Earlier this week my oldest son passed a major milestone in his life: He was finally allowed to watch “The Matrix”. (Great movie, too bad they never made a sequel…J) Not 24 hours later I read a great post on Copyblogger about what today’s businesses could learn from the Matrix.
What are the odds? It was obvious fate was jumping up and down and screaming that this post had to be written.
The Copyblogger post is well worth reading, and you can check it out here, but the whole philosophy of both the post and the movie it was created from can be summed up in one sentence: In order to think outside the box, we must first accept that there is no box.
They didn't just look cool. They were also the savviest marketers in town.
It’s Not Real…Yet
Imagine that you were alive two centuries ago, and someone told you that today we’d be flying through the air in giant metal birds and talking to people thousands of miles away on tiny little devices that link by going into space? You’d have thought they were crazy. Things like that can’t happen in the real world.
But both of these things are very real, and very much taken for granted by today’s society. We call them airplanes and cell phones. The point is, nothing is “real” until you make it that way. So by restricting your mind to think in terms of what is real today, you’re missing your chance to create what’s going to be real tomorrow.
Just ask Steve Jobs. He’ll tell you all about it.
The Only Box You Think Inside is the One You Build Yourself
Didn’t you ever want to be bad? Just once? Here’s my challenge to you this year; take the time to kick everyone else’s rules to the curb. Deny their reality. Live in your own.
Sooner or later creativity, drive and a blatant refusal to be trapped by someone else’s way of thinking will pay off. Your reality will become their reality. And you’ll get to kiss that box goodbye.