You’re a little restaurateur.
You live and breathe restaurants.
If you were on Mastermind, your chosen specialist subject would be ‘restaurants’.
You wake up every morning thinking of those twinkling candles on the tables ten minutes before service.
That superb ingredient and how you’re going to turn it into that thrilling dish.
That amazing new wallpaper you’re about to decorate the loos with.
The problem is, your guests aren’t restaurateurs.
They’re other things.
They have proper normal jobs like lawyers and bankers and plumbers and teachers and respectable things like that.
To have their lives regularly punctuated by their favourite companies is welcome, but permitted.
That’s why you need to be Not Boring.
There’s nothing worse than being caught with a load of ‘experts’ all talking at length about their specialist subject.
It’s like being trapped at a coffee convention.
I like coffee, I appreciate the small artisan thing, but that’s about as far as it goes.
Start talking about immersion drips and cupping spoons and my eyes are glazing over.
Many small companies make the mistake of believing their customers are as boringly passionate and obsessive as they are about their product.
More often then not, they just like it.
Yvon Chouinard is the founder of the outdoors equipment company Patagonia.
He built a company from scratch, selling the most technically advanced, specialised climbing equipment known to man.
There could not have been a more specialist market.
In his book ‘Let my people go surfing’ He who talks about being an ‘80 percenter’:
“I've always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession that doesn't appeal to me. Once I reach 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product like - and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.” (1)
Here Yvon Chouinard directly affiliates his anti-obsessiveness with the creativity and success of his products.
This quote has stayed with me more than most.
Go beyond 80 percent and you become an obsessive.
Most obsessives when positioned outside of their small circle of other obsessives, are by no fault of their own, a bit boring.
I try my best to take this into whatever content I produce.
Sure, talk passionately about what you’re doing, but as soon as it gets too technical, too intricate, too geeky, talk about something completely different.
Perhaps something that has nothing to do with restaurants.
Go beyond eighty percent and you become boring.
Be Not Boring.
(1) Quote from Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, Penguin Books; Rev Upd edition (29 Sept. 2016)
