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    The Great Gordino Newsletter - Issue 295 - Fri 25th Feb 2005
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    Hi There,

    Another Friday rolls around, and I hope it finds you well.

    I'm always tempted to write about anniversaries, but that could
    be a whole newsletter on its' own.

    I will mention one quickly today though.
    Wed 23rd, was 40 years since the death of Arthur Stanley
    Jefferson.

    Born in Northern England, he was in various comedy troupes in
    his teens, eventually ending up as the understudy to another
    English born, Charlie Chaplin.

    In time, Arthur Stanley Jefferson took the name of Stan Laurel,
    and ended up with his own huge fame.
    I've always prefered Laurel and Hardy to Chaplin, it's slapstick
    comedy at its' finest, and those films still make me laugh out
    loud, around 70 years after they were made.

    Ok, I had a great time last night.

    I was at a charity gig, and was playing with one of the bands, a
    new 3 piece in gestation.

    I noticed 3 things last night.
    Firstly how nervous I was.
    Recently I have only been playing at jam nights, so I am bit
    rusty.

    Secondly, I had never played a lot of the songs before.
    At the jams nights, making mistakes is part of the fun, but at a
    gig, I don't like to make mistakes, so I was a bit worried.
    As it happened, it went much better than I thought it would.
    In her best-selling classic 'Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway',
    Susan Jeffers points out that negative thinking about upcoming
    events is proved wrong most of the time.
    Last night was a case in point for me, where the negative
    possibilites I had considered just didn't happen.
    It's always a good point to bear in mind.

    The third point from last night?
    Well there were 3 bands, so 3 drummers, and one of the
    bassists is also a drummer.
    We have all pretty much played with each other at various points
    recently, so we have all played the same songs.

    I found it really interesting, particularly with the drummers, that
    although we might be playing songs that everyone knows, we
    still all added our own individual touches.
    In my case, in every song I like to aim at something around the
    drum kit and pretend to miss, just to fool the audience into
    thinking I missed by accident.
    That's my story anyway, and I'm sticking to it.
    The point is though, you may be doing the same as others, but
    you should always add your own personal style, a point covered
    in my book, not so subtlely directing you to the link below.

    On Wednesday I mentioned 'The Apprentice' which has recently
    started over here.
    This week's show had a great business point, so I'll cover it
    today.

    The 2 teams were challenged to come up with an idea for a new
    toy.
    The first staggering point was that the girls came up with an idea
    of a building block system that you plugged into an electric
    socket, and if you built it in a certain way, a light would come on.

    Yes, that's right, a children's toy which enouraged them to put
    things into electric sockets!!!
    Unsurprisingly, the experts said 'er, I don't think so.'

    Of their 2 other ideas, a robot idea went down well in the market
    research and also in the focus groups of children.
    The other idea of a card signing system was viewed as boring.

    The team leader, faced with 3 indicators to go for the robot idea,
    i.e. market reasearch, focus groups and the votes of her own
    team, decided to go for the card signing idea.

    That decision didn't pay off.
    The team lost the challenge, and it cost her the place in the
    programme, as she was 'fired'.

    It's important to do research with any idea.
    So many people don't do it.
    One of the worst things you can do though, is to do the
    research, and then ignore it just because you like the idea so
    much.

    It's a mistake that so many people make.
    It can be frustrating to admit that an idea you had is not that
    good an idea after all, but to carry on blindly can be very VERY
    costly!

    Ok, have a good weekend, and here's a thought - if Stan Laurel
    played the drums, would it be a good idea for him to set up a
    drum teaching course or not?

    'Til Monday,
    Health and Happiness,
    Gordon
    email me at gordon@gordonbryan.com - you'll have to copy and paste
    thanks to the idiot online spammers!



    
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