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This podcast is brought to you by Label Sessions, the global platform that connects you to the
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best advice from the most interesting people.
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In this exclusive series, entrepreneur and creative leader Andy Nielman takes us through
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his views on creativity, curiosity and guts.
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To find out more about Andy, listen to the Q&A listed in the show notes.
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To find out more about Label Sessions, visit labelsessions.com.
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Welcome back to CCNG, the podcast that tests your knowledge and sometimes your patience,
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I suppose.
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Our first question today is worth five points.
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Can you figure out what these seemingly diverse 17 materials have in common?
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Listen carefully.
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Glass, hard rubber, aluminum foil, parchment, pitch, leather, chamois, cloth, silk, a five
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dollar bill, ivory, birch bark, a pig's bladder, mica, I don't even know what that is, rawhide,
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gelatin and fish guts.
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Hmm, I'll give you a few seconds to ponder.
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Okay if you got this one, frankly, you deserve 10 points, maybe even 20.
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The answer?
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Starting in 1877, these 17 materials, albeit not in this exact order, these 17 materials
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were used by Thomas Edison in an attempt to convert sound waves into electric impulses
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in a series of laborious experiments to come up with a better telephone transmitter.
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Edison was famous for saying, negative results are just what I want.
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They're as valuable to me as positive results.
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But 17 swings and misses?
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Yikes!
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Be careful what you wish for, Thomas Alva.
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Edison's vantage point is not an easy one.
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Au contraire, it's quite a queasy one.
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And it takes a special person just to deal with this negative vantage point, let alone
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masochistically welcome it.
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Yeah, I just said masochistically.
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Because that's how I define resilience, not just being impervious to the pain that business
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brings, but looking forward to dealing with it.
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Luckily, resilient people don't have to be born that way.
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They can be made.
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And here's how you can be one of them.
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First off, resilient people make use of a trio of defensive weapons, which I like to
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call the Shields of Dreams.
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They are extra thick rhino skin to deflect stones, arrows, bullets, and anything else
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the world throws at you.
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Earplugs to distractors to block out the brayers and the naysayers.
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And blinders to distractions to maintain a laser beam focus.
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Using these three Shields of Dreams simultaneously enables resilient people to pay attention to
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what's really important, namely the battle ahead.
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Because resilient people realize that no matter what, there will be a battle.
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Make no mistake, there's always a battle, especially when you're trying to institute
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change or create something new.
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Whether it's the competition, the status quo, the rules, societal norms, nothing but
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nothing ever changes or is created without some sort of knockdown drag out battle.
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Even if you're working in a harmonious tandem with other people and or teams, you will always
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be battling someone to get your point, your idea, or your decision across.
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Heed the words then of the great philosopher Bugs Bunny, who used to say this when SmackDown,
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and not just any war, because resilient people realize what they're up against is usually
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lopsided and not tilted in their favor.
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A battle indeed, and mostly uphill.
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Now let me explain with yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yet another pertinent story.
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In 1999, I co-founded a company called Airborne Entertainment with my friend Garner Bornstein.
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Airborne was a true trailblazer in the nascent mobile media space.
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At the time, back in 1999, not only were cell phone screens the size of large postage stamps,
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they were monochrome green with black dots assembled to construct the most basic of words
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and images.
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Despite these limitations, we told anyone who would listen, and many who wouldn't listen,
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we told them that one day people will watch television on these things.
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The response, when not ridicule, was outright derision.
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I still remember one meeting in 2001.
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We were looking for financing and the VC sitting in front of us pulled out a bar chart from
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the Yankee group that was a powerful market researcher and consultant of the era.
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The chart he pulled out was titled, Willingness to Pay for Mobile Data.
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It said that about 10% of North Americans were willing to pay about $5 a month for mobile
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data, about 8% said they would pay between $5 and $10, about 4% said between $11 and
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$20, and perhaps half a percent would pay $20 a month.
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The largest answer by a gaping wide margin was 67% of people who said they'd be willing
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to pay absolutely nothing.
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That's $0 per month.
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So after throwing this in our face, the VC kind of sneered.
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Why would we invest in a business that close to 70% of people are willing to pay nothing
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for?
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Well, we left that meeting kind of crushed, but still wouldn't let ourselves be terminally
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deterred by the VC or his report.
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We concluded that the VC was an asshole and the report was wrong.
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I mean, it was either that or fold up the tent, which we weren't gonna do.
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Four years later, though, the Yankee group was sold for $30 million.
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One year after that, we sold Airborne Entertainment for over $100 million.
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That's more than three times the value of those damn Yankees.
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We still don't know what ever happened to that VC who pulled out the report.
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And finally, don't you wish you only had to pay $20 a month for your mobile data plan
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these days?
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Moral of this story?
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Despite Airborne's win, it was ultimately not about success or failure.
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It was about being resilient enough to stay in the game whatever came our way.
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But enough sweet revenge nostalgia.
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Let's backtrack a bit to CCNG Podcast episode number five, where we discovered the myth of
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change, namely, everybody loves change as long as someone else does it first.
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Despite that, things must change and someone somewhere will eventually take the necessary
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first step to change things.
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And no matter what they do, part of the change process is the possibility of failure and
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the ensuing criticism.
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And as in the Airborne story, what ultimately separates the winners from the losers is not
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the winning or the losing.
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It's how they deal with the times, with the people, and with the inevitability of things
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not going exactly as planned.
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As someone well well versed in this game, Mark Zuckerberg has said,
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Optimists tend to be successful, and pessimists tend to be right.
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If you think something's going to be terrible and it's going to fail, then you're going
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to look for the data points that prove you right, and you'll find them.
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That's what pessimists do.
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But if you think something is possible, then you're going to find a way to make it work.
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And Sarah Blakely is someone who found a way to make it work.
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She created and launched the unique shaping underwear called Spanx back in 2001.
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A self-made billionaire, Sarah is the poster child for optimism and business masochism.
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As she explains,
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The two biggest fears humans fear of failure and fear of being embarrassed, and they're
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connected.
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The more that we work to free ourselves up from caring so much about what other people
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think, the freer we'll be from both.
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I intentionally try to embarrass myself.
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I really don't want it to own me.
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If I make embarrassing myself the goal, then it just flips the whole thing on its head.
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Even when it's flipped on its head, the concept of what other people think is still tough
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as nails.
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Worse yet, is that it manifests itself in a piercing bell chime called rejection.
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If this bell rings in your ears to the point of madness, you're toast.
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But if you use it as a wake-up call, you may be like the five following reformed rejects.
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Reject number one, Stephen King.
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King's first book, Carrie, was rejected by a whopping 30 publishers.
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When it was finally acquired, his advance was a measly $2,500.
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Now total sales of all Stephen King books today, over 400 million copies.
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Reject number two, Dr. Sillst.
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The beloved children's author's first book, entitled And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry
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Street, was also rejected by 30 publishers.
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I wonder what it is with these 30 guys.
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Anyway, total sales of all Dr. Seuss books today, over 600 million.
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Reject number three, J.K.
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Rowling.
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Let's put all the recent gender politics about J.K. aside and focus on her first book,
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
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It was rejected by only 12 publishers.
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Obviously, publishers were getting smarter later on.
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Her advance, when it was acquired by publisher number 13, $2,200.
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Total sales of all Harry Potter books today, over 500 million.
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But enough authors.
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Reject number four is inventor James Dyson.
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Well, actually, this is a quote from a review from his book, Invention, A Life, so I guess
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he can qualify here as an author, but I digress.
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It took Mr. Dyson four years and precisely 5,127 prototypes to develop his bagless dual
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cyclone vacuum cleaner.
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He points out that his perseverance, abetted by subsequent and continuing failures in the
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form of rebuffs from the likes of banks, venture capitalists, government agencies, manufacturers,
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distributors and retailers, was rewarded with ultimate success.
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The idea of accepting and even enjoying failure, but going on, is a theme carried throughout
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Mr. Dyson's book.
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And finally, Reject number five, Steve Jobs.
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Or more specifically, if you can believe it, the iPhone.
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Yeah, before it became one of the best-selling products of all time, these were some of the
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early comments and reviews of the iPhone.
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In England, the Guardian newspaper said, there is a low demand for a converged all-in-one
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device.
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't
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have a keyboard.
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Well, what did you expect him to say?
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We'll give the last word to Bloomberg Businessweek, who called the iPhone, nothing more than a
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luxury bubble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks.
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Released in 2008, Apple sold its one billionth iPhone way back in 2016, and it's still the
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core of Apple's amazing worldwide business.
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So rejection, as you see in all its forms, is just part of the process.
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And because it's a process, the reason for rejection changes over time.
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Back to Steve Jobs, some of the initial problems the iPhone faced was not because of the phone
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itself, but because of the lack of infrastructure strong enough to support such a transformational
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product.
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In an article in the Globe and Mail newspaper, columnist Gus Carlson put it succinctly, the
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telecommunications infrastructure back then simply did not have the bandwidth for everyone
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to have a mini computer in their pockets.
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Who else faced that problem?
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Well, there was Henry Ford, whose initial launch of the Model T stalled because of the
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lack of proper roadways to drive them on.
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And despite the popularity of the Tesla, Elon Musk and his electric car manufacturing brethren
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still have to deal with an electricity infrastructure that's not optimized for an exponential increase
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in plug-in vehicles.
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So facing rejection is a phenomenon that's not static, but progressive.
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It moves with you and often has more to do with the state of the world around you than
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anything that you've done.
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So how do you deal with it?
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Well, first of all, if the world is against you, you got to make it your enemy.
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Like that sappy old Helen Reddy song, it's You and Me Against the World.
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In fact, establishing an enemy status works no matter who your detractors are, be they
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micro or macro.
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In fact, establishing an enemy status works no matter who your detractors are, be they
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macro or micro.
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One of my favorite examples of this is Andrea Ili's reaction to Starbucks first opening
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up in Italy.
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Ili, the president of the iconic Italian coffee company that bears his family name, was asked
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if the arrival of Starbucks would change Italy's coffee culture.
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His response?
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With all due respect, it hasn't led to any significant changes in the coffee culture.
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Maybe for some young people these have become gathering places.
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Some tourists might like to go there.
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Yikes, that's cold.
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Yep, as Bugs Bunny said, this means war.
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Another way to deal with rejection is to meet it with disbelief.
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No matter what the setback, put yourself in an incredulous mindset.
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Surely the solution is just around the corner.
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Surely the judge, the critic, or the evidence is wrong.
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To counter book reviewer criticism of her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, libertarian author
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Ayn Randers self-shrugged, I did think I'd get more intelligent smears.
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Never mind the critics randist society itself by saying, the whole state of culture suddenly
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appears much worse than I had ever imagined.
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So flip a coin.
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Heads, you're right.
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Tails, they're wrong.
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But to end this podcast in the poetic, profound manner this subject deserves, we leave the
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last words to columnist Gus Carlson once again.
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Too often the purveyors of conventional wisdom focus on and gripe about the wrong things,
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and in the process, jeopardize the success of ideas that can change the world.
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Innovators have always been at the mercy of mere mortals and the earthbound hurdles they
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fear aren't conquerable.
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Mic drop!
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Before I go, if you dug what you heard, or if you hated it, let me know at label sessions
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on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn.
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And and and although I know I shouldn't, I will read every comment and promise to respond
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to those without spelling, grammar punctuation, or other such nagging errors.
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So until next episode, see C&G ya later.
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This podcast is brought to you by Label Sessions, the global platform that connects you to the
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best advice from the most interesting people.
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Around the world, we work with brands to connect their people to true leaders, just like the
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people you hear on this podcast.
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For live sessions of advice, mentorship, or sometimes to collaborate on ideas.
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To find out more, visit labelsessions.com and book in for a demo with our team.
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:06,240
This podcast is brought to you by Label Sessions, the global platform that connects you to the
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00:00:06,240 --> 00:00:08,840
best advice from the most interesting people.
3
00:00:08,840 --> 00:00:12,600
In this exclusive series, entrepreneur and creative leader Andy Nielman takes us through
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00:00:12,600 --> 00:00:16,380
his views on creativity, curiosity and guts.
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To find out more about Andy, listen to the Q&A listed in the show notes.
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To find out more about Label Sessions, visit labelsessions.com.
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Welcome back to CCNG, the podcast that tests your knowledge and sometimes your patience,
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I suppose.
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Our first question today is worth five points.
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Can you figure out what these seemingly diverse 17 materials have in common?
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Listen carefully.
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Glass, hard rubber, aluminum foil, parchment, pitch, leather, chamois, cloth, silk, a five
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dollar bill, ivory, birch bark, a pig's bladder, mica, I don't even know what that is, rawhide,
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gelatin and fish guts.
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Hmm, I'll give you a few seconds to ponder.
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Okay if you got this one, frankly, you deserve 10 points, maybe even 20.
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The answer?
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Starting in 1877, these 17 materials, albeit not in this exact order, these 17 materials
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were used by Thomas Edison in an attempt to convert sound waves into electric impulses
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in a series of laborious experiments to come up with a better telephone transmitter.
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Edison was famous for saying, negative results are just what I want.
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They're as valuable to me as positive results.
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But 17 swings and misses?
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Yikes!
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Be careful what you wish for, Thomas Alva.
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Edison's vantage point is not an easy one.
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Au contraire, it's quite a queasy one.
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And it takes a special person just to deal with this negative vantage point, let alone
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masochistically welcome it.
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Yeah, I just said masochistically.
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Because that's how I define resilience, not just being impervious to the pain that business
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brings, but looking forward to dealing with it.
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Luckily, resilient people don't have to be born that way.
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They can be made.
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And here's how you can be one of them.
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First off, resilient people make use of a trio of defensive weapons, which I like to
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call the Shields of Dreams.
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They are extra thick rhino skin to deflect stones, arrows, bullets, and anything else
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the world throws at you.
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Earplugs to distractors to block out the brayers and the naysayers.
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And blinders to distractions to maintain a laser beam focus.
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Using these three Shields of Dreams simultaneously enables resilient people to pay attention to
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what's really important, namely the battle ahead.
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Because resilient people realize that no matter what, there will be a battle.
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Make no mistake, there's always a battle, especially when you're trying to institute
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change or create something new.
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Whether it's the competition, the status quo, the rules, societal norms, nothing but
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nothing ever changes or is created without some sort of knockdown drag out battle.
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Even if you're working in a harmonious tandem with other people and or teams, you will always
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be battling someone to get your point, your idea, or your decision across.
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Heed the words then of the great philosopher Bugs Bunny, who used to say this when SmackDown,
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and not just any war, because resilient people realize what they're up against is usually
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lopsided and not tilted in their favor.
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A battle indeed, and mostly uphill.
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Now let me explain with yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yet another pertinent story.
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In 1999, I co-founded a company called Airborne Entertainment with my friend Garner Bornstein.
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Airborne was a true trailblazer in the nascent mobile media space.
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At the time, back in 1999, not only were cell phone screens the size of large postage stamps,
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they were monochrome green with black dots assembled to construct the most basic of words
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and images.
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Despite these limitations, we told anyone who would listen, and many who wouldn't listen,
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we told them that one day people will watch television on these things.
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The response, when not ridicule, was outright derision.
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I still remember one meeting in 2001.
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We were looking for financing and the VC sitting in front of us pulled out a bar chart from
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the Yankee group that was a powerful market researcher and consultant of the era.
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The chart he pulled out was titled, Willingness to Pay for Mobile Data.
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It said that about 10% of North Americans were willing to pay about $5 a month for mobile
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data, about 8% said they would pay between $5 and $10, about 4% said between $11 and
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$20, and perhaps half a percent would pay $20 a month.
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The largest answer by a gaping wide margin was 67% of people who said they'd be willing
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to pay absolutely nothing.
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That's $0 per month.
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So after throwing this in our face, the VC kind of sneered.
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Why would we invest in a business that close to 70% of people are willing to pay nothing
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for?
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Well, we left that meeting kind of crushed, but still wouldn't let ourselves be terminally
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deterred by the VC or his report.
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We concluded that the VC was an asshole and the report was wrong.
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I mean, it was either that or fold up the tent, which we weren't gonna do.
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Four years later, though, the Yankee group was sold for $30 million.
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One year after that, we sold Airborne Entertainment for over $100 million.
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That's more than three times the value of those damn Yankees.
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We still don't know what ever happened to that VC who pulled out the report.
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And finally, don't you wish you only had to pay $20 a month for your mobile data plan
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these days?
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Moral of this story?
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Despite Airborne's win, it was ultimately not about success or failure.
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It was about being resilient enough to stay in the game whatever came our way.
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But enough sweet revenge nostalgia.
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Let's backtrack a bit to CCNG Podcast episode number five, where we discovered the myth of
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change, namely, everybody loves change as long as someone else does it first.
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Despite that, things must change and someone somewhere will eventually take the necessary
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first step to change things.
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And no matter what they do, part of the change process is the possibility of failure and
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the ensuing criticism.
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And as in the Airborne story, what ultimately separates the winners from the losers is not
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the winning or the losing.
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It's how they deal with the times, with the people, and with the inevitability of things
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not going exactly as planned.
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As someone well well versed in this game, Mark Zuckerberg has said,
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Optimists tend to be successful, and pessimists tend to be right.
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If you think something's going to be terrible and it's going to fail, then you're going
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to look for the data points that prove you right, and you'll find them.
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That's what pessimists do.
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But if you think something is possible, then you're going to find a way to make it work.
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And Sarah Blakely is someone who found a way to make it work.
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She created and launched the unique shaping underwear called Spanx back in 2001.
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A self-made billionaire, Sarah is the poster child for optimism and business masochism.
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As she explains,
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The two biggest fears humans fear of failure and fear of being embarrassed, and they're
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connected.
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The more that we work to free ourselves up from caring so much about what other people
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think, the freer we'll be from both.
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I intentionally try to embarrass myself.
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I really don't want it to own me.
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If I make embarrassing myself the goal, then it just flips the whole thing on its head.
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Even when it's flipped on its head, the concept of what other people think is still tough
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as nails.
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Worse yet, is that it manifests itself in a piercing bell chime called rejection.
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If this bell rings in your ears to the point of madness, you're toast.
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But if you use it as a wake-up call, you may be like the five following reformed rejects.
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Reject number one, Stephen King.
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King's first book, Carrie, was rejected by a whopping 30 publishers.
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When it was finally acquired, his advance was a measly $2,500.
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Now total sales of all Stephen King books today, over 400 million copies.
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Reject number two, Dr. Sillst.
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The beloved children's author's first book, entitled And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry
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Street, was also rejected by 30 publishers.
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I wonder what it is with these 30 guys.
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Anyway, total sales of all Dr. Seuss books today, over 600 million.
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Reject number three, J.K.
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Rowling.
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Let's put all the recent gender politics about J.K. aside and focus on her first book,
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
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It was rejected by only 12 publishers.
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Obviously, publishers were getting smarter later on.
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Her advance, when it was acquired by publisher number 13, $2,200.
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Total sales of all Harry Potter books today, over 500 million.
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But enough authors.
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Reject number four is inventor James Dyson.
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Well, actually, this is a quote from a review from his book, Invention, A Life, so I guess
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he can qualify here as an author, but I digress.
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It took Mr. Dyson four years and precisely 5,127 prototypes to develop his bagless dual
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cyclone vacuum cleaner.
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He points out that his perseverance, abetted by subsequent and continuing failures in the
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form of rebuffs from the likes of banks, venture capitalists, government agencies, manufacturers,
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distributors and retailers, was rewarded with ultimate success.
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The idea of accepting and even enjoying failure, but going on, is a theme carried throughout
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Mr. Dyson's book.
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And finally, Reject number five, Steve Jobs.
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Or more specifically, if you can believe it, the iPhone.
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Yeah, before it became one of the best-selling products of all time, these were some of the
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early comments and reviews of the iPhone.
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In England, the Guardian newspaper said, there is a low demand for a converged all-in-one
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device.
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't
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have a keyboard.
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Well, what did you expect him to say?
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We'll give the last word to Bloomberg Businessweek, who called the iPhone, nothing more than a
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luxury bubble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks.
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Released in 2008, Apple sold its one billionth iPhone way back in 2016, and it's still the
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core of Apple's amazing worldwide business.
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So rejection, as you see in all its forms, is just part of the process.
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And because it's a process, the reason for rejection changes over time.
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Back to Steve Jobs, some of the initial problems the iPhone faced was not because of the phone
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itself, but because of the lack of infrastructure strong enough to support such a transformational
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product.
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In an article in the Globe and Mail newspaper, columnist Gus Carlson put it succinctly, the
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telecommunications infrastructure back then simply did not have the bandwidth for everyone
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to have a mini computer in their pockets.
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Who else faced that problem?
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Well, there was Henry Ford, whose initial launch of the Model T stalled because of the
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lack of proper roadways to drive them on.
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And despite the popularity of the Tesla, Elon Musk and his electric car manufacturing brethren
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still have to deal with an electricity infrastructure that's not optimized for an exponential increase
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in plug-in vehicles.
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So facing rejection is a phenomenon that's not static, but progressive.
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It moves with you and often has more to do with the state of the world around you than
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anything that you've done.
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So how do you deal with it?
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Well, first of all, if the world is against you, you got to make it your enemy.
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Like that sappy old Helen Reddy song, it's You and Me Against the World.
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In fact, establishing an enemy status works no matter who your detractors are, be they
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micro or macro.
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In fact, establishing an enemy status works no matter who your detractors are, be they
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macro or micro.
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One of my favorite examples of this is Andrea Ili's reaction to Starbucks first opening
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up in Italy.
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Ili, the president of the iconic Italian coffee company that bears his family name, was asked
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if the arrival of Starbucks would change Italy's coffee culture.
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His response?
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With all due respect, it hasn't led to any significant changes in the coffee culture.
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Maybe for some young people these have become gathering places.
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Some tourists might like to go there.
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Yikes, that's cold.
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Yep, as Bugs Bunny said, this means war.
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Another way to deal with rejection is to meet it with disbelief.
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No matter what the setback, put yourself in an incredulous mindset.
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Surely the solution is just around the corner.
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Surely the judge, the critic, or the evidence is wrong.
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To counter book reviewer criticism of her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, libertarian author
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Ayn Randers self-shrugged, I did think I'd get more intelligent smears.
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Never mind the critics randist society itself by saying, the whole state of culture suddenly
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appears much worse than I had ever imagined.
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So flip a coin.
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Heads, you're right.
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Tails, they're wrong.
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But to end this podcast in the poetic, profound manner this subject deserves, we leave the
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last words to columnist Gus Carlson once again.
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Too often the purveyors of conventional wisdom focus on and gripe about the wrong things,
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and in the process, jeopardize the success of ideas that can change the world.
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Innovators have always been at the mercy of mere mortals and the earthbound hurdles they
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fear aren't conquerable.
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Mic drop!
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Before I go, if you dug what you heard, or if you hated it, let me know at label sessions
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on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn.
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And and and although I know I shouldn't, I will read every comment and promise to respond
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to those without spelling, grammar punctuation, or other such nagging errors.
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So until next episode, see C&G ya later.
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This podcast is brought to you by Label Sessions, the global platform that connects you to the
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