![]() ![]() ![]() What I call the Prevailing Wisdom is what everyone else, including some leaders, say about and perpetuate about a subject. Marty Neumeir, Director of Transformation at Liquid Agency (love that title), lays out what he calls the “Zag” of game-changing, conversation-changing brands. It’s not enough for a Thought Leader to repeat the moral of a classic myth as the premise and promise of his book. Find the image, the song lyric, the story, that speaks to that yearning. Take-away: Know and define the specific yearning your readers have, whether they know it or not. Like Elliot in E.T., Godin wants to free the frogs from the jars whose fate, unbeknownst to them, is to be pinned and dissected. Godin writes to the Icaruses of the world pining to escape their cubicles and the mental labyrinths of their own making. “Don’t be too full of yourself,” our cultural Fathers say like a small town of small-minded misers who sneer at the boy who’s “getting too big for his britches.” The classic Greek story of young Icarus and his father Daedalus (“clever worker”) has been embedded in and referenced in centuries of art, literature, and music – from Homer to Bruegel to William Carlos Williams to Joyce’s character Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Odysseus.įor centuries, as Godin reminds us, the story has been held up as a cautionary tale. “Don’t fly too close to the sun,” the good papa warns his sun, “or else your wings will melt.” So his dad built Icarus wings out of feathers and wax. (Sound familiar? Being trapped in a labyrinth of your own making?) Like Dorothy in Kansas or the man trapped in a cubicle, Icarus yearned to flee Crete where he and his father had been imprisoned in the very Labyrinth he had created. The Architect who had built the Labyrinth for a king to hold and enclose the half-bull, half-man creature the Minotaur. So he goes back in his reservoir of references and recalls the classic Greek story of Icarus. He wants to write a book that will help people soar. But to tap into his audience’s desire to feel free and fulfilled creatively, he has to understand what holds them back without making them feel guilty. He wants them to claim their inner artist. Imagine Godin the artist recognizing how many people in businesses feel stifled and uncreative. They catalyze deep change in perception and behavior. Images arouse the intellect, the heart, and the imagination. But I know he’s read sources who come from Jung.(2) Take-away: Think in images. The artist gives form to an image that speaks to a culture’s or group of people’s yearning. Those theories would have indelible effects on how we talk about and create stories – be they in books, around fires and kitchen tables, on stage or on screen. For several years he intuitively built cottages with stones, followed premonitions, heeded dreams, and deciphered the underlying patterns of more world myths.įrom Jung’s own deep, creative work would he feel confident that he was living in his own myth and realize more fully his theories about the unconscious and art. In his middle years, though, he wrestled with his own waning creativity in his life and work. Godin gets Jung.Ĭarl Jung flew high with theories he would say later simply passed through him and the unconscious. Godin’s book The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? aims to change the way many people, trapped by corporate and cultural myths, view themselves and their potential.ĭespite a flawed assumption here and there, the book works on many levels and for many reasons. In short, Godin gets the art and science of captivating creativity.Īnd if you’re someone writing a nonfiction book or wanting to write a book or eBook that makes a difference to its readers, you might learn something from how Godin’s book The Icarus Deception works.Ī change in thought. He understands story and the way story awakens something latent within our unconscious and stirs change. Godin is an archetypal Thought Leader because he understands the nature of Thought itself. Not only because he’s prolific and creative. Why? Godin is a Thought Leader not only because he’s smart. ![]() There are thought leaders, and there are Thought Leaders.(1) And Seth Godin is the latter. ![]()
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