Shiny Chrome

Are you the type of person who looks at a blank piece of paper and sees a million possibilities? Stories to be written? Artwork to be created? Emotions to be expressed?

Google Chrome is betting that heavy users of the internet have a creative spark waiting to break loose and ignite the world. Their ‘Savage Love’ video campaign plays to that innate desire to be a creator.

The first time you see the video, you might wonder what the association is between Google Chrome and Dan Savage’s “It gets better” campaign. As far as I can tell, there is no actual association. Google Chrome piggybacks on the warm and fuzzy feelings generated by an on-line campaign encouraging gay teens not to commit suicide. The message is: you’re not alone, there are thousands of us who know what you’re going through and… it gets better!

Google Chrome is ultimately inviting other people who have a message and a mission to use the tools in Chrome to share it with the world.

In this commercial, as you watch the page views grow, you can’t help but get swept up in the experiential excitement… How long will it be until my campaign gets viral support from Anne Hathaway and Woody from Toy Story?

Google Chrome got it right. They started with a simple idea, demonstrated the end results and made a solid emotional connection. In a way, Google walks away with more emotion than they’ve really earned. It’s somewhat like a company that makes hammers sharing credit for the accolades heaped on the your new home.

They make this advertising stuff look so easy, you have to wonder why everybody doesn’t do it just as well.

Searching for gold

Hello, my name is ‘Daryl the Magnanimous’. I was considering ‘Daryl the Magnificent’ but my mind-reading skills still need work so… I’m kind of a work in progress, and um… whatever.

Where was I?  Oh yeah. We’ve never met, right? If we have met, just play along. Even though I don’t know you at all, I am seeing that recently… or many years ago… or somewhere in between… you attended a seminar!

Please… hold your applause.

You were really looking forward to this seminar but when it was over, tragically, you walked away with nothing. You were deluged with information, scribbled a bunch of notes but ended up remembering nothing.

Although it may be possible, it’s very unlikely that a seminar would contain absolutely nothing that you could use and benefit from in the future.

My personal goal in seminars, meetings or even chance encounters with people I respect, is to walk away with one nugget. That’s it. If I can leave with one idea that I can incorporate into my life, the engagement was worthwhile.

Twenty years ago I took a time management course. It was part hocus-pocus and part ‘heard it before’. I was almost fully checked out when the instructor dropped the nugget. “After you finish a task, ask yourself – what is the most important job I need to do next?”

The premise was - if you finish a task at 11:30 and you know you’re leaving for lunch in 20 minutes, you might do a few “C” jobs on your to-do list because you can get them done in a matter of minutes. That means you leave the important “A” job untouched. The instructor said – start the “A” job. In 20 minutes, you might only have time to lay it out and start thinking about it, but you are thinking about it. Over lunch, you might have an epiphany, or someone might say something that triggers an idea, and when you come back from lunch you’ve already organized your plan of attack. Your “A” job is well on its way to being completed because you decided to do it first.

Twenty years later, I still ask myself several times a day, “what is the most important job I need to do next?”

You never know when you’re going to find a nugget. My good friend C.R. Nichols was interviewing a man who was celebrating his 100^th birthday. At one point in the interview, C.R. asked him how his life had changed as he got older and he shared this simple thought.

“The days are long, but the years are short.”

Keep your mind open to finding the nugget.  You might miss that brief flash of gold in the pan if you’re not looking for it.