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What’s your zone?

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Kevin Sandlin

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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.

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