START WHERE OTHERS STOP

 

 

In 1975, Gary Dahl was looking for a way to make money, so he began selling rocks.

He charged $3.75 per rock ($22 in today’s money).

Within 2 months he’d sold 10,000 rocks, within a year he’d sold 1.5 million rocks, eventually his company sold $15 million worth of rocks.

So what was special about the rocks?

Absolutely nothing, they were plain ordinary rocks.

But obviously millions of people weren’t paying that kind of money for just a rock.

And here’s the part we can learn from, they weren’t paying for the rocks, they were paying for the packaging.

Each rock came in a plain brown box that had ventilation holes cut in it and PET ROCK written on the side.

Inside the box, the rock was laying on a bed of straw, and it came with a 36-page manual “The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock”.

The learning for us is, it wasn’t the rock that everyone bought, it was the packaging.

The obvious part, the rock itself, wasn’t the idea, the idea was what went round it.

The brilliant part was seeing the opposite of what most people saw.

In the late 1980s B&Q, Britain’s biggest DIY retailer, had a problem with staff shortages.

They hired mainly young people, which created a lot of staff turnover and absenteeism.

B&Q decided to look where other people weren’t looking for staff – older people.

In their Macclesfield store they tried an experiment, they only hired people over 50.

Their thinking was that older people were more likely to have settled family lives, more likely to be interested in DIY, more likely to enjoy the work rather than being bored.

After 2 years the results were as follows:

Higher customer satisfaction, the older staff gave better service, showed more interest and had more expertise.

Profits were up 18%, older staff were able to help customers find what they needed instead of just leaving them to get on with it.

Staff turnover was SIX times lower than the company average.

Absenteeism was 39% lower than the company average.

This experiment caused B&Q to change its staffing policy across its network.

It ended compulsory retirement for older people, it rehired older workers who’d been laid off, it introduced flexible work schedules to accommodate older workers.

The brilliant part was seeing the opposite of what most people saw.

In the USA, libraries have begun looking where most people don’t look.

In order to encourage youngsters to read, libraries have put wrappers on the books that schools have banned.

The clear plastic wrappers are like the evidence wrappers police use at crime scenes.

They are under a sign reading: THE BOOKS THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO READ.

Inside a wrapper labelled: WARNING, SATANIC, is Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’.

Inside a wrapper labelled: COMMUNISM, POLITICAL THEORIES, INCITES VIOLENCE, is Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’.

Inside a wrapper labelled: CAUTION, OBSCENE, is Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’.

Inside a wrapper labelled: ANTI-WHITE, VIOLENCE, OCCULT, is Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’.

Inside a wrapper labelled: GRAPHIC IMAGES, RACIAL SLURS, is Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.

Inside a wrapper labelled: PRO-COMMUNIST, SEXUALLY EXPLICIT, is Orwell’s ‘1984’.

The adults who banned these books thought it would stop their children reading them, but the people who run the libraries knew it would have the opposite effect.

Going to the library was previously seen as the sort thing only nerds and swats did, now it’s been repositioned as an act of rebellion.

Every teenager is going to want to say they’ve read the books that their schools have banned them from reading.

The libraries have suddenly made their image exciting and anti-establishment.

Just like the Pet Rock and B&Q, they’ve done it by doing the opposite of what everyone  else thought of doing.

As Schopenhauer said:

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”