Today I saw this headline in my notifications from Mashable.

Apple set to be the #1 seller of PC’s next year.

Thoughts of Wow! And Finally! And “They said it would never happen!” all flashed across the screen of my mind.

And then it hit me. Apple doesn’t sell PC’s. Wasn’t that Steve Jobs’ whole point?

“Think Different?”

It would be akin to the headline, “Pepsi set to be the #1 seller of Coke next year.”

If ever there were the blaspheming of a brand, this is it.

Could this signal the beginning of the end for the brand Jobs’ built? He must be turning over in his grave.

My take: Apple didn’t set out to win the “computer” war. Jobs created an entirely different game; one in which they were the only player. That, in large part, explains why apple owns the tablet market. There is no competition. This can’t be summed up as a blue ocean red ocean issue. It’s more like apples and oranges isn’t it.

How might you develop this kind of strategy in your business or on your blog? What about your church or non profit? How many churches operate with the mentality of competing with other churches. I work in higher education, an industry that constantly talks about “comparator” schools. Someone is going to completely reinvent the game soon, leaving the rest of us holding the proverbial bag.

My question: what would it look like to create a new game; one where you owned the playing field–because you were the only player? It takes a lot more imagination and ingenuity to do this. But it must be a whole lot more fun. I

Anyone got any analysis on this?

Mayer began the clinic explaining that, although the industry has changed with the advent of social media, creating music requires the same discipline it always has, if not more discipline to combat the added distraction of online promotion. Referring to the allure of having an instant, albeit often shallow and fleeting, online audience, John Mayer cautioned against seeking out “joy in little, tiny statements – little, tiny applause hits.”

“I remember playing the guitar through the amplifier facing out the window of my house onto the street in the summer time – that was social media in 1992.”

John Mayer explained how this seemingly isolated musical grounding allowed him to concentrate on perfecting his craft and that students’ time at Berklee is perfect for this same level of focus.

“This time is a really important time for you guys because nobody knows who you are, and nobody should. This is not a time to promote yourself. It doesn’t matter. This is the time to get your stuff together. Promotion can be like that. You can have promotion in 30 seconds if your stuff is good. Good music is its own promotion.”

But John Mayer’s main reason for discouraging promotion came from his own struggle to curb using social media, which should have been an outlet for promotion but eventually became an outlet for artistic expression. Mayer shared that he found himself asking himself questions like “Is this a good blog? Is this a good tweet? Which used to be is this a good song title? Is this a good bridge?”

And possibly more alarming, Mayer realized that pouring creativity into smaller, less important, promotional outlets like twitter not only distracted him from focusing on more critical endeavors like his career, it also narrowed his mental capacity for music and writing intelligent songs.

“The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”

Although twitter was his most frequent whipping boy, Mayer also targeted the urgency beginning artists feel to update their blogs and youtube channels with new songs or videos to maintain steady flows of interest for their work. Instead, Mayer explained that he found the separation of creation and promotion necessary in his own career, saying “as you start playing music you’re going to stop thinking about getting better. As soon as you flip the switch into showing other people your music, for some reason, the other brain sort of goes away.”

“You got the distraction of being able to publish yourself immediately, and it is a distraction if you’re not done producing what the product is going to be that you’re going to someday use the promotion to sell…I had to go through the same thing I’m talking to you about – what you have to go through – which is to completely manage all the distraction. Manage the temptation of publishing yourself.”

So, to avoid the temptation of publishing himself and to increase his mental capacity for creativity, Mayer deleted his twitter, stopped blogging, and created a strict regime for recording his next album.

“Here are the rules for recording this record… no drum machines, no loops, no keyboards to start out with, no excuses, no breaks, no laptops, no nothing. If you take a break, it’s to eat. If you’re done, you go home.”

In addition to the distractions of promotion, John Mayer also discussed another enemy of creativity – judging songs before they’re finished.

“I can’t stress enough how important it is to write bad songs. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to finish songs because they don’t think they’re any good. Well they’re not good enough. Write it!  I want you to write me the worst songs you could possible write me because you won’t write bad songs. You’re thinking they’re bad so you don’t have to finish it. That’s what I really think it is. Well it’s all right. Well, how do you know? It’s not done!”

Published first here. 

Our practice in January involves reading one chapter of the Proverbs each day; the one corresponding with the day of the month. Today, I want to reference the prelude to Wisdom (Chapter 1). Read the passage below from The Message Translation aloud.

^1-6 These are the wise sayings of Solomon,
David’s son, Israel’s king—
Written down so we’ll know how to live well and right,
to understand what life means and where it’s going;
A manual for living,
for learning what’s right and just and fair;
To teach the inexperienced the ropes
and give our young people a grasp on reality.
There’s something here also for seasoned men and women,
still a thing or two for the experienced to learn—
Fresh wisdom to probe and penetrate,
the rhymes and reasons of wise men and women.

Fresh wisdom to probe and penetrate. Nothing diminishes wisdom more than cliches and catch-phrases. Proverbs, or wise sayings are different. Somehow these short sayings capture and distill the wisdom of the ages. They cry out for more than simple reading. One does not master Wisdom, but is mastered by it. Wisdom, more often than not, opens up a small way. This way requires slowing down and submitting to words. One cannot arrive at wisdom except by Wisdom’s way. Step 1: Humble yourself.

⁷ Start with God—the first step in learning is bowing down to God;

Practicing Wisdom Today:  Find a private place– any place will do– and literally bow down on your knee. Express submission to God through declaring aloud Jesus is Lord. Say it until you mean it. This little Way will change you.

Probe & Penetrate: Remember Jesus, who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing. . . . and humbled himself.

Despite the fact that I work in an industry known as “Higher Education,” I am pressing to find within it a way I call, “Lower Education.” It seems the higher and  higher one becomes educated the more and more they become isolated from reality. Perhaps that’s why people sometimes speak of the academy as the ivory tower. Now this isn’t always true and I could show you a cadre of exemplars that seem to go lower as their education reaches higher. I work with a lot of them.

Paul talks somewhere about knowledge “puffing” up and love “building up.” To be clear,  I don’t think Paul was talking about Harvard grads, and yet there is something about that statement that transcends time and place.

Knowledge so easily forges the on-ramp to the interstate of power and the destination of pride and prestige. There’s only one exit ramp off this high-way: the low road of lower education. Love. Not sentimentality. Lower education is  not pontifical love, but practical action. Lower education constantly descends to the place of the needs of others. I like how Albert Schweitzer put it,

“Therefore search and see if there is not some place where you may invest your humanity.”