Get High at Work!

What’s your zone?

Written by

Kevin Sandlin

in

Yup, another Michael Jordan post. Way back in 1992, the Bulls played the TrailBlazers in the NBA Finals. In game 1 of the series, Jordan decided to start shooting three-pointers. He hit six threes in the first half, and ended up scoring 35 points just in the first half. After he hit number 6, he was running back down the court, and looked over at the scoring table to the announcers and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “beats me!” Jordan was not known at all for being a 3-point shooter, so the Blazers had no answer for this brand new threat from the player that nobody could guard anyway.

After the NBA Finals were over (Bulls won), Jordan was asked in an interview why he was not regarded as a great three-point shooter. His reply was epic: “I’ve never shot the three before.” In other words, Jordan wasn’t known to be great at it because he hadn’t yet tried it.

In that same interview, Jordan said he was “in the zone.” He said the basket looked like a swimming pool and he just couldn’t miss and he knew it. I can recall a half dozen times or so when I was playing competitive soccer when I was in the zone. I couldn’t see anything around me. No distractions. Like I was wearing blinders, and yet I couldn’t miss.

Have you ever been in the zone? You’d know if you had. Well, that’s a really long intro to a meeting I had today. Thanks for sticking with me here. :-)

I met with an experienced entrepreneur today to talk about his business. The business is very much product centered at the moment, and they have several add-on products that they are planning to launch very soon. That’s what he was very excited about as he described the great experiences their customers are having using their product. As he talked about his products what they have built and are building, he was in his zone.

Throughout the discussion, we talked again and again about how they’d like to engage in content marketing, but they didn’t know where to start, and their entire team is made up of engineers. Creating code for them is child’s play, but blogging and creating a content strategy? Nah. They could do it, if they were horse-whipped daily, but they would never get near “the zone.”

But when he’d ask me questions and get me talking about content and strategy and telling your story…that’s when he looked at me and said, “You’re really excited about this stuff.” I didn’t even realize it. That’s a great feeling: loving what you’re doing and being able to evangelize about it without even knowing you’re doing it.

What’s your zone? What are you really excited about? That’s what you should be doing. Go do it.

Comments

Leave a comment

More from Kevin

  • DGM4 Starts Tuesday at General Assembly

    If by now you have not made your way down to spend some time at General Assembly at Ponce City Market, you’re pretty much doing it wrong. GA is a great global brand in the digital training space, and they’ve built up a first class operation in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. Tomorrow night at 6:30pm,…

  • Content + Images = Dope

    Good content is nothing without good images. It’s like PB&J. Or a bagel and schmear. Or popcorn and butter. My love affair with food aside, content and high-quality complementary photos and graphics are the perfect match. The Lowdown There’s a reason you can’t have content without an image. It’s the world we live in now:…

  • My process for creating blog content

    When you create blog content for a living, you can’t wake up each day and say, “ok, how we gonna do this today?” You have to have a process. Just like the process that we teach in Pitch Practice every week, it’s a construct that you start with and then adjust to your own style,…

  • 3 Reasons Why Every Digital Marketer Should Learn to Code

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly blog in Digital Marketing, Work Life. The definition of “marketing” hasn’t changed in 100 years or more. However, the methods, tactics, and tools of marketing have changed rapidly in the last 10 years. Today, if you want to lay claim to the title “digital marketer,” you’d be…

  • 7 Upcoming Speaking Events at SuperNova South and General Assembly

    Summer is almost over, the kids’ school starts next week, and the fall schedule is about to kick into high gear. I’ll be teaching, leading, and otherwise getting up in front of people on several occasions for various reasons on a plethora of different topics in the coming weeks. Here’s the list of upcoming events.…

  • The 3 Ingredients for Outstanding SEO

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. Since Google took over ownership of the search functionality on the internet, the term “SEO” (search engine optimization) has been top of mind for any serious website owner. If you cannot be found easily when someone searches for your product or service on Google,…

  • Three great questions about social media strategies

    Last night I led a full house class called “Advanced Social Media Strategies” at General Assembly. This class is fun to teach, and we had a very large group with tons of great feedback, questions, and anecdotes to share. There were three questions in particular that we spent some extra time on. Should “going viral”…

  • Content Marketing Takes a Turn for the Worse

    When content marketing was first hailed as an initiative for brands to reach customers, marketers and consumers alike couldn’t get enough of it. But in the past couple of years, content marketing has turned down a dark path. We’re now producing gobs of articles and podcasts and social posts that mostly repeat each other. They…

  • Digital Marketing Terms & Metrics

      We kicked off a new class last night at General Assembly called “Digital Marketing Key Terms & Metrics.” We had a great turnout, and I tried a non-traditional delivery of this class. I didn’t use a slide deck. #FREEDOM! Instead, we started off with a little brain-freeing inspiration from this fantastic video. No, instead,…