There is Always Another Way
I was reading “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” this week and this sentence stood out to me.
If you didn’t get into the prospect’s mind first, don’t give up hope. Find a new category you can be first in. It’s not as difficult as you might think.
It was in the “The Law of the Category” stating that if you want your business to succeed, you need to be the best or the first in a category. If you can’t be the first, you just need to create another category.
I’m still going through the book, but it seems that the world “law” is used sparringly here. Yes, these are strict rules, but all of them have an interesting workaround that can be exploited.
I’m sure this is the same with life. There are rules and laws that prevent you from doing something or becoming something. But all of these rules can be “broken” if you use your imagination and creativity.
The simplest example that comes to mind is that with a Russian citizenship (which I have) you can’t apply for a Dutch visa, which I needed to travel to Curacao to meet with my team. I could give up, or I could realize that you can enter on a different Schengen visa. Yes, the travelling would take much longer, but at least I achieved the desired goal, despite the rules.
This may be a silly example… but I urge you to think about your life and remember times where you succeeded, despite the circumstances, despite the rules. Share them with meand I’ll add the to this post.
To take this point further, some of the most interesting ideas come from restrictions and limitations:
- Dr. Seuss wrote the classic children’s book ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ after being challenged to produce a book using no more than fifty different words.
- Alfred Hitchcock filmed “Rope” to appear as one continuous shot using only 10-minute film reels
- Some of the most famous and popular games in the world (Tetris, Pac-Man) came to be due to severe limitation in processing power available.
You get the gist.
Maybe you shouldn’t just find another way when you run into a problem, maybe you should seek these problems out to find another way!
Marcus Aurelius probably said it better than me in his “Meditations”:
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.