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The Passionate Speaker
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few."
– Shunryu SuzukiA Newsletter for Speakers By Michael Landrum January 23, 2003 — Number 48 Creativity is Power Back in the mid-1960's a high school student – poor, black, living in the ghetto in Washington DC – had gotten a job as a busboy in a big hotel. In the course of his work each night he noticed all the food scraps that were thrown away. He thought “there’s a waste.” He did some investigating and discovered that there was a market for grease. So he got the other busboys together and offered them two dollars a night if, when they scraped the dishes, they would toss the meat scraps into a separate garbage can that he provided. Soon he was selling fifty pounds of leftover steak fat a day. He went around to the other hotels and made the same deal with those busboys, and by and by he was a major supplier. He had to leave the busboy job. He looked down the line and saw that all this animal fat was being processed into lipstick. I’m sorry if this is news to you. Don’t let it spoil your next kiss. Our young entrepreneur went to the lipstick manufacturer and worked out a deal where he would supply the animal fat and take his payment in the form of tubes of lipstick. He even got to pick the colors. Suddenly, he was in the cosmetics business. He found out what colors the girls in his neighborhood liked, and then he hired them to sell his brand of lipstick. Nobody in the 60's was targeting poor black girls for cosmetics. He had monopoly on his niche market. He wasn’t finished. While he was spending all this time on the loading dock collecting fat, he noticed something else the hotels were throwing away. Soap. All those little personal-sized soap bars that are unwrapped, used once and pitched out. So he went to the maids and offered them a few bucks to put all the discarded soap into another one of his garbage cans. He took the soap to his cosmetics manufacturer and they simply ground it into powder for use in public restrooms. By the time he got out of college, this creative fellow was worth a great deal of money, had a thriving business and was a great role model for others. We live in the information age, “Knowledge is power,” people say. I have to disagree. Knowledge is not power. Power comes to people who have the imagination and skill to put their knowledge to work. “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Einstein said. Imagination plus skill equals creativity, and creativity is power. After the age of information will come the age of creativity. It’s not what you know. It’s what you do with what you know that counts. So, speakers. If you think your audience is coming to hear you just because you know something, think again. Knowledge is way over-rated. Karl Kraus observed that “a great deal of learning can be packed into an empty head.” There’s very little new knowledge in the world anyway, and what there is was published in the newspaper at least a day before you are scheduled to stand up and deliver a speech. So quit depending on what you know. Get creative. Turn your facts into a story. Use words that inspire images in the mind. Write something radical when you’re writing your next speech. Make five mistakes on purpose. Look in your wastebasket – maybe you’ve thrown away something imaginative, something useful. . . something powerful. Something to Ponder "We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action." - Frank Tibolt ©2001-2003 Michael F. Landrum |
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