Gabor George Burt

Overstepping self-imposed limitations

What if you could overstep self-imposed limitations and discover what you are really capable of achieving? Well, this is the very topic of my book, Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine. Your Life. You can get a quick taste via my recent interview with Blue Steps, the career management service of the Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC) representing more than 300 leading executive search firms in more than 75 countries.

BlueSteps: Hi Gabor, thank you for taking the time to share with BlueSteps some ideas from your book, Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine. Your Life. Referencing a video on the Slingshot website, let's start with a really fun question: What can today's leading executives learn from Lady Gaga?

Gabor George Burt: A great question to kick off with. Lady Gaga personifies the type of innovative thinking that executives should embrace. She rocketed to fame and success not by being the best singer in a traditional sense, nor by inventing a new form of music. Rather, she overstepped industry boundaries to fuse together music, fashion, and art, creating a new type of entertainment that captured the imagination of a broad audience.  This perspective of re-packaging existing components in new combinations is the exciting shortcut to meaningful innovation. It is the common theme among many of the world’s top innovators, from Apple (blending technology with art), Cirque du Soleil (circus with theatre, ballet and opera), to Starbucks (centuries-old café culture with a quick-service model), and NetJets (airplane ownership with airline business travel).

You can continue reading my entire interview with our friends at BlueSteps here.

In Company of Visionary Friends: Tony Hsieh

This series brings to you the most thought-provoking excerpts from my chat sessions with visionary personalities, as recorded for the Slingshot Living radio show. The conversations reveal valuable wisdom, playful anecdotes and useful advice on how to continuously overstep perceived boundaries for success in your business and your personal life.  

Our first segment is an excerpt from my chat with with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos and bestselling author of Delivering Happiness.

Q: Equally as important as delivering happiness is receiving happiness. And a point I make in my book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life is that people’s ability to stay happy or satisfied is, in a way, fleeting. In other words people need to be continually infatuated or replenished otherwise they start to feel entitled and not happy per se. How do you continuously replenish this sense of happiness in your organization, or how do you enable this to be done with customers? 

A: That actually makes perfect sense especially in regard to the first aspect of my [Delivering Happiness] framework—which is perceived progress. Progress is never over and to feel like you are continuing to progress there needs to be ongoing change or evolution. And then going back to pleasure, passion and purpose what the research has shown is that when you go after just the pleasure—which is actually one of the three  shortest lasting type of happiness—what they [researchers] found is that it’s great if you can sustain it, but it’s very hard to sustain on an ongoing basis. And as soon as the stimuli that is giving you that high is taken away your happiness levels drop back down to where they were before. The second aspect which I call passion—also referred to as F-L-O-W—is about those moments in time when you are so engaged in an activity that time just flies—three hours pass and it feels like it’s only been twenty minutes. For some people that might be when they or running, or for others when they are painting. And the strategy is to notice when it happens—because it happens to all of us—and then think about how you can change your environment, your friends, who you hang out with, where you work, where you live—to have those moments of FLOW occur more frequently. The research has shown that this [FLOW] is actually the second longest lasting type of happiness. 

I invite you to listen to the entire chat with Tony, and my co-host, Jesse Dylan here.

That elusive, perfectly satisfied customer

There is no such thing as a perfectly and continuously satisfied consumer. Go ahead, test this on yourself. Think of your absolute favorite product that you have purchased or your very favorite service that you have experienced. Now ask yourself: Is your favorite product or favorite service experience absolutely perfect just the way it is, or could it somehow be better? 

Could you not think of any new attributes that would make your favorite things even more perfect for you? Of course you can. There are boundless possibilities for further improvement, that create new layers of comfort, personalization, convenience, style, fun, harmony, security, simplicity, variety, and so forth to what you already have.

You may pose a possible objection here. There is in fact something that you consider perfect just the way it is. But what you are actually feeling is infatuation, not satisfaction. How can infatuation become a powerful tool in your business or your personal life?  Check back next week as I continue to explore this topic, or you can read more about it in my book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.

What will your neighbors think?

What if you could reclaim your childhood creativity and sense of limitless possibilities to overstep perceived limitations for continuous business and personal success? We previously shared an example of a concept that embodies that very notion: the flying car. And if all continues according to plan, flying cars will no longer belong to the realm of sci-fi movies and comic books, but will be touching down at a garage near you. Which raises the question: what will the neighbors think?

An update on this fun story via Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

The impetus behind this futuristic product is a 2004 FAA rule change—the Sport Pilot/Light Sport Aircraft Rule—that allowed a streamlined process for pilot certification and a modification in light-plane build standards. Foreseeing that this revision might usher in a new wave of simpler air travel, Dietrich and four grad school classmates (private pilots all) decided to explore bringing a new product to market. They would aim at overcoming the biggest obstacles to entering the world of private aviation: fear and difficulty of traveling in inclement weather, high costs of ownership, and lengthy travel times to and from the nation’s network of regional airports.

[Image via Bloomberg BusinessWeek.]

 

Do you see that elephant being swallowed by a snake?

In The Little Prince, French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry created one of those rare stories and literary characters that hold a timeless appeal and deep meaning for children and adults alike. The story is told through a narrator and depicts his encounter in the Sahara Desert with a diminutive visitor from another planet. In the beginning of the story the narrator recounts his first drawing at the age of six—that of an elephant having been swallowed whole by a boa constrictor. The drawing showed just the contours of an overstretched snake with the elephant inside, and therefore grown-ups were never frightened by the picture, which they mistook for that of a hat. He then created a second drawing, this time of a transparent snake to make his meaning clear for adults.

Every time after that, whenever he encountered new grown-ups, he would test them by showing the first drawing. The grown-ups would invariably think it was a picture of a hat. Thus the narrator sadly realized that he could only talk with grown-ups about boring, pragmatic, superficial topics like politics and neckties rather than things that fueled his imagination. But when he unexpectedly meets the Little Prince in the middle of the desert and presents his first drawing, the extraterrestrial visitor immediately recognizes it as an elephant that’s been swallowed by a boa constrictor.

Saint-Exupéry is clearly talking about the same void, the same disconnect between the creativity of childhood and the rigidity of adult thinking that I am targeting. But unlike in his story, my contention is that you don’t have to be from another planet to bridge this void. You just need the right stimulus and framework—namely, the Slingshot Framework.

For more inspiring stories like this check out my book, Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.