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“With an apple I will astonish Paris.”

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Paul Cezanne

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Well. I saw this quote in a book last night and immediately wrote it on a piece of paper.

i'd rather be an appleCould you ever imagine a business person suggesting something like this? … suggesting surprising the world with one of the most ordinary common things in Life?

Everyone would think you were fucking crazy.

Everyone would start shouting …

“We need something new!!”

“We need to be unique!!”

Well. Let’s face it. Most new things suck.

Most new ideas are just bad. And most new shit just stinks.

All that said ……

“With an apple I will astonish the world.”

I wish more businesses would think this way. Within the ordinary always resides a small mundane thing which is incredibly easy to view as mundane, as common, as useless, or even pedantic.

Yet each ‘ordinary thing’ also has the capacity, if we are open to it, to usher us into an experience of something extraordinary, usher us into some new way of looking at the ordinary, usher us into some new way of experiencing the ordinary.

Even the ordinary contains infinite possibilities <if we would only seek it there>.

Within finite often resides the infinite.

Within each of us ordinary people resides something extraordinary.

I mention that last point about us ordinary everyday schmucks <people> because we need to remind ourselves something experts have been trying to tell us for quite some time … “ no one is born a genius … genius takes time and opportunity to develop.”

David Shenk <The Genius in All of Us: New Insights into Genetics, Talent, and IQ> described genius as a process, not something someone has or is borne with, but rather something that someone does.

We all have some genius within us.

We all have the ability to take something ordinary and surprise the world with something extraordinary.

This belief, this understanding of self, far too often is trampled in the rush to get things done and the search for ‘something new.’

As we rush up & down the hallways of our businesses we tend to overlook the opportunities in the ordinary.

As we rush up & down the hallways of our businesses we tend to overlook opportunities, and potential, found in the seemingly ordinary people.

<sigh>

Surprise the world with an apple.

What an awesome thought. What an awesome thing to actually do in business. What do I mean?

I can guarantee 2 things if you surprise the world with an apple:

business success: its called optimal newness. If you take something ordinary and make it newly extraordinary to people it offers them something familiar and something extraordinarily new. people love that.

personal success: I don’t know if its monetary success, but i do know there is little more satisfying than walking into a business, taking something ordinary that 99% of people have overlooked or dismissed, and bringing it to Life in a way no one had really thought of doing so before.

Anyway. Go ahead. Grab the apple. Someone in business should.

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Written by Bruce