Two short stories in this week’s article will prove a simple point. Certain answers are not always obvious to us. Maybe it’s the whole “forest for the trees” thing, who knows?

I once heard a marketing guru tell a story of how he arrived in a far-off town for a speaking engagement only to discover that he had his favorite French cuffs, but no French cuffed shirt to put them on. Since wearing his suit and tie with no shirt was not an option he headed out in search of a “french-cuffed shirt.” Every clothing store he found was either closed or did not carry the shirts.

He was getting frustrated and was thinking, “What kind of jerk-water town is this, no French-cuffed shirts anywhere? Unbelievable!” Finally he spotted a Walmart in the distance and figured he’d give it a shot.

He found a clerk wearing one of those big yellow smiles and asked  her if the store carried French-cuffed shirts. The answer came back, “no!” At this point he was angry and muddled something under his breath. The clerk then asked him if everything was OK.  He then explained to the clerk that he needed a French-cuffed shirt to go with his suit because he forgot his back in Arizona. The clerk then said, “Sir, we don’t have French-cuffed shirts, but we have plenty of button-down shirts that will look just fine with your suit. Why don’t you just buy a new shirt?” As you can imagine this was a “duh” moment for this marketing wizard.

My recent “duh” moment…

My wife teaches a Zumba class on Saturday mornings at “C-Steps” in Tilton. She takes Julia with her and Marissa stays with me. After a little lounging around Marissa and I head out and take care of the grocery shopping for the week.

Most weeks I pick up some ground-beef. My careful stats revealed to me that two pounds is plenty. One thing that had been bothering me recently is the fact that I could never find a “two-pound” package so I’d get exactly the amount of meet we need. As I stood there and looked at the packages I saw some that were close to a pound and the others that were a tad over three pounds. Then I saw my chance to rectify this problem.

In front of my eyes was a surely competent meet department employee. So I asked him, “How come no two pound packages?” He very politely explained that based on the process and how the machine worked – two pound packages just did not make sense. Then, being a “master of the obvious,” (which, unfortunately I am not) he said; “Just get two one-pound packages and you’ll have your two pounds.” “I think I’ll do just that, thanks!!” Talk about a “duh” moment!

So what can we draw from these two stories? That “Marketing Wizards” and Authors are stupid? Of, course that conclusion is arguable based on the above facts! But the real lesson here is the simple truth that what is obvious to someone else may not be so obvious to you. What is obvious to you may not be so obvious to me and what is obvious to me may not be so obvious to you.

I see this truth play out every day in my life and business. I seek out answers from people I know have them. And when I work with business owners I constantly help them make obvious (to me) improvements in their businesses.

The Lesson…

Keep your mind open because the minute you think you have all the answers is exactly the time you need to slow down before you get hurt.

Tags: business, marketing, personal development, success

This entry was posted by miked on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 11:19 am and is filed under Personal Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.