Erase What You Know | Beyond the Status Quo
“You must crawl before you walk” is a familiar saying that expresses the concept of learning the basics before going to the next level. If you Google that phrase along with the word success, you’ll find dozens of articles to validate this concept. Whether it’s proving your contribution to a team project to receive a promotion or laying a strong foundation to sustain a business, there’s a consensus that you must succeed in the first step in order to reach the second step. Let’s challenge this theory by thinking beyond the status quo.
When my firstborn son was around ten months old, he had not yet crawled. Initially, our family was concerned that he might be a slow learner. But one day, he spontaneously pulled himself up and started walking. To reiterate, prior to our son’s first steps, he had never once crawled. While I’d like to think he was a baby genius, he is not alone. According to an Australian study, about 10 percent of toddlers do not crawl before they walk. However, a few other studies suggest that if a child does not learn to crawl first, they may have difficulty concentrating, struggle with mathematical concepts, and possibly develop ADD/ADHD.
My son is quite the opposite, with concentration being one of his greatest assets. He has scored over 100 percent on tests and was placed in the accelerated math group in his fourth-grade class. Even with my industrial and operations engineering bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, my son has actually guided me through grasping the new common core math concepts that are different from how I learned mathematics in the ’90s.
From the time we are children, we are trained to color between the lines. As teenagers, we are taught to drive between the lines. As college students, we are told to master a skill, because a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none.
While I do have a tremendous amount of respect for experts who have mastered their craft, the requirement for success is not mastery. It’s resiliency. It’s originality. To create your own yes, you must continuously pursue innovative solutions.
Unconventional Logic
On a rainy day in Chicago when I was young, my mother and I dashed into Pizza Hut to get our meat lover’s pizza. Our clothes were drenched when we returned to the car. I wondered why the pizzeria didn’t have a drive-thru. When I asked my mother, she told me that pizzas take too long to make and wouldn’t be ready quickly enough for a drive-thru. I accepted that logic. Perhaps had I challenged that thought, I could have invented Pizza Hut’s existing drive-thru, which serves personal pan pizzas and bread sticks.
Temporarily erase what you know. This may involve dissecting or disregarding daily inspirational quotes, motivational speeches, and even wise advice from family, mentors, and colleagues. To start with a clean slate of thinking about how to tackle a rejected goal or unfinished task, you’ll need to first rely on your instincts.
If you’re a visual person like myself, buy a poster board and write down the goal, even if it’s been rejected numerous times. Then you’ll need to brainstorm clever ways to achieve your pursuits. Going beyond the status quo entails transformational thinking but not necessarily grandiose ideas. Even a simple gesture can accelerate your career trajectory.
Extraordinary Steps
I recall when the surprising success of Tyler Perry’s first theatrically released film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, was covered in the Hollywood Reporter, an entertainment trade publication. The president of Lionsgate mentioned that the studio was actively seeking similar scripts from diverse writers. At the time, I had a screenplay, Hollywood Chaos, that I had written and was pitching around town. The story had a similar tone to Perry’s film, so I decided to contact the Lionsgate president.
Now, entertainment executives are instructed by their companies not to respond to unsolicited submissions for legal reasons. An unsolicited email typically gets forwarded to the legal department. I know this to be true because I have received a plethora of rejection letters, stating that my material was unsolicited, since it was not requested, and was therefore never reviewed.
To be taken seriously, the project should be represented by an agent, manager, or prominent attorney. Film school professors instruct students to follow the traditional routes of submitting their work by securing a literary agent. This infrastructure protects writers from their ideas being stolen and protects studios when they have similar projects already in development.
I did not personally know the president of Lionsgate, and I did not have literary representation that could contact him on my behalf. I scoured the Internet for his email address. Instead, I found the email to a publicity executive who worked at Lionsgate. Then I used the same format to guess the president’s email address—first initial and last name @lionsgate.com. I sent a brief email mentioning his quote in the article and suggested that he read my script.
To my surprise, he responded in minutes and had cc’d several of his executives. They followed up with me that same day. I completed the required submission release form and emailed over my script. They read it and passed, but they invited me for a meeting at the studio to learn more about my goals as a filmmaker. All because I activated the Hollywood Reporter.
The Catch-22
Give yourself permission to frequently try the impossible. Throughout your success journey, colleagues, family members, and even mentors you genuinely trust may suggest that you need to have something that you don’t have to get what you want.
This is the catch-22 syndrome: to launch a business, you need capital. To get the capital, you need to generate revenue. To generate revenue, you need a loan. To get the loan, you need assets or a track record, which may be difficult to provide for a new venture. Don’t allow this double-edged sword to hinder you from moving forward. If you need funding, be sure to purchase a subscription to Fast Company, Inc., Money, or Kiplinger’s Personal Finance as well as local publications that are specific to your city or community, such as a business journal or chamber of commerce magazine.
The general public reads magazine articles to gain new insights. To go beyond the status quo, I challenge you to activate the content that you read. Allow the relevant information from articles and social media posts to permeate your life. I have an IT guru friend in San Francisco who received a post on social media about a power brunch with the most elite influencers in the city. The ticket was priced into the thousands. He tweeted the organizers a positive comment and offered to volunteer at the event. They agreed. He attended the event for free and was assigned as a greeter, which hardly involved work for his congenial personality. Where there is a will, there is a way indeed—but you may need to create it.