No Locks No Gates

September 21, 2009 ·

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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?