Coney Island State of Mind
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 by Mark | Posted in Business, Entrepreneur, Management, Marketing, Small Business, Unconventional Thinking | Comments
I know. I know. Your brain is dizzy just thinking of all the stuff you have to do managing your career, running your business. It’s like doing everything in an amusement park all at once; ride the ferris wheel, gobble down the cotton candy, ride the roller coaster and the Himalaya, all in 10 minutes.
And that’s how we really do behave at the parks, and on vacation sight seeing. You arrive in Rome and see it all – all the must sees – as soon as the plane touches the ground. But the problem is, you are so consumed by racing through it all, that your brain is disengaged. You never really see anything. You simply react to the stimuli. The neon lights. The electric movement. A Coney Island State of mind!
Too often business is the same. Actually, more than the same, it’s Coney Island squared. You are so busy doing all the must-dos that you forget there are NO must-dos. Success, the true-genuine-eclipse of the sun success, requires you get out of a Coney Island State of Mind to a Blank Canvas State of Mind. This makes things possible. This frees you to be an artist. This liberates you to be an innovator.
There is nothing you HAVE to do. There are no must-dos. It is all want-to-dos. All passion.
Passion breeds ideation, and exceptionalness; a life well lived; an extraordinary career. And it’s all due to one reason, just one– you accepted no one’s rules. You made your own. And you had the confidence to live by them. The hell with convention. Or even the false positive of the Coney Island State of Mind.
You become the Picasso, the Spielberg, the Newton, the Lennon, the Oprah who turned a Blank Mind into a rainbow.
Can you do it? Or are you a prisoner of someone else’s philosophy? Tell me about it and be honest.
Mark Stevens
CEO
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May 1st, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the link to my post
I bought and read your book “Your Marketing Sucks” a few years ago. Great stuff.
Probably time to read it again!
Cheers,
- Alister
May 2nd, 2007 at 1:13 pm
“There are NO must-dos.”
What a great truth, and yet it’s the hardest one to accept. It’s interesting that this concept was second nature to us as kids. We didn’t wake up with a to-do list a mile long. We started the day with a Blank Canvas State of Mind, which allowed us to take advantage of the serendipitous moments and interesting opportunities that presented themselves.
Funny how we all (well the smart ones, at least) spend our adult lives trying to get back to where we started in the first place.