2006 - jam packed

The sales message? It doesn’t survive all those cuts.
Your mind will be chopped up with all those cuts and, if
someone asks you what you just watched you’ll sit there
numb and mutter,
“I don’t know really. I think it was something about a
car?

I’d like to see a car commercial where the only image you
saw was that of a new car. It would stay on screen for
the full 10 seconds and there would be a voiceover from a
celebrity spokesperson that said, “This is the new
Sharpmobile. It’s really a great car. You should buy
one.” And this commercial would give maybe a full 6
seconds of relief from the continuing blitz.

6 seconds! Wow! A
whole 6 seconds of calm.

Come to think of it,
you know what I didn’t write so far when I described that
blitz of commercials? I didn’t write about the sound
tracks that accompany all of those commercials. It’s
extremely loud, harsh and grating, violent drums, staccato
rythmns, screeching horns, explosions. Yes, your ears
have to be tormented along with your visual cortex.

Now let’s talk about
the average Americans’ jam-packed life. He gets up, turns
the radio on so he can hear it while he showers. After
the shower, he fires up his trusty I-Pod, puts on a pair
of headphones and listens to hip-hop or some kind of heavy
metal music. Then, it’s off to his computer to check his
e-mails. While the computer plays music through it’s
little speakers, then he gets in his car and turns the key
to start the car and immediately the car radio is
blaring. He arrives at work, turns off the car and turns
on the I-Pod so there will be no dead air as he walks
across the parking lot from his car to his office. He
walks in the office and is immediately given a list of
phone calls that are waiting for him. As he walks a short
distance to his desk, he can hear seven different radios
with seven different stations. And then he sits down
and... never mind. You can guess what the rest of his day
will be like.

Where I live, there
are the sounds of twenty-four hour a day construction work
as they endeavor to surround my building with other new
buildings. The cacophony never stops. I was reminded of
all of this as I listened to the CD recordings of my Root
Canal Seminar in Los Angeles. Most of the seminar was
taken up by people asking me questions. They literally
sucked me dry. I am not sure I know anything about
marketing that I didn’t reveal at that seminar. And I
revealed a lot of information and inside secrets that I
didn’t know I knew. It was only through the act of
teaching to a lot of information starved attendees that I
was able to dredge up secrets and techniques I had
forgotten. It was jam-packing in reverse. Now it was me
who bombarded the attendees with information, marketing
secrets, sophisticated techniques of marketing I had long
forgotten. There is a moral here. A lesson. And that
lesson is if you really want to learn something, you need
to teach it. It is the act of teaching that allows your
knowledge of a subject to fully blossom. Your knowledge
of a subject will become better organized and you will
discover you know a lot more than you thought you knew.
So that’s the lesson of this newsletter. If you want to
more fully understand something, teach what you already
know to one or more people, I can sum up this lesson in
three words...