In Hong Kong, where I live, I woke up in the middle of the night as a typhoon 9 was raging outside. I listened to the heavy rains and winds howling around my house, hoping that none of the tall trees would fall down on our house.
At the back of our garden is a tree trunk. It is the remains of a papaya tree that was torn from the ground by a typhoon a few years ago. When we moved into this house, I initially wanted to throw it out because it looked like dead wood, but something, the shape, the colour and somehow the reminder that it was once a papaya tree, let me leave it there. Last year, I noticed new leaves started to grow and this year it started bearing fruit again!
It managed to survive the rumble and found a new shape and form to live!
In the late 1960s, Dr Spencer Silver was a scientist at 3M who worked on inventing super-strong adhesives for the aerospace industry in building planes. He accidently managed to create an incredibly weak and sensitive adhesive that seemed too weak to be useful. While Spencer had to continue working on developing stronger products, he never gave up on the idea of having an application for this weak adhesive. He was persistent and kept creating, experimenting with it, and the best idea he could come up with was a bulletin board with the adhesive sprayed on it on which pieces of paper could be stuck without tape and removed without leaving glue residue on the sheets. But management did not see any potential profitability in such a bulletin board and did not intend to market it further.
A colleague of Spencer’s, Art Fry, who was a Product Development Engineer, heard Spencer speak about the adhesive at a seminar. Art also happened to be singing in a church choir on Sundays. One problem he often had, was losing page markers in his songbook while singing. They would constantly fall out. He had an idea, asked Spencer if he could take some of his weak adhesive and began spraying it on the pieces of paper and sticking them in his songbook. The 3M Post-It Note was born! A product that’s now part of our daily life.
It’s one of the most valuable lessons in perseverance and entrepreneurship!
If it is VALUE you have to offer, MAKE it come alive and be PERSISTENT!
1. What VALUE do you create?
What is new or innovative about your offer? How does your product or service meet people’s needs in a BETTER way than what’s already out there? The 3M Post-It story also shows that having a good idea is not enough. Don’t fall in love with your product or service, instead look at the VALUE it can create for others!
Value can be added by doing what you do faster, offer better quality (according to your clients), offer more convenience, improve customer service and whatever you do – try to OVERDELIVER.
2. Marketing – How do you attract people to your product / service?
Who is your ‘ideal’ customer? What does he/she think? What is their world like? What are their challenges? What are their goals? What do they value? Where do they get their information from?
Then tell them HOW your product or service is going to help them ACHIEVE THEIR GOALS!
3. Persistence leads to Success
When you are convinced your product or service offers people VALUE, be PERSISTENT. The 3M Post-It story does not stand alone:
- James Dyson had to create 5,000 prototypes to launch his revolutionary vacuum cleaner.
- Thomas Edison made 10,000 attempts to create a light bulb.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger played in 41 different movies; most were unsuccessful, some moderately successful. Only a few of them made him one of the most famous actors in the world (Terminator 3 brought him USD30 million).
- An average millionaire goes bankrupt 3-4 times before becoming permanently wealthy.
- Starbucks founder Howard Schultz said: “I believe life is a series of near-misses. A lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seeing what other people don’t see and pursuing that vision.”
We know there’s a typhoon raging out there which is unlikely to calm down any time soon. Meanwhile, keep creating VALUE, help your client achieve their GOALS and BE PERSISTENT.
Let’s Lead!
