No Locks No Gates

locks and a gate The most powerful changes of my last few years came from one realization: there are no locks, no gates. In doing all that I’ve accomplished, it’s come from the repeated situation of doing something I wanted to try, making lots of mistakes, fixing the mistakes, and suddenly being at the core of something really useful. I started blogging in 1998 when it was called journaling. I started PodCamp with Christopher S. Penn because we wanted a different kind of event where we explored the disruption of new media. I started New Marketing Labs because I wanted to create a different kind of new marketing agency.

I never once asked for permission. I never once worried that someone else had done it or that someone had done it differently. Most times, it never dawned on me to think about those things.

No one told Richard Branson he couldn’t reinvent air travel, or space travel, or record stores, or dozens of other business categories. No one ever told Jeff Pulver he couldn’t rethink how we communicate via voice. And when people do choose to tell you that something can’t be done, or that you’ll never succeed, don’t listen. Everything worth doing seems impossible. To other people. To you? It’s what comes next.

Rethink everything. Do it all the time. Tom Peters taught me that (with Re-Imagine!).

If you don’t reimagine, if you don’t reinvent, if you don’t start something because you know it’ll work, where will you be? When will you do it?

There are no locks, no gates. Now what?

Photo credit, Darwin Bell

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  1. Keys to the Gates of Social Media
  2. Should Every Outward Facing Employee Have a Web Presence

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  • http://wildaboutlife.org brigid

    Yep,

    I agree, there are no restrictions (within reason of course), the only locks and gates we put on are our own.

  • http://www.MarketersMojo.com/ Angela Wills

    I think it's amazing how we can create our own locks and gates by our limiting beliefs that we have. For the longest time I believed that I couldn't get my websites past 100 visitors a day. It just seemed that all my sites stalled there. The reason? I think because I believed it and then when they got to that point my attention went elsewhere.

    Now I know better though :)

  • BorisReady

    Chris,
    You are totally right, there are not locks.
    The world is open to the ideas that have not been tried yet.
    However, I think that there are gates, gates that you move a little bit and they will move the streams. There are powerful forces moving the world and when we align ourselves with our ultimate purpose, those gates channel this powerful force and amazing things happen.

  • michaelthimmesch

    Hello Chris,

    I like the analogy of the locks and gates a lot. A former boss had a similar analogy on his desk, a jar with a grasshopper sculpture in it. When I asked him what it was about, he told me the story of the grasshopper that is in a jar with the lid on it. After jumping and hitting the lid many times, the grasshopper learns not to jump to high and hit the lid. At that point, you can remove the lid, and the grasshopper won't jump out. He had that jar and sculpture on his desk to remind him we had just “lost” our former, very restrictive VP above him, and that he could start jumping higher again.

  • http://Under30CEO.com Jared O'Toole

    could not agree more. 1 thing I hear from people all the time is how worried they are that someone else has already done something similar to their idea. who cares! If you believe it what your doing thats what matters. Go out and have fun. Those are the important things. Worrying about what everyone else is doing is a waste of time.

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  • http://twitter.com/kylechowning Kyle Chowning

    I think you could write about this every day.
    such.
    a.
    good.
    reminder.

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