About ten years ago I went to a music festival on a hot summer night in Sydney. Rage Against the Machine had the closing act – it was cool.
When it wrapped up though, we realised we were right in the middle of a huge crowd and there were only 3 or 4 little exit gates out of the place.
As you can imagine, you could feel tension rise as you got squeezed out of the field like a speck of play dough getting pushed out of a little shoot.
We were literally powerless, trying to keep our feet underneath us as we eventually got spat out.
In our work and our business, it’s tempting to play in the middle. We look left, we look right, we are part of the group – something looks good, so let’s do it that way…
The problem though, is we end up like everyone else.
We end up being just part of the crowd. We end up getting squeezed – squeezed for time, squeezed for price, squeezed to take shortcuts just to survive and get out of the gate.
Going to the edges feels risky, but here we find an open field. Easier access to the people we seek to serve, more room to move, no squeezing.
