Seth Godin’s blog post about benefiting from history is just up my alley. Here are some key points:
Marketers are good at looking ahead. We predict/create the future, working to build an idea or a product into something that will matter more tomorrow than it does today.
The focus on the future, though, encourages us to take our attention away from what has worked in the past.
My question to marketers with a huge idea, something that will change everything, is, “tell me about how someone has done this before.”
In other words, identify the relevant pattern of success, and apply it to where you want success.
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Some of my thoughts…
Some call it “comfort zones” while others may call it “default behaviour”… the fact is that patterns repeat themselves. The question “how someone else has done this before?” is extremely important if you want know whether you are doing or thinking about something totally new, futuristic, revolutionary, successful. If success has a pattern, then it can be modelled and installed. I said “If”, but on second thoughts, everything in life has a pattern. The pattern of success will largely depend on the definition of success. What may be “success” to one person may not be the same for the next. My definition of success, for instance, is “never to let anyone or anything define who I am”. The question now pops up “what is the pattern, and how do I do it?” My answer to that is ” I do not know” because I think that it has developed into an unconcious competence that is very difficult to describe. Perhaps that is my comfort zone or default behaviour. If we consider predictions of future behaviour, the best prediction is to look at past behaviour and the pattern(s) that emerges from that. Comfort zones are deceptively powerful. By stretching the boundaries of your comfort zones you have to go through a process of discomfort, risk and uncertainty in order to become more comfortable with more things, ideas, situations… life in general.
Another interesting thought is the notion of paradigms. People glibly talks about a “paradigm shift” meaning that the person has developed a new insight, revelation, transformation and will now operate win the new paradigm. But…. from what position or vantage point do you describe a new paradigm? How do you know that a new paradigm is in fact a new paradigm? You can not describe the new paradigm by being in the new paradigm, so you have to describe it from the old paradigm. This means that the new paradigm is not all that new, because elements or remnants of the old paradigm will “leak” into the new paradigm. Patterns, patterns, patterns… How new are new patterns? How revolutionary are new thoughts?