Whenever I hear the word focus, I always think back to the Simpsons episode where Bart gets put on Focusin, a special drug to help him concentrate in class, but then it sends him slightly crazy. Now in reality, parents would never put their children on mind altering drugs to control their behaviour. Hence we won’t talk about that right now.
The main issue of focus in regards to business, is to help you look at a number of key areas to concentrate your mind and energies on things that will maximise business growth and effectiveness. However, in a world that’s always switched on and bombarding people with information, it’s often hard to focus on anything. The only time I really see people focusing on one single thing, is when I hear the screech of brakes and look around to see someone crossing the street like a zombie looking at the phone. I'm amazed more haven't scored Darwin Awards for this talents pastime. Whilst most individuals can bumble through and get away with a complete lack of focus in their lives, for business, focus is absolutely critical to success. Not long ago, I was speaking at a business chamber function about what I was up to. Afterwards there was a Q & A session. Someone commented, quite negatively I thought, about the fact that my business could do so much more in so many other industries. Why had I kept it just in one? ‘Isn't that stopping your growth?’ ‘Why don't you do this or that?’ I remember hearing. Focus is hard! Especially when you're building a business from scratch. The reality is that things are flying at you from every direction. You're overwhelmed with tasks you have to do. From admin, to finance, to product development, to marketing, to sales! There's so much to manage, not to mention all the random spanners that get thrown into works as well! How the hell can you focus on anything at all? That's a good point! To be effective you need to delegate some of the time consuming tasks that need to be done, but are not core to sales. Look at all of the things that somebody else could do (most likely even better than you can) and let them do them for you. Now you've off-loaded time consuming admin, you can focus on what you really need to be doing. In the early stages of a business, it's vital that you keep your focus, otherwise trying to do too many things, or serve too many masters is a potential business killer in itself. What's going to bring you the best result? Who are going to be your best customers? Firstly, through really understanding your target customer, and then focussing on how you can deliver the best solution to their problem, you can ensure that all of your efforts can be focussed in on maximising engagement with someone who’s going to make the decision to buy. Not everyone is a decision maker. Not everyone wants or needs your products, so the faster you can narrow it down to who does, the faster you can turn these leads into sales and at the end of the day, that's what business should all be about, solving a specific real world problem in a really effective way. Once you've done that, growth will come in the most positive and sustainable way.
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Teaching is hard work. Sure you get great holidays, but they’re both well-deserved and absolutely essential. Having said that, why is the first week back after a break so exhausting? If you work for a school that’s anything like the schools for which I’ve worked, most of the term you’re running at a supercharged pace. Usually this pace during term time is ok, however, for me, the start of every term is particularly taxing and I put it down to compulsory meetings about absolutely nothing.
There's nothing more boring and draining than sitting in a pointless meeting listening to someone rubbish on about strategic plans for the department. In my experience, these have been nothing more than pointless time wasting activities in which nothing is achieved, or if something is possibly decided as perhaps a good idea, the good idea is deferred to a committee or held off until ‘later.’ Everybody at the meeting knows that ‘later’ means never! So why is this? The failure to achieve anything at all is completely counter to what teaching is actually about. Teaching is about everyone learning new things and about getting things done. It's about moving forward, about improving oneself and growing! So why is it so hard for this to happen within a school? As educators, we should be at the forefront of innovation and making things happen. Yet the overall culture of schools tends to be hell-bent against new ideas and innovation. The sad fact is that the majority of the education system in Australia is still stuck in the 19th century. Principals who should have retired when Mr Squiggle was still drawing his upside down master pieces just keep hanging on to what worked ‘back in their day!’ Well their day has come and gone and now with Australia falling behind Kazakhstan’s educational standards, something has to change. But if the top down approach isn't going to work, who's going to change it? Well you have to! If there's ever a time to get to and do something, it's now! Every time you have a good idea that could improve the education of your students, then make it happen. You might get told no five times, but don't give up. If you really want to make something happen, then it's up to you to find a way to do it. It's time to be bold and push the boundaries. Too often I've seen teachers spoon feed kids the answers to everything just so they get results, but this shows a complete lack of innovation and is ultimately damaging to the student. Sure they might get a good result on one thing, but then they become dependent on the teacher giving them everything. The same goes the opposite way. The teachers who are prepared to spoon feed their students everything, are the same ones who put road blocks up to new ideas and innovation. You know the ones I'm talking about because someone's name had just popped into your head. On staff development days, they're the ones ready to kill off all good ideas because it's uncomfortable to them to try something new and something different. After all, they've just got back from the holidays so they couldn't possibly do something new so soon. They're great with the excuses! However, anything worth doing comes with challenges. To achieve great things, you need to be bold and it will feel uncomfortable, but it's so worth it. To kick off this new academic year, don't give up on your bold ideas. Make them happen! No matter how grand the challenge might be, you can find a way! After all, it’s about developing the best educational opportunities for your students, through which you can help everyone to achieve great results. Goal setting is something that’s quite often missed due to the busy nature of our lives, but it can create focus and lead to massive positive change in your life. We often think about it at this time of the year, because people throw around the idea of the New Year’s resolution. However, this is nothing more than a notional way people feel good for a day or two before they go back to their old ways. Let’s get serious about something here. Personal and business goal setting is completely different and it’s an excellent way to create a positive and proactive start to the year.
I constantly develop new goals, work out what I need to do to achieve them, then go and make it happen! None of my goals have just magically happened. They have all required planning and taking action. If you have the drive and determination to do this, you can achieve whatever you want to achieve in life! Over the years, I’ve worked with both kids and adults to help them create a vision for themselves through goal setting. What do they like to do? What do they love to do? What do they want to achieve? Where do they want to take their lives, their careers, their businesses? What’s their timeframe for each goal? Today? Next week? Next month? End of the year? Next five years? What actions are they going to have to take to achieve these goals? I have to use a cliché here, but it is warranted. It’s often hard for people to see forest for the trees! People get so stuck in the noise of life. The more challenging and complex the goal, the more likely people are going to think it’s all too hard and just give up. People often don’t put things into perspective. Huge goals are awesome, but to achieve them, you need to take massive amounts of action. Goals without actions don’t actually achieve anything! One day I was at the supermarket and a rather over-weight guy was standing there complaining about how he couldn’t get fit, yet whilst standing and complaining, he was eating a pie and drinking a can of energy drink. This is typical of a lot of people because they want to achieve something, but they’re not willing to take any real action towards achieving it. Similarly, new businesses are particularly vulnerable to this lack of direction and lack of appropriate action. Like the guy with energy drink, they want to achieve a goal of being ‘successful in business,’ but why so many businesses fail is that they don’t put in the action required to achieve their goal of ‘success,’ because they haven’t mapped out what that success looks like and what actions must be seriously taken to achieve it. Instead, all their energy is put into other time consuming activity just to maintain the status quo. However, when you set goals for yourself and your business and the pathway of actions to achieve these goals, you’ll see just how much more clarity of purpose you’ll have and this clarity fuels your drive and determination towards those goals. You don’t have to wait for a set point in time either. Start today! You’ve got nothing to lose by doing it and it’s not going to cost you anything at all, but will deliver great long-term benefits. Once you start to truly think about what you want to achieve, break it down into smaller goals or milestones. You’ll find that you can achieve so much more. Here’s a simple guide to begin with: 1. What’s your goal? (Be specific) 2. What’s your timeframe? (Set a date) 3. What actions must you take to achieve this? (Again be specific) I do this constantly throughout the year. Over the past twelve months, I’ve achieved 5 major business goals. However, I’m still working towards a number of others, as the actions that needed to be taken, had to be taken over a longer period of time. Don’t be afraid of long-term goals, these can produce the most reward, but they require planning and commitment. In addition to this, I’ve added more business and personal goals all along the way! One for me for the next twelve months is to be involved in another Australian feature film! The last one was an amazing fun experience and whilst for me this isn’t a business goal, it still contributes to the challenge and excitement of life. Take some time right now to set goals for yourself. What do you want to achieve? Where do you want to be in a month? In a year? In five years? What does that look like for you? What do you need to do to make it happen? A very important part of this is to find some space where you can get some clarity. Where’s the best place is for you to think and reflect, that’s distraction free? Where do you have your best ideas? Where’s the best place for you to be inspired? Find it, go there and start setting out your goals. Having a healthy and proactive mind goes hand in hand with having a healthy and positive life and it’s something that you can achieve. Now take the time, set some goals and have a wonderful, proactive and prosperous 2017! This week, since it’s the new year holiday period, I thought I'd write more about adventures and well nothing about business. After a massive past month, I managed to jump on a plane and fly to Japan. I love flying and with my favourite TV show, now movie, Absolutely Fabulous on the entertainment system, the movie was just the right length to have dinner and then fall asleep. Having not stopped for weeks, it wasn't hard at all to doze off and wake when the stewards were serving breakfast!
After a muesli and a couple of espressos, I was all ready to go. Another thing I love about travelling is the fact that one moment I can be in stinking hot weather, the next I step into winter. It's not quite like going into your cupboard and discovering Narnia, but not that far off it either! Shuffling through immigration seems to get faster and faster as they improve technology to check people through. The biggest hassle however, was trying to work out how to make all the connections to get to my destination. The Japanese I did at school hardly prepared me for any of this. It came down to a couple of options. 1. I could wait 4 hours and catch a bus directly to my hotel (boring). 2. Get a mono-rail, bullet train and bus to my destination. Far more interesting… and challenging! Whilst I already knew of these two options and had it planned out in my mind what I needed to do to make this happen, it's not until you're faced with a ticket machine that even when in English Mode doesn't make sense and no ticket sales desks in sight. I managed to fudge my way through and buy a ticket. I wasn't sure if it were the right one, but hey it kept working everytime I stuck it in a machine so I guessed I was on the right track. (The track being a monorail, it was kind of hard not to be!) I made my way to Tokyo Central Station and from here ran around madly trying to find the next connection. It was the bullet train! I again did battle with the ticket machine that had way too many options that didn't make any sense at all. However, I finally succeeded in getting it to spit out a ticket, yet when I went to the gate, it turns out it wanted two tickets. So after the guard said something I didn't understand except for the word two, I went back and got a second ticket (which was apparently slightly different somehow). Placing both tickets in the machine at once, it worked! With a strange feeling that this ticketing process was somehow inefficient and un-Japanese, I raced up to the platform as the train was minutes from leaving. This was my first time on a bullet train and it was amazing! The sleek design, the aerodynamics, the whole train was awesome. I can't for the life of me work out why Australia hasn't built any lines for them. The smooth pace at which they accelerated and slowed mean that you were never thrown about. Although I have to admit I was slightly disappointed that leaving the station I wasn't nailed to the back of my seat by 5Gs of thrust. Now that would be cool. Seeing the sheer size and spread of Tokyo was something itself. The high-rise apartments, the industrial areas, the sprawl of the city seemed to go on forever. As the urban centre became more distant, the train sped up hitting over 280kph! The world flashed by and in the distance, I could see the snow capped Mt Fuji dominating the landscape. The train ride was around 1.5hrs and as the towns became more rural, the design of the building changed and there was some great tranquility about this transition. Reaching Nagano (venue of the 1998 Winter Olympics), the bullet train ride ended. Stepping off the headed carriage, I was snapped back into winter by the frosty chill in the air. From here, I transitioned onto a bus for the final leg of the journey. As the bus wound its way through the rural townships, light snow began to fall, getting heavier and heavier as we ascended into the mountains. After another hour and a bit on the bus, we reached the township of Hakuba, a great town now deep with snow. I explored town for a couple of hours buying and eating some random foods which looked like one thing, but tasted like something else. One such food looked like a cream bun and turned out to have some sort of black bean mash within it! Ha! It's always worth trying new foods and I eventually stumbled on something I liked for lunch. Going anywhere new for the first time is always filled with uncertainty, but that's what makes it so exciting. I don't know what's going to happen next, but to an extent it doesn't matter, as enjoying the journey and everything that happens along the way is the most important thing. It's way too easy to get so wrapped up in work and ‘regular’ life that you miss out on the opportunities to travel, to explore and to experience new things. So over the Christmas break, think about somewhere new you'd like to go or something new you’d like to try. Ask yourself where your next adventure will be and go and book it in the next hour! Whatever it is, don't delay, don't defer it, make it happen and have an awesome adventure whatever it may be! I've been reading a lot of business books lately. Some are amazing, some are total crap and some are just repeating everything else that everyone else has already said, yet still pretending that they thought of it first. Whilst business books are great to read, I reached saturation point last week and everything started appearing to be exactly the same. I've also been driving thousands of kilometres to get to meetings and listening to audio books along the way, but again everyone's sounding the same, telling me the same thing over and over and I needed a break. Ok, so quick sidebar and for those of you thinking about writing a book on business. Please resist the temptation of reading the audio book yourself, unless you have some form of training in media production. It's a rare thing to come across someone who can write logically and fluently and perform their own work with an entertaining flair, most business writers can't!
Having said that however, in my frustration of endless repetition in business tomes and the drones of their authors reading them to me, I woke the other morning to an offer I couldn't refuse! It was a free gift from my purveyor of fine audio books, obviously because I either spend too much money with them, or just not enough. Anyway, the gift was in the form of Girt, (a mysterious word whose usage came to prominence when written into Australia’s national anthem and means surrounded). The book Girt is about the settlement history of Australia. “Ugh! Yuck! Australian history,” I hear you cry. “How boring!” Well having a degree in Medieval European History, I thought that too. However, nothing could be further from the truth (with the exception perhaps of Hilary's approach to online messaging). I downloaded my free gift and started listening to it right away. Written and narrated by historian David Hunt, this is an astoundingly hilarious account of the unspoken tales of Australian history that show how a nation was discovered by accident more than design and built on the back of dodgy deals generally involving rum and settled predominantly by people who really didn't want to be here. However, due to their rampant compulsion to blow their noses on something nice, rather than wipe it on their sleeves, they were transported here for all the handkerchiefs they borrowed! I won't go into all the details of the book as I can hardly do it justice and, after all, you can read or listen to it yourself. I will say however, that it was a rolling barrel of laughs as David explored how dysfunctional the early days were in the new British Colony of New South Wales. Although I do note some important general guidelines for those future empire builders looking to send their criminals far far away:
If I'm not making any sense, it's either because I'm writing this late at night, or you still haven't read the book! Ok, so there is a point to all this, other than recommending a fantastic book. The book was so far removed from business, it was the refreshing break I needed from my business. When we focus on something so much, we often lose touch with other things which excite us and make us happy and that's been the case for me. Listening to a wonderful and interesting history that had nothing to do with work or business was great. It gave me the chance to switch off and really enjoy myself and that's so important for anyone, not just entrepreneurs, to be able to do. Take some time for yourself, recharge, refocus and just take the time to enjoy life. As for Girt, even if you're not into history, read it. It's the most engaging and interesting history book I've ever come across and you will be richer for the experience. It was an early start, getting up before dawn to drive to Sydney for StartCon. I’d actually been quite hesitant to go to this for many reasons, which I’ve written about in the past. The basic problem is the massive difference between a startup and an actual business. The start up world has a lot of fantasy involved with it and not much business and the business world needs to be a bit more innovative.
Anyway, today, it was fun and interesting to go to, but personally I can’t say that I got much value out of it. There were some great sessions for new ventures. However, I’m still sceptical as it remained way too much in the fantasy realm of people wanting to raise money for bad ideas. I went in the pitch competition and it was pretty entertaining. My pitch was, well… umm… I thought it was good considering I formulated it on the way to the event. The reason being, this past week’s been manically busy and so between a wilderness expedition, setting up client meetings, beta testing the new version of software for release, writing blog posts and managing a whole host of other aspects of the business, I didn't have much time for writing a pitch to try and impress investors that I don't even want. Now, it was only a 2 minute pitch and I had four slides which I threw together from my sales deck. For those of you involved in the start-up world, you’ll know what people expect in a pitch deck. It's got nothing really to do with sales, therefore I’m fundamentally not prepared for a pitch competition in which I’m trying to ask people for money. My presentation deck is purely targeted at sales and therein lies one of the biggest problems with the start up world. They’re not particularly interested in sales. They’re interested in market size, metrics and investors opportunities. More Las Vegas than Warren Buffet in approach. Anyway, I didn’t have any of that, so I basically just threw together a couple of slides, which showed the app and looked nice and went with that. It’s a 3 hour drive to Sydney from where I live, so I spent much of it thinking, “How am I going to describe an Educational Risk Management App to a group of people who are from the tech world? How do I simplify this, how do I rationalise this down so the audience understands?” I ended up throwing out all the tried and tested pitches I’ve done for schools because I’m not pitching to customers. Instead I’m pitching to people who most likely know nothing about the education system and what risks are involved when taking kids away. This is a hard thing to answer and after three hours of pondering, I still didn’t have a pitch when I walked in the door and registered. Walking up the stairs, I jotted it down, one or two points on a piece of paper, then promptly stuffed the piece of paper in my pocket completely forgetting what I'd written down. It was reminiscent of when I was up against the deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce in preselection and I wrote a speech one night on the back of a beer coaster in a pub 5mins before I had to present it. Anyway back to the pitch comp. My name was called to go on stage, so I jumped up as it was now or never and I just had to get into it. With no plan and the note in my pocket, I just went for it and delivered the 2min presentation on what Xcursion was, what the problem was, what the solution to that problem was and my background and experience. No talk about raising money, no talk about anything else other than saying that I was looking for strategic partnerships to further growth! It was so much fun! It’s been a long time since I’ve done any public speaking like that, in that sort of impromptu, unprepared sort of way and I really enjoyed it. The results of the competition weren't great for me, probably because I didn't ask for any money. I got a 7 and a 6 from the first two judges, then a 4 from the other one, but I think he was struggling to understand anything to do with business. I'd never heard of him before so a 4 from a random nobody didn't really worry me. I was sure I could make up the points in the swim suit section, but then they told me there was no swimsuit section… Typical! Despite there being no swimsuit section, it was a good experience and it was interesting to see what others are thinking and doing in the tech space. What was a really powerful take away for me was that it really reinforced my point of view that all these good ideas are commendable, but there has to be more of a real business behind them. What many don't realise is that it’s not all about raising capital. It is not all about falsely inflating the potential of the business by injecting cash into it. It is running a true business with real customers who at the end of the day will pay you for a good or a service. I wandered around the exhibition hall and looked at a few other potential businesses that are there as well as many startups, which probably needed to have a clearer idea of what business they were in, than they really did. I collected some free stuff, which is always nice. I don't think I will ever run out of pens! Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to stick around for the second day of the conference as I had to get back to my own business, but there were some really good sessions and great speakers on the marketing and building of a real business and I think that’s really the core of this conference once you strip away the other parts. Considering the focus was more on how to market your business and how to develop and grow your business, rather than how to raise capital, it was a winner in my books. All up, it was quite an informative and useful conference to go to and maybe next year they will include the swimsuit contest as well. Validation has a pretty clear definition. You're basically making sure something works. If it's at the airport, your passport is validated to make sure you are who you say you are. With some jobs, your uni transcripts are validated to ensure that you’ve got the results you needed. However, in the tech world, it’s a term which can be easily used and abused. Sure everyone wants to validate that their great idea is useful and people will use it, but often the unanswered question is, will they pay money for it?
The idea of monetisation is an assumption that is often an afterthought and a case of ‘well if we get enough people onboard using and liking the platform for free, then they’ll be happy to pay for eventually’. Whilst in some cases, this has worked where businesses have been able to provide a basic service for free and then paid business services, this isn’t always the case. It's like running a café for free. You get to have as much coffee as you like, but if you want to have food with that, then you pay. I’d have tons of customers, but I'd be broke very quickly, unless I raised capital, but I won't go into that again. Many tech startups gather users as their method of validation, which is one measure. You can have a bunch of users that like or love your product, but if they're not going to pay for it, your business isn't going to be around for very long. As always, there's exceptions to the rule on this, but the harsh reality for the majority of tech businesses is that they need paying customers, without which you’ll need to be finding yourself another job. This is why you need to validate your idea on both a user level and a commercial level. If you can't answer the question, ‘How do you make money with this?’ then don't waste your time and money building it. My first experience in the tech world was like this. My brother had a great idea to make livestock markets more transparent and efficient. It was an awesome logical idea which hadn't been done before. Validation testing showed that farmers wanted a better way to get and compare prices. Meat processors were keen to modernise practices. The problem for me however, remained … How was this going to make money? Having run another business, I was well aware of the need for paying customers. I wouldn't have had the business for six years before selling it, if I hadn’t had great regular customers coming in each day and paying for the products and services we provided. With this livestock idea, I sat in meeting after meeting being told, “Don't worry. This is how you can eventually charge users for your service.” The grand sweeping statements of yeah, we can do this and that and charge this customer for this and then you'll gather so many users and market data. The valuation of your business will be X. I unfortunately sat there silently, listening to this crap and thinking, ‘This is so stupid,’ these people have no idea. However, I wanted to support my brother in his venture. I stupidly assumed because he knew the industry far better than I did, it would work. In hindsight, I should have said something at the time. That nagging thought in my mind that nobody would want to pay for this, proved to be correct. Whilst the idea was great and people liked it, it was the sort of platform that should've been done as an internal project for livestock companies or meat processors to create value thorough increased efficiencies, not as a third party project. The cost to implement this with the geographically diverse customers and tailor it for their systems, proved also to be prohibitively expensive. However, despite this being an expensive lesson, it was worth it because from this I've been able to claw away a lot of the fantasy tech industry crap to ensure anything we do now has a paying customer business base from the very start. I've had countless good ideas before and after this project, but since I couldn't work out how to make money from them, they were all archived into the business ideas folder of my laptop as a reminder. You can have a great idea, but turning it into a business is a whole other thing. So for your next tech idea, or any business idea, when you're developing your business plan, the most important thing to focus on is who is going to pay for this and how much will they be willing to pay? Once you have this locked down, you’ll be able to see if this is going to be a total waste of time, or an amazing viable business! Often in life, we find ourselves in situations where you get asked something by a friend and in hindsight you probably should've said no. I found myself in one such situation a few years ago. I was doing some volunteer work in my hometown of Tamworth when one of the committee members who owns a chicken farm, asked me if I'd like to come and help move some chickens. ‘How hard could that be?’ I thought. Move a few chickens from one shed to another, easy! At the time, I'd been doing a few casual jobs, as well as the volunteer work so a few more dollars and the offer of pizza for dinner was a tempting offer I didn't want to knock back.
“Sure, be happy to help out!” I replied, not knowing what exactly I was getting myself into. But hey, let’s not forget the aforementioned pizza! That evening I drove out to the property, which was about 20 minutes out of town. Now it's funny what goes through your mind when you're not sure what you're getting yourself into. I had visions of picking up nice soft little chickens and placing them in little tubs and carrying them a short distance into another shed. I’m not entirely sure why I thought that, but that was my impression of the job. Sadly, this was not the case… On arrival, I saw a scruffy looking crew of chicken movers and I immediately felt overdressed in my jeans and T-Shirt. I did wear old jeans, just not old enough. My induction was swift and to the point. Grab six chickens with each hand and load them in the crate. “Ok… How many are there?” I asked “5000!” was the reply. “Oh crap,” I thought as I walked into the shed to see thousands of chickens before me. Well it was too late to turn this down and this was certainly a new challenge for me! So I jumped right in and started grabbing chickens by the legs. The whole thing was really well co-ordinated. There were the catchers, who would catch the chickens and then hand them on to the collectors. The collectors would ‘collect’ the six chickens in each hand, then carry them over and load them into the crates. The crates would then be loaded and stacked onto the back of a truck. This was hard work! It was summer and the evening air was hot. Add to this, the dust in the shed that'd been kicked up by the commotion, the smell, the noise, the pecking, the scratching and the chicken poo all made this the weirdest and hardest night of physical work is ever done. Everyone kept changing roles of catching, collecting and loading crates. After a couple of hours of work, the job was completed. The shed was empty and the huge truck was fully laden with 5000 enormously noisy chickens. My work here was done! Well… not quite. Now it was time to unload them all. We drove the truck to the other side of the farm to another shed where we proceeded to unload the crates, stack them onto trollies and then take all the chickens out. Crate after crate I lifted, getting covered with more and more chicken crap. Another couple of hours later, the truck was empty and I was trashed. I was so tired I'd forgotten about the pizza! But when it arrived, I sparked back to life! It was so worth it. Although I couldn't even look at the chicken pizza without cringing, I hungrily munched several pieces. Looking down, my hands were scratched to pieces, my clothes covered in blood and chicken crap and I couldn't even begin to describe the smell. I needed to get home for a shower! Just as I was leaving, my friend said, “Thanks for helping out tonight. That's a good start. We've only got another 15,000 to move. So, same time tomorrow?” Exhausted, I stared back blankly… and with a smile replied, “Sure, same time tomorrow!” This is a bit different in some ways from what I usually talk about. However, at the same time it's exactly what I'm on about. I was watching a documentary on Twisted Sister the other night. For those of you who don't know who they are, they're a 70-80s glam rock band that took stage performance to the next level. Google them and watch some of their film clips. My two favourite songs are We’re not gonna take it! And I wanna Rock! There pretty cool film clips, especially if you don't like classrooms and psycho teachers! If only this happened when I was at school! Anyway, even though they’re not one of my favourite bands, they have such a fascinating history of adversity and rising to the challenges that were constantly thrown up in front of them. It shows how such drive and determination paid off, despite what seemed to be a world conspiring against them at every turn. From the start, they were weird! A bunch of glam rockers dressed up in outrageous costumes and performing on the fringe of the rock scene. Unlike many performers today who think the only way to get their big break is through a contest, they played the pub scene in New York State. Despite everyone having rough and quiet beginnings, not knowing if anyone were going to show up to their performance, they quickly found a following of dedicated fans who followed them from venue to venue for each of their shows. They became so popular in the live rock scene, they were selling out shows wherever they went. However, they could land a record deal. If they'd started today they could've recorded their own songs and have them playing on YouTube and ITunes within days. However, the world was a very different place in the 70s & 80s and getting heard by anyone in the music industry was tough. But they continued to play and do what they loved to do. They got their big break where they were going to perform at the Palladium theatre. The show sold out in record time, but one of the band members collapsed and the performance had to be postponed. Instead of record executives who were originally booked in to see the big show, they got secretaries and assistants showing up the next time around. As a result, no record deal was struck. This went on and on. Then they finally managed to sign a deal, but the executive died of a heart attack on the way home. So that fell through. Then they signed a deal in the U.K. But the record company went bust and back home they were black listed by Atlantic Records who threatened to fire anyone who tried to sign them. By this point most people would've given up. Generation Y certainly would have, but not Twisted Sister. They kept going and going and trying to find new ways of opening doors every time one slammed shut in their face. At one point they drove 56 hours across America to play a 29min show! Now that's determination! This endless struggle would’ve destroyed most people and they probably would've given up and begun resentfully making coffee somewhere and claiming they could've been big, but the universe stopped them. Well Twisted Sister grabbed the universe and bent it to its will! Their big break finally came in England when they were doing a live show and did such an epic performance, they got the attention of a British Atlantic Records executive who signed them up for a record deal! Much to the disgust, it would appear of the head of Atlantic Records US, who had blocked an album deal for so long, obviously realising there was money to be made from this deal, he finally capitulated and with this deal their album went platinum! This shows how being tenacious and persistent can pay off. If you truly believe in something, even when the odds are not only stacked against you, but people are actively working against you, if you stick to your guns and keep working towards your goal, you can achieve anything. If it doesn't work to start with, or if doors keep closing, instead of giving up in five minutes and blaming the world for stopping you, keep working on it. Keep knocking on doors. Keep coming back. Keep fighting to do what you love and despite the odds against you, if you stick with it, you can achieve some amazing things. To get the full understanding of the rollercoaster ride they had, watch the documentary We Are Twisted F*@#king Sister. It really is an eye opening journey of how what seemed a hopeless pursuit, ended in a platinum record deal and one of the greatest live performance rock acts in history. This is a crossover post between my education blog and business blog, as it fits in both. However, since Experiential education is any education where you just go out to do something. It’s not about theories. It’s not about book work. It’s about getting in and actively problem solving or engaging in a real world activity that’s malleable, has real consequences and outcomes which are either positive or negative, depending on how somebody approaches the task.
So why is this so important? One of the big problems with mainstream education, is the fact that most of it is completely impractical. Most academics would yell savage rebukes and cast terse derision on me from their lofty ivory towers, which incidentally were all built by tradesmen and artisans. However, I’m not here to knock academics and the role in education, because they play an extremely important role, but it’s not one for everyone. Experiential education, on the other hand, is for everybody. It’s the way people have learnt for tens of thousands of years. One of my favourite lines from The Simpsons, is when Homer turns the hot water on, scolds himself and yells out in disbelief. “What?! H Means Hot!” This really sums up how experiential and education works. You do something and there is a real consequence. Much of this has been lost by the drive of politicians to make sure that academic standards are high. Unfortunately, this doesn’t translate into practical jobs for students leaving school. A whopping 2/3 of school leavers will never go to uni, yet almost the entire educational framework is based around training to encourage everyone to go to uni. It just makes no sense! This is only scratching the surface of a much broader issue, so over the next while on this blog and my education one, I’m going to explore more practical ways of learning through experiential education. What lessons do people remember the most? It’s the ones where they see or experience a real outcome not just the theory of an outcome. |
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