

The Chief Marketing Officer listened quietly and then declared he didn’t like it. So of course to agree with the client, everyone in the room said, “OK no problem. We have other ideas.” Not Andy.

Andy asked “Why? Why don’t you like it?” He persisted to find the real reason why the CMO didn’t like the ad idea.
CMO replies, “Well the tie is ridiculous. No one would wear such a ridiculous tie.”
Andy grabbed the sketch artist in the room and asked him to redraw the face. “How about now?” Andy asked.

Lesson 2: Persist until you understand the real reason.

The biggest misconception is that communication happened. If your audience immediately dismisses your idea, don’t assume they think it’s crap. People say No to great ideas for reasons that often have nothing to do with the idea itself. People often say No to ideas that have personal triggers. The key to identify the root assumptions behind decisions.

Merrill funded the ad, and they moved 750 million dollars worth of bonds in 9 weeks using that ad. And incidentally it was the first DRTV commercial to ever win a CLIO award, and many other creative advertising awards.