david hieatt

“How to build a great brand with very little money”.

David Hieatt is co-founder of The Do Lectures. And Co-Founder of Hiut Denim Co. He has built companies with strong brands using some simple rules that anyone can use.

What you will learn?

How to tell your story?

How to give your brand a voice?

How to get people to love your brand?

The importance of 1000 true fans.

How to use the real advantages of being small? 

Is your idea going to change anything?

How to put a moat around your idea?

How to identify a niche before others?

The importance of being first.

How to fund it without losing control?

How to build a great team without employing anyone?

Price - £200

Limited to ten people.

Price includes – Great lunch with the best local ingredients.

Plus teas, coffees and snacks throughout the day etc.

Location: Cardigan, West Wales

Friday: June 22nd. 10am-5pm.

Mark Shayler's Do Day course: How to develop a world beating strategy from your bedroom? This will take place on June 21st. Same location. If you attend both courses, you can purchase both for £350 combined.

Email: Anna.thomas@thedolectures.co.uk

Getting the fit right on a pair of jeans is perhaps the most important

thing a jeans maker can do.

The difference between a great fitting jean and one that is sucky,

can be measured in a matter of millimetres.

That’s why cutting a pair of jeans from the cardboard pattern using a chalk and a single blade-cutting knife is an art.  It is where those millimetres can go missing.

And like all arts, it takes time to acquire.

Our cutter, at The Hiut Denim Co, has cut jeans for 38 years now. So in terms of hours, that is close to 80,000 hours.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote that to be considered a Grand Master at chess, you had to do 10,000 hours.

So I don’t know what that makes our cutter in terms of a title then, but I do know what it means for our customer: A great fitting jean.

www.hiutdenim.co.uk

We have not bought howies back.

We’ve had endless emails, phone calls, text messages, direct messages congratulating us about getting howies back. But we are not part of the management team. Nor have we given any thought about buying it back since we left.

So who has bought it? Well, as much as we can gather from the town gossip, the guy Timberland hired to run howies has bought it with venture capital backing. What that means for its principles like organic cotton, the earth tax and its dream of being the lowest impact clothing company, I guess time will reveal the answers.

As for Clare and myself, we are just about to get our town making jeans again with our new company – The Hiut Denim Company.

I can’t tell you how exciting it is to make something. When you pick up a roll of denim and watch it get turned into a pair of jeans, well, that’s where our hearts are now.

We can’t wait. Not long now.

All the best,

David and Clare.

9am start.

Good morning, I guess you are all here because you want to go and start something. That’s good. Most businesses fail because they never start. So you are going to be ahead of just about 99% of people. 
So let me ask, what is everybody planning to do? If it’s a secret, keep it that way. If you are happy to share it, then that’s cool too. Also which brands inspire you and why. And today, there’s a lot to cover, if there is anything you want to learn in particular, say now.

Today is going to be me going through 12 key points on building a brand with little money.

1, Love.

The easiest way to get your customers to love your brand is for you to love it first.

The biggest mistake you can make in life is to do something just for the money. It is one of the biggest sadnesses of man. People living for the weekend are people who are dead 5 days a week. Because they are doing the thing they don’t love to earn money so they can do the thing they do love on the weekend. They are alive two days a week.

Don’t do it. You can always make more money, you can’t make more time. So here is some advice: Find your love. And make the thing you love doing the thing you do the most. Not just on weekends. But all the time.

Oh, and the good news is if you love doing, you will get good at it. Work will never feel like work. And in the end, all that love will show in your product, your service, your business. 
Love pays well. Not just in a pay cheque but in your health, in your happiness, in your day to day, in your family life.

My old boss was a difficult but wise man. His advice was to chase the work, not the money. The money will come. And he was right……

Plumbers, chefs, electricians all have their trade secrets. Those little tools or techniques that just make it easier for them to do what they do. It’s the things that make them professional and separates them from the amateurs.

The Internet is the same. It has its tools and techniques that help you stand out. I discovered this by accident.

At some point last year, I was trying to figure out why I was having so many visitors to my blog (davidhieatt@typepad.com). It’s a small blog and the traffic is small but regular. But suddenly the traffic was spiking. That one article had been viewed 45,000 times.

And I didn’t know why. So I began to dig.

When I started to look into it, it turned out that 99% of my traffic was coming from Stumble Upon. It was coming from a single piece I had put on my blog that someone had obviously liked and then had put up on Stumble Upon. And from there it just went a little bit crazy.

I knew of Stumble Upon before this. But I didn’t use it. It wasn’t on my radar. But it was dawning on me just how powerful a tool it is.

So I decided to try and find out more about how to use Stumble Upon. I watched a video by Tim Ferris who I believe amongst other things, is a truly great direct marketeer.

I visited his blog and found a video where he tells the audience just how important Stumble Upon was as a tool for getting his great content out there. I know how good Tim is at using the secret tools of the Internet, so that made me ask the question why doesn’t everyone know how good Stumble Upon is? It was like some secret tool for those in the know. Except, and I keep saying it, it’s massive.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Gi3QNdN2w&feature=player_embedded)

Everyone talks about Facebook, Twitter and Google, (and understandably so) but no one talks about Stumble Upon. And yet it is huge. This set of Internet stats put it second to Facebook with a 25% share of traffic. (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_accounts_for_half_social_traffic_stumbleu.php)

So then I asked someone to go and research Stumble Upon and for them to tell me how we could use it for The Do Lectures. (www.thedolectures.com) To get our great content out there to more people and faster.

Then coincidentally at the same time, we got an email from Stumble Upon saying they would like to give The Do Lectures $5000 worth of free advertising.  At first I thought it was spam. But I checked out the email address and it was for real.

Yeehah.

So not only had we just found out how important Stumble Upon was. And how powerful it is. But they wanted to help us. We were going to get $5000 worth of free advertising. That would bring us 100,000 views plus more if it went viral.

So this August, we spent their money. And correspondingly our viewing figures went crazy. It worked so well for us because we could target their interests to our interest so accurately. And, here's the other good thing. It keeps on working.  If people think your content is great they keep telling people they like it. So it keeps on being spread out there for free. So even though we spent the money real quick, it is still working for us now. Like a snowball going down hill. It just keeps getting bigger. And it keeps rolling without us pushing.

We have tried many things at The Do Lectures to get our talks out there to more people. We have tried Facebook but it hardly made any difference to us. We know Google adwords works but they aren’t cheap.

So when we have some money next year to spend on getting people to see our talks, where will be spending our money? Stumble Upon, no doubt.

I would have said that before we were given $5000 to spend on it. But now I have proof. I saw what it did to our traffic. And, importantly, what it keeps doing to our traffic. I know spending money on Stumble Upon is a super smart way to spend our money.

Just to finish up, whenever we get some spike in our figures now, the first question I ask is it Stumble Upon? The answer is often “Yup”.

Stumble Upon may not get talked about that much, but it is one trade secret worth knowing about.

Because it works.

More info:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/audiencetools

A User Manual - Hiut Denim Co.

1, Watch every penny.

We are in the business of building a global denim brand. But behind every strong brand has to be a strong business. In other words, we need to watch the pennies. We need to treat each penny spent like it matters. It will matter in the end. So it’s best to make it matter from the beginning.

If we manage the business well from the start, our destiny will be in our hands. If we manage the business poorly, we will be in the hands of others. My experience tells me it is better to watch the pennies now than watch someone else come in and control your business later.

 2, No debt.

We will raise money for working capital by selling shares in the company. No loan to repay. No bank to answer to. We have to understand the importance of this. If we fritter our money away now, we will not forgive ourselves later.

I know from experience once you get on the back foot, it is hard to recover from.  So let us be guided by this and do everything we can to spend our working capital wisely.

We do not have to take risks with holding too much stock. It is better to pay a surcharge for materials than carry too much stock.

Taking risks is not good for the business or a good nights sleep. And a good nights sleep should never be underestimated.

3, A small number of shareholders.

It will take us 10 years to build a strong business and a global brand. To find long-term thinkers is not easy. They are a scarce commodity these days.  But the truth is, they always have been.

So we want to find those rare, crazy people who understand that it takes time to build something of real value. Those people who understand that there is no substitute for hard work, and that there are no short cuts to building something great. There is no lift up to the top of the mountain.

This investment will require patience. That should be enough to put off most investors.

4, Have two types of shares. But just one type of shareholder.

I learnt my lesson from the last company the importance of keeping control. I want my investors to be rewarded for their risk taking. That is only right. And we will work hard each day to make that happen.

There will be two types of shares: One will be voting. And one will be non-voting. The voting shares will not be offered for sale.

We want shareholders who want to profit from their investment, but don’t want to take control of the company. That’s the type of investor we want. The type who trusts us in the bad years as well as the good years.

5, Put the money in front of the customer.

When I was a young copywriter I was taught a simple rule about making TV commercials: Make sure the money goes in-front of the camera and not behind it. It was a good rule for making sure the customer always came first.

To a greater or lesser extent our future will be determined by how well we manage our costs. The more efficient we are at running our business, the more we can afford to give to our customer in terms of quality.

I like a company that puts customers before themselves.

6, Tell our story. (It’s a great story).

We live in a town full of people who know how to make a great jean. They have spent decades making jeans. They are the Grand Masters, as I call them. And I know they will make a great jean on our behalf.

But I also know a big part of the jeans business is about how you tell your story.  We will have to tell our story as well as we make our jeans.

The good thing is we have a great story to tell: A town that stopped making jeans after 30 years. Then one day started making them again.

7, Monthly reporting.

This time round we will be both the businessman and the creative man. We will control our costs. But we will not control our imagination. We fully understand the importance of maverick, scary, un-tried ideas.

At the same we will know our costs. We will have a dashboard in-front of us that we can trust. We will set our systems up to know where every penny is being spent, what our margin is, how much stock we are holding. Then we can manage the business with a clear understanding of where we are. 

We will start as we mean to go on. All costs known. All costs controlled.

The work we do at the beginning to set these reporting systems up will be worth the pain. Discipline now will pay us back many times later on. If we are in command of the figures, and know what they mean, it will allow us to run a company that will have the freedom to be as creative as it dreams of being.

It will serve us well to run a well-managed company so it doesn’t run us.

8, Do something you love.

I love quality. I love longevity. I love good design. I love ideas. I love this town. But most of all, I love that I can wrap all these things up into a pair of jeans.   

There’s just something about ‘em. I love the way they get better with age, if they are made well. I love how they become yours slowly overtime. I love how each cut, rip or splash of paint tells its own little story. And I love how they have become the uniform for the creative man and woman of the world.

If we can spend our day working on something that we love doing, then that spirit will soon find itself into the product that we make.

9, Have a purpose. It gives you drive. 

I believe great companies change something as well as make something. They have a purpose and it propels them forward.

We want to get this town making jeans again. We will only ever make jeans in our town that overlooks Cardigan Bay.

 This town is our ‘why’ we are in business.

It’s good to know that. And it’s good for everyone else to know that too.

10, Have ideas. They change things.

The great thing about ideas is they change things. They create new ways of doing business. They turn small companies into big companies, and the lack of ideas turns big companies back into small ones.

The important thing with ideas is to recognise which are the good ones and which are the great ones. You have to be a good filter. Say no often. The things you don’t do will define you just as much as the things that you say yes to.

Great ideas need be executed insanely well. Lots of great ideas die with poor execution.

The best way to be a guardian of great ideas is to work with great people. Simple, really. Let them bring them to life. The design of it, the feel of it, hey, even the smell of it all matter. Yes, executing well is as important as the idea itself.

And lastly, don’t talk about your idea. Don’t tell your mum. Keep your ideas secrets. Then launch it on the world. Keep the element of surprise. 

11, Do one thing well.

We make jeans. We will only ever make jeans. We will focus our minds on making jeans. It will keep us plenty busy.

So no bobble caps. No sweatshirts. No mugs. No perfumes. No distractions from the main thing. The main thing will be the only thing.

12, Judge the business over the long-term. The early years are never easy.

It takes time to build a business. The first couple of years are inevitably tricky. The basic systems and the infrastructure all have to be built up from scratch, the customer will have to be found, and the product refined. It is a time when the business is both time and cash hungry.

But we should not be quick to judge the business. It should be given time to grow slowly. Patience is what will be needed. Hard work takes time to show the fruits of all that labour.

We should view a young business as we would a young child. It needs love, time and a set of rules to adhere to. It will make mistakes, it will fall and it will need the parents to be there for it as it grows and becomes its own person. We should not make too many demands on it when it is young, let the child play for a while.

It will grow up before we know it.

14, Lets not underestimate the importance of lady luck.

Luck matters. You can have a great product, a great team, and an idea how to change things, and still fail. All businesses need luck.

The best way to get luck on our side is to work hard at what we love doing, and have ideas that haven’t been done before. And be honest with people, keep our word, and sometimes do things for people without expecting anything in return.

The other aspect to luck is its close cousin called talent. To have a feel for what the customer wants, to imagine something that doesn’t exist, to come up with something that captures a zeitgeist, well, that has little to do with luck. 

These two things are often confused with each other. But both are vital to success.

15, Stay independent. Stay in control. (See point 1, 2).

 It is important to be in control of your own destiny. William Blake said it best ‘you need to create your own system or be enslaved by another man’s’.

The reason our independence is important for us is that it allows us shape the business by what we feel is right, it can grow at a pace that the company feels comfortable with, it can make decisions for the long term, it can do things that make no sense to the bottom line at the time, but may well do in the future.

This may mean that our company will not be the biggest, but it should ensure the company stays true, creative and loved.  And, importantly, that it will keep making jeans in this town when there will always be cheaper places to make them.

 I will settle for being great at this thing over being big at this thing. 

16, We won’t pay a dividend. We will keep re-investing.

Our investors are going to be asked to invest in a start-up company. Start-ups are not without risk. Indeed, most fail. That said, we have confidence in ourselves to build a global brand and a strong business that goes with that. 

The key to these two things is to work with great people. And make a great product. They both go hand in hand.

At the same time, keep investing back into the business. The compound interest of investing back into the business will overtime be far greater than giving dividends to shareholders.

This requires long-term thinkers and those who have an unshakeable belief in what we are doing. They tend to go hand in hand too.

17, Make us all proud of the company we own.

We measure things mostly in numbers. But there are other important ways to measure how well a business is doing. These are things like ‘Are we proud of it?’, ‘Is it loved?, Is it insanely creative?

But these are just as important as ‘Are we growing?’ ‘Are the margins good?’ ‘Are the customers happy?’

If we build something we are incredibly proud of, that is loved, that is insanely creative, you can be sure that it will also be a great business too.

18, Work with great people. Go home early.

We are going to run a creative company. The good thing is we know how to work with creative people. If we work with great people, they will challenge us. They will push us. They will frighten us. But ultimately it will be a much easier life than working with average, mediocre, or middle of the road.

When we find great people, we will do the following: trust them, give them room that their talent deserves, and let them fly like they have never flown before.

19, Make it fun. Make it easy.

The wrong stress is not good for a business. Or, for the people running it.

But you can minimize the wrong stress by planning for less sales than you hope for and for keeping your costs lower than the business requires. And you can put in systems so that the business is easy to run. Systems that work almost without thinking.

Then we can get on with the serious stuff of making the business as creative and as fun as we possibly can. The ideas that will come out of that culture will make us stand out. They will increase sales. Help us get known. And define us.

In time, that will produce good stress of how on earth are we going to get all these orders out of the door. And how do we come up with another idea as good as the last one. That is good stress.

20, We are our audience.

We won’t second guess our customer. We are a small part of that creative community. And have been for over two decades.

So when we say ‘we will make jeans for the creatives of the world’. We are also saying we will make jeans for people like us.

For me, I feel the most comfortable when I am around creative people. I enjoy spending time with them. I trust these people the most. I am inspired by their ideas, by what they make, and what drives them forward. They write the music -They make the films -They start the companies. I love how their ideas change this world.

And I would love to make their jeans for them.

21, We all work for the silent shareholder.

We live on a planet with limited resources, but an almost unlimited appetite for consuming more and more things. Our best answer as a company should be to make things that last.

We want to make legacy products using superior quality materials and craftsmanship. Longevity, of course, doesn’t just come from the materials used but also from timeless understated design and great fit.

Things are thrown away not because they have stopped working but because we have stopped loving them. Great design is more important for the environment than lots of people give credit for.

We should run our business knowing that there is a silent shareholder called planet earth. And we have to keep that shareholder happy too.

22, Meet up once a year and talk about stuff.

Once a year we will invite all our shareholders down here. Meeting up will give us a sense of community than I am yet to feel from a spreadsheet. 

We can share ideas, challenge what we are doing, talk about the business. But equally to talk about family, to talk about sport, or whatever is grabbing our attention.  To eat some good food, drink some wine, and just to enjoy each other’s company as well as the company we all own.

These meetings may not feel like business but they will help shape the company.

23, Don’t be average.

Be great at what you do. Life is short.

Email: info@hiut.co.uk

This is a ‘Do’ Day Course I will be doing in September.

David Hieatt is Co-founder of The Do Lectures. And founder of Hiut Denim Co. He has built companies with strong brands using some simple rules that anyone can use.

What you will learn?

How to tell your story?

How to give your brand a voice?

How to get people to love your brand?

The importance of 1000 true fans.

The real advantages of being small.

Is your idea going to change anything?

How to put a moat around your idea?

How to identify a niche before others?

The importance of being first.

How to fund it without losing control?

How to build a great team without employing anyone?

Sept 9^th – 9am -5am

Price - £200

Limited to ten people.

Price includes – Great lunch with the best local ingredients. Wine.

Plus teas, coffees and snacks throughout the day etc.

Location: Cardigan, West Wales.

Good Morning, My Name is David Hieatt. I want to talk to you about Love, Luck, Story and the importance of Zeitgeist. And lastly about keeping secrets. And how I have relied on all these things to start my new company: The Hiut Denim Company.

Love

To start off, I want to speak about Love.

Right now, you can count the number of brands making jeans in the UK on one hand.

And come September, you will be able to count the number of brands making its own jeans in its own factory in the UK on one finger.

And that one finger, well, that will be us.

The Hiut Denim Company will be the only denim company making its own brand of jean in its own factory in the UK.

Making in our hometown. Cardigan, West Wales.

Why jeans?

I love them.

I love the way they get better with age, if they are made well. They are one of the few pieces of clothing that can say this.

I love how they record events. This hole is when I was cutting with a knife towards me, and the knife kept going. Folks, always cut away from you.

This dark bit of denim is where the jeans patch used to be of my old company. I removed it when I realised I had sold it to the wrong people.

So yes, jeans record your journey. Your good days. And your bad. This ability to record events interests me greatly.

I love the fact that jeans mould to your shape after a while. They stop being a mass produced, and they start being ‘yours’. And there is a point where they become your ‘favourite’ jeans. They go beyond just utility and head slowly towards love.

And when in the future they eventually come to the end of their days, saying goodbye to them is oddly emotional. Maybe it’s because they have become ‘yours’, and there are memories that go with them.

And I love how they have become the uniform for the creative man and woman of the world.

For me, the creative’s of world are the people I feel most comfortable being around. I enjoy spending my time with. I trust these people the most.

I am inspired by their ideas, by what they make, and what drives them forward. They write the music -They make the films -They start the companies. I love how their ideas change this world.

And I would love to make a great jean for these inspirational people.

And it’s always good to do something you love.

Luck.

And now I want to talk about luck.

After I left my last company, I sulked for a year, or more.

I had sold my company to the wrong people. It wasn’t bad luck. It was bad judgment. My disappointment was not so much for me, but it was a realisation that the company would never achieve the dreams I had for it.

I couldn’t blame anyone but me. I knew if I had run the company better, we wouldn’t have had to sell to anyone.

Whereas success teaches you very little, fortunately pain is a great teacher. And what I will say to all those creative’s running their companies right now: Be the creative but be the businessman too. That way you will stay in control of your dream.

Look at Steve Jobs, look at how the pain of leaving his own company taught him the importance of being the creative and the businessman. Those difficult lessons were not lost on him. Pain taught him well.

After leaving my last company, I spent 3 months writing a plan for a jeans company. My investors were keen for me to go again. But I was less keen to run around the same track twice. So I put the plan on a shelf. I didn’t look at it for over a year.

Then I was speaking to Gideon, who used to design jeans for me, and he wanted to know why I wasn’t doing the denim plan. I told him I was still looking for the ‘Why’ of it.  I knew I could but not ‘Why’ I simply had to. To understand the purpose is to understand what drives you. And that’s important.

Then he said, “Isn’t it just to get the town making jeans again?” And that was it. The why: To get the town making jeans again.

It’s all about the Town

My joke about Cardigan is it’s a bit like Hollywood in one way. In Hollywood, it’s hard to find a waiter who isn’t going to be an actor or actress, a director, scriptwriter etc. In Cardigan, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t know how to make a jean. The driving instructor who used to train all the machinists. The guy on the way to Aberporth with the hamburger stall who used to cut jeans. The pub landlord who was a Grade ‘A’ machinist. Our town is full of stories like that.

Of all the towns in the UK, Cardigan probably knows more about making jeans than any other. It made jeans for 3-4 decades. It made 35,000 pairs of jeans each week for a very long time. It was Britain’s biggest jeans factory. It employed 400 people out of a town of 4,000 people.

This had nothing to do with talent or judgment, but everything to do with luck. I didn’t know about it when I moved here. But the thing about luck is to take advantage of it.

Having all these amazingly skilled people in my town who just happen to know how to make a great jean is pure luck. Malcolm Gladwell talks about having to do 10,000 hours to become a grandmaster in chess. In our town, we have people who have spent 20,000 hours, 30,000 hours, and in some cases, 40,000 hours making jeans. This town is full of grandmasters of making a jean.

My aim, which I know is naive, is to give all 400 of them their job back.

And to get this town making jeans once more. That is my ‘why’.

Zeitgeist

I now want to talk about the importance of timing.

When I go running up the Preseli Hills, when the wind is blowing in my face, it’s the opposite of a zeitgeist. The conditions are against me. When the wind is behind me, I fly. The zeitgeist is with me.

And as with running, business is much easier when the zeitgeist is with you.

Now, lets go back 3 years ago and talk about the banking crisis. Something happened in that moment, and no one has really articulated it. It was a profound moment for Britain. A jolt. People felt vulnerable. They knew the country no longer made as much as it used to, and we didn’t grow as much as we should do. And both of those things unsettled everyone.

The service industry will always be important, but we have learnt the hard way that it can’t always be relied upon. So I think an odd consequence of the banking crisis, is it will get Britain making more things again. And importantly, customers will want them. They will seek them out. They will pay a little more for them. They don’t like feeling vulnerable.

Another odd consequence of a recession is that people are more discerning. They may buy less, but they are buying better. Quality is a winner in tough times. Products that are made well and made to last are sought after.

And lastly, the other thing that has happened is that the cheap places to make things have become less cheap. The difference between making over there and making over here has become less. The economics have gotten better for making in Britain.

All these things add up to mean that the zeitgeist is with us.

Which is good because we are going to need all the help we can get.

Story.

We are going up against some amazing competitors: Nudie, Raleigh, Diesel, Ralph Lauren and, of course, Levis.  They all do their thing well. Very well. If we are going to win, we will have to be insanely good at what we do.

We have to make a great jean, for sure. And we are fortunate enough to have a town full of grandmasters to help us do that. But we will also have to tell a great story too. The good news is we have a great story – Our town is going to make jeans again.

I will give you one example of the power of story. We are doing a 150-page yearbook to tell the world we are here.

We are going to sell our jeans to the creative’s of this world, so our yearbook will have to be an inspirational piece. To do that we will have to work with the very best. We know who they are. We know how to get to them. But our budget is way too small to entice them.

So we simply told them the story about our town, and how it’s going to make jeans again. And that our dream is to get 400 great people making jeans again. We told them how big our mission is, and not how small our budget is.

It worked. Some of the most creative people on the planet are now helping us.

Secret

The Hiut Denim Company is run by creative people for creative people.

We can’t own the past. And we are not here to follow.

We are here to have ideas and change the future

This September, we will launch.

With an idea.

I know you would like me to tell you what it is today. But I can’t.

It’s important to keep the element of surprise.

Secrets are more powerful when kept.

I hope you understand.

Thank you for your time.

When a football games goes to penalties, something interesting happens.

There are those who step forward to take a penalty. And then there are those who’d do anything on earth not to take one.

Are the most talented the most likely to take one? Not always. The pressure of taking a penalty often means all that talent suddenly evaporating to nothing in front of your eyes. And more importantly, in front of goal.

Are the bravest the best penalty takers? The problem here is 'brave' really means 'passionate'. And passion can take a terrible penalty. Or a great one. It really is either hit or miss.

The best penalty taker is the one with nothing on his mind other than taking a penalty. They don’t think about the importance of the kick, about the crowd, about what it will mean to lose. Their heart maybe racing, but their mind is clear.

They block stuff out. They don’t/can’t/won’t imagine what missing could mean.They are the entrepreneurs of a football team. They accept the risk, but don’t dwell on it.

They just kick the darn ball.

A farmer knows that a field has to be left to fallow from time to time. They know the law of diminishing returns. They know it helps fertility and stops disease from taking hold. It is a lesson they have had to learn the hard way. And once learnt, it isn’t forgotten.

We can learn a lot from a simple field. We tend to think we can input-output, input-output, input-output like a machine. And the truth is we do far more outputting than we do inputting. If we carry that on, just like a field, we will end up giving less and less back each year.

That’s why it’s good to have a break from your blog, leave twitter be for a while, switch the mobile phone off. Go and sharpen the saw.

See new stuff. Different stuff. Crazy stuff. Have a break from your norm.

You are far more like a field than you are a machine.

Go fallow.