Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Karaoke as Education!

Karaoke as Education
by Tiger Todd
Did we know what the words were before they were on the screen?



"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer 


As a native Nevadan, I’m also a product of its public school system. In reality, I’m more a product of Nevada’s public school system and my dad’s entrepreneurism, a six-month stint in a body cast after being run over by a drunk driver at age 4 (that explains a lot, huh?), multiple skull fractures from multiple collisions between my big, hard head and even bigger, harder objects (that explains even more), no cavities (thanks Colgate), an ex-wife or two (the fault of my hard head once again), and all of the movies I’ve watched more than twice. Still, my public education was very important in defining who I came to be. While most of my vocabulary did come from my life experiences, it was the school district that actually taught me how to read. 

Mr. Morrow’s 6th grade English class at Robert Taylor Elementary School in Henderson, Nevada was where my reading speed really took off. The year was 1975 and Mr. Morrow used a kind of overhead projector that flipped sentences on the screen at a pretty good clip. We were challenged to read each line of text before the next line appeared. I hadn’t realized it until now, but this was like a prehistoric form of karaoke.

In the 1990s, my education from lyrics evolved with the advent of actual karaoke. I’ll not forget the first time I attended a large-screen karaoke party. Initially, I was fascinated by both the quantity and caliber of the "closet" singers in attendance, but I soon found myself mesmerized by the words to the songs that danced melodically across the screen. This was not Mr. Morrow’s machine, and neither were the intriguing sentences, particularly in this case from the Beatles’ song, Come Together:

He bag production he got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard he one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knee
Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease
Come together right now over me 


Walrus gumboot? Spinal Cracker? Could these really be the words? We are certainly not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Wait...didn't the group Toto record "Hold the Line"? We aren't even in MTV's Real World anymore. Maybe the lyrics were some 1960s code for “We’re invading America and will replace Perry Como.” There is probably some music aficionado out there who understood exactly what these words meant - and the words to every other Beatle’s song - but not me. 


Just think for a moment of what these words must have sounded like to a kid hearing or reading them for the very first time? Probably like the other words we made up as kids. Today as an adult, however, what weirds me out the most about Come Together is the thought that there may actually be someone out there whose “feet” are NOT below his knees...



The Value of Our Words

"You must unlearn what you have learned." - Yoda



The older I get, the more I find that the words to many of the songs I grew up with are not the words I thought they were. In a Junior High assembly in the 1970s, fellow eighth grader Michelle Small and I sang, 
You Don’t Have To Be A Star,” by Marilynn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. While we were a big hit with the hundreds of students who filled the gymnasium that day, I recently learned that the words to the song were not the ones I sang. In fact, I was way off. The actual line from the song, “You're rejected and hurt…to me you're worth, girl, what you have within” was beautiful, moving, and unfortunately, not anything at all like what I sang. My rendition replaced this insightful passage with, “Your rejection of Merv, to leave the earth, where you haven’t been” was, in retrospect, just plain scary. Come on, gimme a break! I was only 13, and my 13-year-old self knew less about just about everything than most 13-year-olds know today. Boy, was I naïve. Maybe at the time I was simply too young to understand the complexities of relationships. Perhaps my mental vacuousness was a result of being stuck at Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage of development so I didn’t yet have the ability to think abstractly or draw conclusions from the lyrics. In any case, my substitution was flawless, so no one- including me- was the wiser. It probably didn't hurt that the sound system in the gym was standard government-issue so the hundreds of kids in attendance couldn't really discern the lyrics anyway. Or maybe they thought the words that I sang were the right words, too.

Where are you learning your Life Vocabulary?

My limited vocabulary as a teen illustrates just how influential our social networks and non-scholastic sources are to our competence and understanding of the real world. Incidentally, the real world I am referring to is not the contrived environment by the same name on MTV, but rather, the world of interpersonal communication, business relationships, and respect for colleagues. As teachers and parents will attest, today’s teens’ on-board dictionaries have few if any of these terms since they are not typically comprised of words learned in a classroom or from a Merriam-Webster dictionary. In many cases, their vocabulary and definitions come from their music, experiences, surroundings, and the people they hang with during their formative years. 


"I looked up my family tree- and found three dogs using it." - Rodney Dangerfield 

Talk about no respect, as a sheltered child in the 1970s, most of the people I was allowed to hang out with were adults. This left me handicapped when communicating with children my own age - but with a distinct advantage with adults. Instead of talking about sex, sports, video games, and sex, like most teen boys (and grown-up boys) do today, I was communicating with old people, listening to old-person songs, and learning old-person jokes. Of course, hanging out with adults - instead of kids - did help me become a pretty good student since I related more easily to my teachers - the ones grading me - than I did to my classmates. My old person communication skills were also embellished by my babysitter- a black-and-white Sony TV- and by my language teacher- an AM/FM clock radio. Dialogue from TV Shows like Lost in SpaceGilligan’s Island, and Star Trekand the lyrics from songs by the CarpentersPeter Paul and Mary, and the Bee Gees, also helped to shape my vocabulary, my sense of humor, and my character(s). Judging by the experiences I’ve had and the quotes I still use in conversations today, I have become what I’ve learned.

Hell's Angels meet the Powerpuff Girls

Sometimes it is difficult to get every attendee of our Hero School® programs to understand the gravity of the phrase, “We become what we learn.” I encountered one tough customer about 5 years ago during my Saturday morning class for homeless men at Catholic Charities. He was already hard to forget, this gaunt, graying, 6’4” Hell’s Angel-type sitting in the front row. But it was the series of tattoos on his forehead that made the task of forgetting him utterly impossible. My mind was vacillating between trying to decipher the 3 indistinct blotches on his forehead, and the wonderment over what would possess anyone to be tattooed "there." A tattoo on my butt? Maybe. On my forehead- are you crazy? So I began tactlessly, “Nice tattoos...are they the three Powerpuff Girls, you know, Bubbles, Blossom, and Buttercup?” A sneer and a grunt followed. Of course I thought I was being very clever. Then came the most disturbing response; one that I certainly did not expect. “6-6-6,” he began. “Got ‘em when I was 16.” I was stunned, to say the least, but in this class, my showing any reaction could give these men the upper hand. “Cool!” I responded. “So, your parents were Christians, huh?” He didn’t want to talk about it so my mind wandered back to thinking about the tattoos. Apparently, forehead tattoos don’t hold their shape very well once you get into your mid-50s, but what part of our anatomy does?

“We become what we learn.” –Tiger Todd

The next 45-minutes of the class period elapsed without incident while I continued to rattle-off numerous examples of how people "become what they learn," whether becoming engineers by learning engineering, or becoming plumbers by learning plumbing. I then explained how I had been cursed in relationships by the songs I learned, particularly the songs of Barry Manilow. DON’T JUDGE ME! Of course, the men in the class laughed - as you probably did just now. So I asked the audience what the songs were that they had learned, and suddenly there was a loud “clunk” behind me on the front row. I spun around to find the man with his tattooed forehead pressed against the table. I asked him if he was O.K. and after a bit, he looked up at me with tears in his weary eyes and almost sobbed, “My songs…mysongs…” “What about your songs?” I inquired. “I became my songs- the songs I learned." "What were your songs," I ventured. "Highway To Hell and Born To Be Wild!” It has been 30-years since AC/DC released Highway To Hell, but it had been more than 40 years since a young man of just 15 had been free to live his own life. For 40 years, the lyrics to songs like these played in his head, reinforcing what might have been only a short season of rebellion, until they had eventually taken root and he was made into their image and likeness. 


“We can try to understand the New York Times effect on man.” – The Bee Gees



The lyrics to Highway To Hell and Born To Be Wild are not the words that change men anymore. Still, today’s prominent gangs, while very different in appearance from the Hell’s Angels of the 1960s and 70s, have indeed become what they have learned through the same curriculum. “Hell” has been replaced with “crib,” and “babes” have been replaced with “bitches” since the “brotherhood” became a pack of “dogs.” And while it is tempting to get sidetracked here and start thinking exclusively about gangs, the most important and significant component of both groups is the educational delivery system that created them. Furthermore, being judgmental of Angels and Gangstas will probably only incriminate us, since we too have become what we have learned. If our life today is in turmoil, perhaps it is because we have been learning turmoil. It is highly likely that our curriculum for daily living - the newspaper, the Evening News, and the Times - have generated this kind of life - one that corresponds to their agenda and curricula. It may actually take the words to a song like Stayin’ Alive on a Karaoke screen for most of us to truly understand the New York Times affect on man.

What are some of the effects that the songs we learn have on our lives? I wrote a little about this in (the soon to be published book) Uncommon Sense, on how my “hero complex” was formed by a combination of the songs I learned as a child. Remember, engineers become engineers because they learn engineering. Just because what people have "become" is not a college course title like, “Gangsta 101,” or “Advanced Family Dysfunction,” doesn’t mean there isn’t a curriculum that we’re learning. We become what we learn, whether we like it or not.

The great news for every human is that we can still become the kind of people we wish to become, regardless of what we have learned to this point. Yes it's true, but this miracle only works for humans so if you are an animal, there is no use in reading any further.

Since we become what we learn, we must exercise our free will and choose what we will learn. Perhaps more importantly - based on the former examples - we must also keep ourselves from learning the “lyrics” that we do not want to become. This is true if you are a dishwasher and you want to be a chef, or if you are in dire financial straits and wish to become stable and wealthy. The dishwasher cannot become a chef if his hours away from work are spent listening to, doing, and learning everything else but that which creates a “chef” life. Similarly, the person in dire financial conditions cannot possibly become secure and wealthy if all she is listening to and learning from are the news outlets that insidiously and repeatedly teach her that she is on shaky ground, that she could lose her house, and that the wealthy are wealthy because they were born that way. We must try and understand the Evening News effect on man. The effect is not the same on the wealthy largely because they make the news. Instead, the debilitating effect is on the regular person who doesn’t have a fleet of financial experts disseminating the news for him or her.


"The greatest ignorance is rejecting that which you know absolutely nothing about." - Jessica Branch

If you don’t want to become something, then just don’t learn it. It’s a simple as that! Many people cannot escape guilt, fear, and the curse of repeating history, since, like that tragic biker in my homeless class, they are already on a “Highway to Hell” and don’t know how to turn those damaging songs off. I’m convinced that the songs that we let play inside us - whether the condemning words from an unfit parent or the inspiring words from great teachers or poets - are in large part responsible for our future successes and failures. The songs themselves are not causal, but hugely influential. It would do some of us a lot of good to change the station.


What is your song? What words are carried around through your head by a familiar or haunting melody and performed by The Artist Formally Known as Stepdad? Take a look at the things in life that have been difficult for you to overcome or attain, and then take a look at the lyrics that are being played the most in your life. If they are not the lyrics you want to live, then maybe it’s time to learn some new songs.

-TT

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Do You Know What You Did Last Summer?
by Tiger Todd



"Don't be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of." ~ Charles Richards


Refreshing Jackson Lake - Teton National Park, Wyoming.

During my recent road trip to Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, I had an enlightening conversation with the night manager at my hotel in Jackson. It was 5 in the morning and as I prepared a green tea from the service cart in the lobby, I asked if the manager wanted me to fix her a coffee. She said "no," and then proceded to tell me about the 2 cups of coffee and the Red Bull she had already consumed after finishing her swing-shift job at the airport at 11pm, and then driving to work the graveyard shift at the hotel where I was staying! I think she was also a mom.

Everybody is going through something.

"The more things you do, the more you can do." - Lucille Ball 


I would have thought this "multiple job" scenario unique but just about everyone I met during my week-long trip was working 2-or-more jobs. A waiter at one restaurant said that he leads mountain bike and raft tours on teh weekends, and the woman at the Albertson's Deli moonlights in a sporting goods store. This got me thinking about the multiple lives of my heroes and heroines...



















"Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it."  - Russel Baker

Have you checked yourself lately? You probably have more than one job, too - paid or otherwise. You may be an accountant and the church treasurer and a mom. Maybe you're a realtor and a part-time professor and a Rotarian. Or perhaps you're an entrepreneur and a social-networker and a (starving) artist.

Welcome to 2010. Welcome to the age of Giganomics.

Giganomics is better than Nothinomics

I'm pretty sure that musicians were the first to coin the term "gig" whenever they were hired to perform for a fee. Playing gigs was heaven for musicians for whom music was their life, even if it was not economally capable of sustaining life. Most of the musicians I used to perform with by night were also working "gigs" by day as waiters, teachers, or construction workers. And so was I. These kinds of gigs must have been the inspiration for former Vanity Fair, Tatler, and New Yorker editor Tina Brown to coin the term Giganomics to describe the ever-increasing portion of the population living by "gigs" to make ends meet. In her edgy Daily Beast blog, she writes,

"No one I know has a job anymore. They've got gigs: a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies and bits and pieces they try to stitch together."

Earn and Learn

"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year." - John Foster Dulles

It is important to note one important distinction between working multiple jobs - or "gigs" - and the growing numbers of professionals and entrepreneurs who are also reinventing themselves while gigging it. Reinvention takes time, but assures us that once the dust from the world's changing conditions finally settles, we will emerge as the kind of people who have a place in it.

The secret to
reinvention, what I dub Earn and Learn, is learning your next position in life while earning in the current one. Remember, every job we do is important. In fact, everything we do now changes the future for someone else.


Teddy Roosevelt's investment of 15 buffalo into OK grew to over 600 by 1988

"The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people." - Theodore Roosevelt 

But there is another important factor in the reinvention equation. Awareness. We must be aware that contained within every "gig" is not just an opportunity - like to form a valuable connection with a future team member, client, or community leader - but also something to learn.

Summer is for reconnecting with loved ones who have suffered through the rest of the year without you, while you were working two and three "gigs" to keep your life together. But Summer is also a great time to increase your educations as well as your client and community member network
so you have income to carry you through the Fall and Winter. Insert a scene from Disney's A Bug's Life here.

You may have turned-pro at
FaceBooking with your friends and family - or playing Mafia Wars with La Famiglia - but we must ask how much help our family members can be at keeping us employed, or keeping our real estate leased, or at sending paying clients to us? If they are your rainmakers, great. But if not, you and I should consider investing more than a little time hanging out with our client connectors and Rotarian rainmakers. Look, if you find yourself investing the majority of your precious 168-hour week "friending" and "familying" when what your business needs is "networking" and "rainmaking," it is probably time to ask yourself what you could be doing instead, and with "whom."

Don't Let Summer Pass Us By

“The best way to get the most from our 168-hour week is to do the most important things first." - Tiger Todd


My hand. Newport Beach, California. Don't be Hatin'.

Look at this number again: 168. Each week we are blessed with seven unique 24-hour days. That's 168 hours with which to live our current life, clean up the past, and create a legacy for the future. Even after 40 to 60 hours "gigging" to pay for it, we still have 108-128 hours left! It's the new math. So why not do the most important things first?

"For we are all connected in the Great Circle of Life."
- King Mufasa, from Disney's Lion King


Whether everything is operating on all cylinders, or you have decided to turn pro at Giganomics, the fact of the matter is that now more than ever, we need one another. We need best practices from one another and moral support from one another. We need to network (the verb) with one another and we need to do business (the action verb) with one another. And we need to befriend one another while we work to transform our community into one that has a place for us, our families, and the families of our friends, our clients, and our supporters. -TT


Would you like to attend a Hero School Communication and Leadership Workshop in your area? Call us at 702-795-7000 or CLICK HERE for more information!

Monday, August 2, 2010

How to Handle Rejection

How to Handle Rejection: Advice from Expert Paul Kerres. 
Written by J.F. Fritch

Many of us fear rejection. It isn’t easy or fun to be rejected in anything we attempt, whether love, employment, friendships, or life. In fact, rejection has become increasingly common amongst the majority of Americans since the downturn in the economy. Many people have lost their jobs, their homes, their families… their livelihood.

How do you face rejection? Is rejection some type of uncontrollable force on the wheel of life, or is it something you can control? Would you like to have the knowledge to overcome rejection and take charge of your life?

The secret to overcoming rejection was summed up for me lately up by longtime corporate training guru Paul Kerres of Nevada Leadership Institution. Mr. Kerres believes rejection is not something to fear, but something to triumph over. A Harvard Business graduate, business owner, motivational speaker and student of Dale Carnegie, Mr. Kerres shared his secrets for facing what many of us fear most - rejection.

"First," he said, "you must expand your prospects." In sales, this means we must realize that there are more potential clients out in the world than the few we are selling to. Enhancing your "prospect opportunity" from 3 individuals, to 300, takes the pressure of you to make those 3 fit your needs, and consequently keeps you for telegraphing that pressure onto them.

Mr. Kerres states that he gets more rejections than acceptances when making sales calls. How he overcomes having a negative emotional response to rejection is to remind himself that there are many other people who will respond. He continues to expand his calling list which in turn, expands his opportunities. If you only have three prospects and they all say "no," what would you do?

Success comes from learning how to turn bad news into good news.

Next, be a predator. O.K., not in sense that you must prey on helpless little baby gazelles in the Serengeti, or on helpless residents of Forks in Twilight. Rather, be a predator in the sense of taking investing the time to learn about those clients who need your services, like predators in the wild do by watching and learning about their prey. They follow their prospect closely, their eyes well-focused on the prize. This helps predators know and then determine what the best prospect is. As you are well aware, even the clients that need your help the most might initially be evasive.

Mr. Karres adds this example. “A lion in Africa will focus on its prey, a Zebra. But do you know why Zebra’s have black and white stripes in a land of greens, yellows, and browns?" He explained that when a lion charges and the Zebras scatter, their stripes create a zigzagging effect, making it harder for the lion to keep focus on any single target." The pattern and activity of the zebras confuses the lion and increases the likelihood that the lion will lose focus on its prospect.

Just like the lion, we must focus on our singular target and only if we are assured we have lost a prospect should we move on to another. It simply a function of nature that we don’t always get the prize, but knowing when to increase our efforts or quit and move on is the key. This is the subject of Seth Godin's outstanding book, The Dip.

Another factor in the rejection equation is to eliminate the negative people and bad influences in our lives. Every Hero School workshop we teach reiterates that to be successful, independent humans, how we must overcome our natural tendency to "hang out with" and learn from people just like us. There has never been nor ever will be a successful human life that didn't begin with leaving high school buddies and family members long enough to learn from teachers, coaches, and experts.

But Mr. Karres makes the additional point that having negative or just non-supportive people in our lives will contribute directly to our failure. There is no room for negativity when you are reaching for bigger goals. You must overcome the temptation to return to the types of family members, friends, and, as Donald Trump states in How to be Rich, losers who hold you back.

“All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.”  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don’t retreat back to what is comfortable, like horses whose instinct is to return to the safety of the barn - even if it is on fire. Ranch hands must tie them down in order to save them from themselves. And in similar cases, people are often like horses. The horse knows the barn is on fire. However, when the horse is scared, it will still go to the only place it knows for safety, the barn. The barn has all its water, all its food, and is the shelter. In its mind, the horse values comfort and safety over the flames in the barn.

Remember, success comes from dealing with rejection with a positive attitude and moving forward. Regressing to old habits and old situations that haven’t worked in the past, will not work any better in the future. Learn from your previous rejections and move forward with intent, the intent to keep doing what you're doing until you achieve success.

JFF

More on Paul Karres at www.vegas-sales-training.com/

If you would like to learn more, Mr. Kerres suggests reading:
“The Greatest Salesman in the World” by O.G. Mandino
“Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by Richard Bach