So you regulars readers may have noticed I have new header to my blog.
I was reading a book on management by Peter Drucker the other day, and it really got me to thinking about marketing, specifically: What do my customers want from me? What do I offer that is so useful that it sells itself? My answer:
Just about every person you see is dragging a psychological anchor behind them, one made of loyalty to their past. It matters little how well you trim the sails or how hard you gun the engine. Tips and tricks have no effect on it. That anchor, while mostly invisible, can keep you from making any real progress.
My purpose is to help people recognize and pull up these anchors of loyalty to obsolete systems. All of my successes in the arts world have relied less on talent (talent is commonplace) and far more upon my ability to override loyalty to past systems. I know how difficult it can be. But if you want to be different, you have to be disloyal to the standard conventional thinking.
I would love to say that I am so smart I can diagnose and solve your problems, but most people already know what their problems– and solutions– are. The problem is overcoming the obsolete loyalty that is invisibly gumming up the works. And this is where I help people.
I think I have this ability largely because as a youngster I had to discard loyalty to the system in order to survive. I was also highly influenced by working with Arthur Fiedler. He was immensely disloyal to all classical music traditions (he was reviled by those loyal to it), and became immensely successful in the process. I never forgot that.
My last two books (“Principles” and “Rich Kid“) have really been all about deconstructing various systems of dogma that exploit our need to be loyal to a system, yet do not actually work. I wasn’t really thinking in terms of undoing loyalty to old systems as I wrote them, but at the core of it, that’s what they do.
So news, I contributed an article (“The Equity of Youth”) to the uncollege.org blog which will be published tomorrow. Very excited to discover these people; the common automatic loyalty to the academic industrial complex is high on my list of things to un-do!
For those of you surfing in from the uncollege.org post, welcome, I hope you will subscribe to my blog (see above right)! Fear not, feedburner tells me nothing about you. You can of course check out my books here, my speaking appearances here, and feel free to become a fan of my facebook page. – jl
