Forbes
by Michael Ellsberg
22 Jul 11
What is the number one piece of advice parents give young people for being successful later in life? “Go to college!”
So—though I don’t know for certain—my guess is that the parents of a young man named Guy [Laliberté] were not all that thrilled when he informed them that his career and educational plans after his high school graduation consisted of hitchhiking around Europe, playing the accordion for tips, hanging around jugglers and stilt-walkers, and learning the art of fire-breathing. All with zero plans for college.
Had you been walking through London’s Hyde Park one particular night in 1978, you might have noticed a young man sleeping on a bench. That was Guy. He was eighteen, and had just graduated high school in his native Quebec. He had flown to London to spend the summer wandering as a street performer. With very little money in his pocket, he decided to save cash and spend his first night in Europe on a park bench.
Guy spent that summer around Europe, busking on the streets for tips and studying with some of the best fire-breathers, stilt-walkers, and jugglers in the world….a few years after returning to Quebec [in 1982], Guy [started a new circus troupe]…..
That troupe, which featured no animals and instead focused on acrobats, dancers, jugglers, stiltwalkers, clowns, mimes, and musicians, was called Cirque du Soleil.
Cirque toured Canada in 1985, but nearly went bankrupt….Over the last twenty-four years since that Los Angeles opening, Cirque du Soleil has been seen by close to 100 million people in over 250 cities around the world. Laliberté has been a fixture on the Forbes list of the World’s Billionaires, recently coming in at #459 in the magazine’s 2011 list of the world’s 1,210 richest individuals, with a reported net worth of $2.5 billion.
Laliberté ignored all the conventions, pieties, and “rules” of his industry and of conventional wisdom on how to get ahead in his career. (How could you not, with a last name that means literally “the freedom”?)
What can we learn from him? Of course, we’re not all going to become billionaires or millionaires by becoming “rule breakers” and “renegades” and “living free” (or by any strategy whatsoever, for that matter—only a small percentage of people ever reach that level of financial success.)
But if you’re starting to feel as though you’re spending too much time jumping through hoops in your career, marking off checkboxes on someone else’s plan, punching time on a clock owned by someone else, and you’d like to begin walking your own path in life (perhaps breathing fire while on stilts—at least metaphorically) then a few key points about Laliberté’s story are instructive
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Here’s the basic idea. Most businesses operate in what the authors call “red oceans” A red ocean market is a clearly-defined industry or niche with many established competitors. The competitors try to grab a greater slice of a fixed-size market share, competing on price, quality, and branding or other established industry metrics and benchmarks, to provide a pre-defined product or service, to a market that already knows what’s it’s looking for. Picture a bunch of hungry sharks fighting each other over a few limited and declining scraps of meat—that’s a red ocean market. Sound fun?
Part of Laliberté’s power, the authors contend, stems from his ability to create what they call a *blue ocean market. The heart of a blue ocean strategy is to stop focusing on *beating the competition—as in a red ocean—and instead focus on “making the competition irrelevant,” sidestepping all the fierce bloodshed of the red oceans and swimming instead in clear, blue waters with minimal competition.
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[The educational system is training people for compliance. Yet, traditional industries are being downsized. So, even compliance won’t get you anywhere anymore.
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What’s the answer?
Stop competing for the same damn credential everyone else is competing for. Stop competing for the same damn jobs everyone else is competing for. Create your own damn credential. And create your own damn job. Make like Guy Laliberté and create a blue ocean in your education and your career, free of competition.
….it’s called entrepreneurialism. The art of creating profitable employment—for yourself, and for other people. It’s a venerable American tradition, around for hundreds of years….
It’s very simple. Instead of jumping through the same hoops everyone else is suiting up from a young age to jumping through…you need to develop a strong—violently strong—distaste for jumping through hoops.
Every time you see a hoop that society wants you to jump through, you should imagine that really you are being asked to jump through the hoop into a big pile of stinking dogshit. Which is, more or less, the case—metaphorically speaking.
If you want to survive and thrive in today’s hyper-changing, entrepreneurial economy, that’s the kind of visceral gag reflex you need to develop anytime someone tells you about a hoop you supposedly need to jump through in order to be successful. More likely, the process of narrowing yourself to fit through the hoop just like everyone is doing, in today’s economy, will lead you to ruin.
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Here’s the success strategy you’ve been waiting for. It’s called “gatejumping.” Chris Brogan and Julien Smith coin the term in their excellent book Trust Agents. They define gatejumping as “find[ing] a better way to do things when nobody else is looking.”
Basically, it involves finding out who the official “gatekeepers” are in whatever field you’d like to make a difference in—the people who check formal credentials at the gate to enter the palace—and simply declining to ask for their permission to enter whatever palace they’re guarding. Find a back entrance. Go in through the service entrance. Or simply go build your own palace in new and greener fields, ignoring the old (and usually crumbling) palaces of bygone eras.
Find out what holes need to be punched, which forms need to be stamped, to achieve the success you want in life, and then simply ignore the hole-punchers and approval-stampers. Tell ‘em to f-off, if you like, or (within the bounds of the law) just politely decline to be punched and stamped by them. Put your thinking cap on, and creatively find a way to achieve the success you want, without the grace of the gatekeepers’ permission. You’re not a robot, are you? You can think creatively, can’t you?
Brogan and Smith write: “No matter what industry you’re in, there are very strict protocols in place. If you are an aspiring young journalist, there is a ladder you must climb to get published in a respectable newspaper. . . . If you are a rock band, you spend years shopping your demo discs around to various people, play for years in small clubs trying to catch some attention, and eventually get a record deal where most of the money is made by the record company.”
And yet, they point out, protocols were made to be broken. For every protocol you can think of, there’s someone whose achieved success, made great cultural advances (and often a lot of money) by breaking it…..
Chris Brogan told me:
“The notion of gatejumping is that you can do something on your own without the mainstream. Why wait for the New York Times to pick you up when you can launch your own online newspaper, write as if you’re the journalist you’ve always wanted to be? You can then see whether you’re still wanting into the Times, or whether you’re happier just running your own project. The premise is, there are many other ways to accomplish your goals and desires than waiting in line to be discovered, even in corporate roles.”
I just spent two years interviewing and learning some of the world’s master gatejumpers, for my book The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think, and It’s Not Too Late. Specifically, I spent two years interviewing and learning from some of the world’s most successful people who don’t have college degrees.
They all made their mark on the world starting as outsiders and underdogs. They usually made their mark by subverting whatever social, political, or artistic norms, unspoken, arbitrary rules, and limiting beliefs prevailed around them. Pretty much everything they accomplished, people were saying “it can’t be done.” They ignored the people who said “you can’t do it.” And, of course, they all made their mark by educating themselves in the real world—none of these people went into the world with a formal credential or a college degree….
The key to success, beyond the traditional professions, is to realize that most social arrangements are simply games with rules. And a lot of these rules are arbitrary, and unstated. (One of the greatest arbitrary rules in our society is that you need a formal credential to be successful.) If you are creative, willing to take some risks, pick yourself up after some failures, and keep trying new approaches until you succeed, you can usually make your own game in life—a wide open blue ocean—with your own rules.
What arbitrary rules are you following, which are keeping you in a bloody red ocean of competition? What arbitrary rules could you start breaking, which would allow you to sidestep the competition, walk on stilts, breathe fire, and still become successful?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaele...g-billionaire/
