Come out with your unique signal and don’t always be compelled to go the common way. That is called innovation.
—Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the Dream!
There are two black guys who grew up in humble circumstances, in different parts of the country, who have become known for Block concepts with which they are each iconically associated. These concepts have become more recognizable than their names. These singular concepts precede them, serving as each man’s signal, and have propelled both of them to unlikely success. Success that honestly should not have been possible.
These two men do not know each other, but both, unwittingly, Icon’d themselves, leading with who they were through their work and art with a singular passion. Their unique and individual stories show how having a singular concept that represents who you are up front and unapologetically can help make you accessible to a vast audience.
Kevin Carroll was abandoned by his parents at six years old as a result of poverty and addiction. Today in his fifties, Kevin has lived a remarkable life, and a singular concept has come to define his astonishing career: a red rubber ball, the kind of red rubber ball we all played with on elementary school playgrounds.
A few things about Kevin: He speaks five languages, including Czech, Croatian, Serbian, and German. He went from being a high school athletic trainer to a college athletic trainer to the head trainer for the Philadelphia 76ers in just five years. His words have appeared on over seventeen million Starbucks coffee cups. He has spoken before the United Nations on the importance of play in developing countries and what we in more developed countries can learn from it. Eventually, after participating in the Olympics as a physical trainer for the Yugoslavian Olympic team, Kevin was recruited by Nike, where he was asked to invent his own job title to be a connector and amplifier of the Nike brand. He worked as the “Katalyst” (the K is for Kevin) at Nike for over ten years, then finally left to become one of the most successful international public speakers and a respected agent for social change.
According to Kevin, play is as universal a language as music and is fundamental to human connection, adaptability, productivity, and creativity. Kevin travels over two hundred days a year evangelizing play as a catalyst for social change, speaking to schools, corporations, and nonprofits all around the world. When Kevin is in a developing country, he will trade a brand-new soccer ball to the local children he meets on the street in exchange for one of theirs. (Kevin has had his own line of soccer balls with Molten—one of the world’s largest ball manufacturers—imprinted with his own special symbols conveying play, energy, and curiosity.)
In his travels across every continent, he has found people of all ages playing with soccer balls so threadbare that the leather has been worn away to the thread. He has collected soccer balls made from banana peels, yarn, coconuts, and even compacted garbage. Kevin’s artifactual sports balls are on permanent display at the Aspen Institute.
Kevin says his collection of soccer balls from around the world represents the universal human desire to play, regardless of whether we live in prosperity or want. People will always find a way to engage in play.
Kevin knows a lot about the science of play and believes in his heart there is no other thing on earth quite like the ball. In a casual conversation, he will go into great detail about Friedrich Fröbel, the German innovator and teacher who created the concept of Kindergarten. Fröbel laid out a series of sequenced gifts that children should receive to support their early development. (All these gifts, as Kevin explained to me one day, are versions of toy blocks.) The first gift is a soft ball. According to research, the word “ball” is often among a baby’s first. We are chasing balls from the moment we can crawl and some of us continue chasing them until we die. That primal power of the ball signals how important play really is to humans.
Kevin loves all sports and debated what balls he should focus on to communicate his message of play in his first book. Soccer (his favorite sport) is big everywhere except in his home country of the United States. Football, baseball, and basketball are really only mainstream in America. So Kevin settled on the red rubber balls that are ubiquitous on every primary and elementary school playground across the world. The book Kevin wrote at Nike was a tribute to the power of the ball and play, and told his story of overcoming abandonment and poverty to reach what should have been impossible heights. Called Rules of the Red Rubber Ball, the book used the red rubber ball that we all chased around in elementary school as a metaphor for chasing our purpose in life and speeding up and amplifying human potential.
The book’s original design was elaborate, inside and out, constructed with thick cardboard and textured red rubber in the shape of a ball on the top. He hired a renowned design firm, Willoughby Design, to communicate the playful sensory spirit of his message. He found a rogue printer in Vancouver, BC, Met Fine Printers, who were willing to go all in on his unusual rubber-and-cardboard book.
Kevin was already one of the most sought-after public speakers globally by the time he left his brand amplifier position at Nike. Today, he is represented by the leading international talent agencies for public speaking, including Washington Speakers Bureau and the Creative Artists Agency—who represent former presidents and movie stars. There seems to be an insatiable demand for him and his message at every kind of company or institution. Having been in such high demand as a speaker while at Nike, Kevin began to realize his sole mission and purpose in life: he needed to leave Nike to evangelize the power of play around the world.
Kevin believes deeply that when we chase our purpose in life it changes us, and makes us better, more effective people. When we play as children, we do it unselfconsciously. Kevin believes that by using play as a tool for social change we can get back to chasing what fulfills us as adults. So it follows that if we all chase our purpose—our red rubber balls from childhood—as individuals, our society will improve collectively.
Kevin decided to pursue a major publishing deal to amplify his message. Yet despite having successfully sold his self-published Rules of the Red Rubber Ball at his talks, he couldn’t get any mainstream agent or publisher to take it. Again and again, he heard, “It is too expensive to produce with its thick cardboard and red rubber,” or “The message is laid out in a way we’ve never seen before.” Most had never seen a book that looked like a children’s book with grown-up content. His favorite statement of rejection was “It is overdesigned and too creative.”
So Kevin just continued his travels, selling his self-produced books at his speaking events. He was completely perplexed that no big publisher would buy it when he saw it resonating with such an incredible cross-section of people at his events. Eventually, he was approached by sports goliath ESPN’s new book-publishing arm; they took on the project, and the book continues to sell more than a decade later. It is passed around by tens of thousands of people as a kind of living artifact containing knowledge on how to overcome obstacles. It is the kind of book you feel compelled to pass on after you read and experience it.
Kevin is recognized wherever he goes as the “red rubber ball guy”—a Block that has completely overshadowed his career at Nike, his military career in which he learned three Slavic languages, his Olympic experience, and his being only the third black head athletic trainer ever hired in the NBA. And yes, the book’s message about play is powerful. However, if the book did not so obviously lead with the pure simplicity of the red rubber ball, it would not be what it is today, nor would it be the universal symbol of Kevin Carroll, his signal, and his legacy to the world. When people recognize him on the street or in an airport, they yell, “You’re the red rubber ball guy!”
No matter our work, if we can be represented by some overarching, immediately perceivable concept or symbol—our Block—it will propel us farther and faster than we would ever get if we lead with a complicated or unclear message. It will serve as your signal, getting you seen and remembered, providing just enough to get people to look deeper. As we see with successful Icons, when we repeat our Block, we can get it to carry with it the full complexity of who we are.
Let’s look at another signal. A singular concept has come to define Donwan Harrell’s astonishing career—denim work jeans that resonate with people of every creed, color, and class.
Donwan Harrell is an artist who grew up working-class in Virginia. His father worked as a naval ship repairman and his mother was a seamstress. He has risen to become the most successful independent denim designer on earth. Donwan’s aggressively distinct signature washes (the way any designed denim is weathered, aged, and stained) have become the powerful signal for his brands.
Donwan is more of a denim archaeologist than a traditional designer. He created his designs by regularly traveling to remote parts of the United States on three- or four-week road trips, collecting and cataloging the different ways people wore their denim workwear. He would observe how paint might splatter or mist on jeans from a paint booth at an auto body repair shop. He noted down how someone loading feed at a farmhouse or working in an underground mine might create a distress, or a unique wear pattern, on the worker’s “uniform.” Or it could be how oil and grease stain and dye a pair of jeans worn by a mechanic or a farm worker. He became fascinated by how denim, with manual labor and scars, wears in ways that are as varied and unique as a fingerprint.
After a trip, he would head back into the studio to design his forcefully stained and distressed denim. Donwan uses complex techniques to create patterns of stress and wear that go into every unique denim wash. For Donwan as a designer-creator, these washes must always be based on, or inspired by, real life. No matter how rich or poor or accomplished we are, there is an impulse in all of us—regardless of age, gender, or where we live in the world—to wear clothing that tells a story; we still value work done with our hands, despite the virtual nature of our current times. We also, as a collective, tend to love things that show our journey or, at the very least, an imprint of a hard day’s work done well. For this reason, Donwan’s washes are often emotional to look at.
Donwan’s hard work and attention to detail paid off, for him and for his suppliers. Donwan was the first American to go to Japan to manufacture selvedge denim on their old shuttle looms. (For years, many fans of his product actually thought that, Donwan was Japanese.) Selvedge is produced around the world, but Japanese denim is often considered superior because the expensive, durable, flowy material is produced in limited quantities on vintage looms, resulting in a character unlike any other textile. Despite the fact that hardcore denim enthusiasts—“denim heads”—had sworn by selvedge for decades, it hadn’t been sold in larger, mainstream stores. Until Donwan’s washes came along, Americans were not willing to shell out $300 to $500 a pair for jeans. Producers and importers of selvedge the world over have benefited from his innovation.
Second, and most important for us, Donwan has become known for and synonymous with his special washes. It is how he and his work are recognized by the retail buyers of the major department stores and the people who love to wear his special product. The brand he founded, PRPS (short for “purpose”), is a luxurious jean beloved by celebrities and artists, including culture makers like Jay Z, Brad Pitt, and David Beckham. (The battle cry for the brand is “Bruised Never Broken.” For decades he named all his jeans after 1960s and ’70s muscle cars, which he collects but doesn’t always tell his wife about.)
There is true irony in the fact that the jeans he designs to look “worked in” cost hundreds and, in rare cases, over a thousand dollars. A few years ago, Mike Rowe, television host of Dirty Jobs, called him out publicly when he saw the price of Donwan’s dirt-covered Mud Jeans. “I took umbrage, (that’s right—umbrage,) [sic] with the emergence of jeans with fake mud on sale at Nordstrom’s for $400,” Rowe said.
Donwan’s washes are distinct and instantly recognizable to his audience as the most authentically “lived in, worked in”–looking denim one can buy. More than “denim designs,” Donwan’s signature style, his Block, is his washes. Donwan’s decades of dedication and work have created a signature Block that, through repetition and consistency, now associates him with the most intricate and realistic denim washes in the world. Just like the criticism of Beethoven, what Rowe is offended by with Donwan’s denim as paintings is the distinct Block that separates and amplifies Donwan as a unique artist. The Block has been such a successful signal for Donwan that after he left the brand he founded he received big unsolicited investment offers and many inquiries to design for others at established global fashion houses. Donwan decided to embark on a new denim venture, ARTMEETSCHAOS, and the signal helped the leading retail buyers to fully embrace and covet his new brand within months of launch.
In fact, the success of Donwan’s Block (the washes) transcended the success of his popular brand. Donwan shows how, if we can become known for one thing that makes us special or resonates with those we wish to engage with, our Block message, science, style, or idea can be a gateway to sustained success.