Just a fast note to alert all of our loyal readers that Erin and I have something new to celebrate. February will officially be Cynical about Love Month. This declaration does not make us bitter about our current states of affairs, nor does it mean that we take anything away from those of you out there who are all sorts of in love. We salute you for keeping the dream alive! But, Erin and I, we have some doubts…
Check back soon for upcoming thoughts on this month!
You know how sometimes you find a kindred spirit in the most random place? I had an experience today that confirmed that I found one of mine. I was meeting today with a friend who I had met several years ago and, years later, fate brought us back together. Although we are from different walks of life, we sound a lot a like. We talk at the same fast pace, changing topics every 30 seconds, and both love a good piece of gossip.
As if this is not enough of a sign of why we are great friends, he brought out of his bag the same Far Side Mating Rituals 2006 Desk Calendar that I have. In this day and age of all things technological, I was amazed that we, not only both still have calendars, but had the exact same taste in a humorous calendar! It was a little thing, but it amused us for some time.
I guess some days its just the little things that let you know that you have wonderful kindred spirits in your life. Thanks for a great afternoon!
And even with all that history, I still have to ask:
Was the Pet Rock a good idea?
By different criteria, would it have received funding from a bank or a loan from the Small Business Administration? Imagine how many Pet Rocks we’ve already passed up in this life…
Quoted from www.virtualpet.com….
“Gary Dahl, as California advertising man, was having drinks with his buddies one night in April 1975 when the conversation turned to pets. As a lark, Mr. Dahl informed his friends that he considered dogs, cats, birds, and fish all a pain in the neck. They made a mess; they misbehaved; they cost too much money. He, on the other hand, had a pet rock, and it was an ideal pet - easy and cheap, and it had a great personality. His buddies started to riff with the off-the-wall idea nd pretty soon they were al tossing around the notion of a pet rock and all the things it was good for.
Dahl spent the next two weeks writing the Pet Rock Training Manual - a step-by-step guide to having a happy relationship with your geological pet, including instructions for how to make it roll over and play dead and how to house train it. “Place it on some old newspapers. The rock will never know what the paper is for and will require no further instruction.’ To Accompany the book, Dahl decided to actually create a Pet Rock. He went to a builder’s supply store in San Jose and found the most expensive rock in the place - a Rosarita Beach Stone, which was a uniform size, rounded gray pebble that sold for a penny. He packed the stone in excelsior in a gift box shaped like a pet carrying case, accompanied by the instruction book.
The Pet Rock was introduced at the August gift show in San Francisco (the gift market is much easier to break into than the cutthroat toy market), then in New York. Neiman-Marcus ordered five hundred. Gary Dahl sent out homemade news releases of himself accompanied by a picture that showed him surrounded by boxes of his Pet Rocks. Newsweek did a half-page story about the nutty notion, and by the end of October Gary Dahl was shipping ten thousand Pet Rocks every Day. He appeared on “The Tonight Show,” twice. By Christmas when, two and a half tons of rocks had been sold, three-fourths of all the daily newspapers in America had run Pet Rock stories, often including Gary Dahl’s tongue-in-cheek revelations about how each rock was individually tested for obedience at Rosarita Beach in Baja, Mexico, before being selected and boxed. A million rocks sold for $3.95 apiece in just a few months, and Gary Dahl - who decided from the beginning to make at least one dollar from every rock - had become an instant millionaire.”
An esoteric subject…
I was sitting in my Entrepreneur class recently and we were discussing start-up businesses and where the ideas come from. We looked at creating habits to note where societal trends emerge. We also talked about broadening our scope by reading different periodicals and looking for stimuli outside of our normal interests. All this said, I still have to wonder- Where do the good ideas come from? And who’s to say it’s a good idea when you’ve got one?
Anytime I announce that I have a great idea, my father is quick to tell me that I should wait for someone else to tell me it was good. And my question back to him is “why?” What makes someone else more qualified than me to decide whether the idea is a good one. This is still one of those areas that has evaded metrics. There is no ISO Idea to detect errors. I wonder if we’ll ever be able to do that. If good ideas are in the eye of the beholder, then maybe there is no right answer.
I wonder if good ideas are nature vs. nuture, like beauty and other personality traits. I wonder how many go discarded on a daily basis if people don’t have the courage to share them with the world. I wonder if ideas get better the more people you share them with and finetune them along the way.
I wonder who ever thought of the pet rock and how it made some much money. Will the wonders never cease?