Bennett's Five Links #069
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Bennett's Five Links #069
Goldfish ties; Show Me the Money
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Really ties the whole outfit together ..
I’ve long argued that neckties are dumb. A slip-knot around your throat, only worn because everybody else seems dumb enough to wear them also.
I enjoyed this twitter thread on the origin of the necktie (blame Croatia, apparently) and its history through to modern fashion.
(via Mem)
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But I’m not sure we want depth, do we ..
These computer monitors look very impressive. That is, until you start thinking about what they’re likely to be used for ..
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Put. That Coffee. Down ..
I loved this website full of ‘sales deck’ (i.e. PowerPoint) examples. Some really great stuff in there.
The Tumblr one especially. It’s like 80 slides (gross) and yet because they’re all quite good I didn’t mind
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Thoughts of a Sports Attorney ..
You know in Jerry Maguire where he writes that big internal memo (it was a mission statement!) and later gets fired? Turns out that’s a real document that Cameron Crowe authored. And you can read in your very own Tom Cruise-sounding inner voice!
Some snips —
I was hired by Jack Scully in 1981, I was fresh out of college, I didn’t even watch much sports. But a young man came to me, and his name was Bill Apodaca. He asked me to look at a contract he’d acquired to play football for the Atlanta Falcons. Before long I was overseeing the business of another member of the Falcons, and two baseball players. The nuances and the small miracles of professional sports would soon hook me — there was something simple and perfect about the way a stadium felt. The way vou felt when a player you’d helped and represented made his stand in front of 54,000 people. And I remember the conversation Mr. Scully and I had by an elevator, standing next to one of those sand-filled ashtray posts, right before he hired me as one of the first agents in this company. “You and I are blessed, he said, “we do something that we love.”
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We are losing our battle with all that is personal and real about our business. Every day I can look at a list of phone calls only partially returned. Driving home, I think of what was not accomplished, instead of what was accomplished. The gnawing feeling continues. That families are sitting waiting for a call from us, waiting to hear the word on a contract, or a General Manager’s thoughts on an upcoming season. We are pushing numbers around, doing our best, but is there any real satisfaction in success without pride? Is there any real satisfaction in a success that exists only when we push the messiness of real human contact from our lives and minds? When we learn not to care enough about the very guy we promised the world to, just to get him to sign. Or to let it bother us that a hockey player’s son is worried about his dad getting that fifth concussion.
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And so begins the game of flattery, of lip service, of doing everything possible to soothe and stroke. It is part of our lives, and part of our jobs. The game of agenting. The tapdance. Not only will Client X be a tapdance, but there will be a tapdance involved in explaining why I didn’t return the call and begin the tapdance earlier. I know it is a tapdance, and so does he. I have seventy-two clients, and over sixty of them are full-time tapdances. I sign ten or twelve new ones a year. As many of you know, it is going in the wrong direction.
But as I sit here in the darkness of this hotel I room, the answer to the future is rather obvious. If the tapdancing becomes less constant, less furious, less necessary, what will the result be? The result will be more honesty, more focus, fewer clients, but eventually the revenues will be the same. Because the new day of honesty will create a machine more personalized, more truthful, and the client that wasn’t bullshitted this year, has a greater chance of greatness next year.
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You can e-mail the President, you can get sushi in a supermarket in the middle of the desert, you don’t even have to read a book anymore, you can buy a tape where it is read out-loud. But where is the simple truth about how to live a quality life? I hope that I have not overstepped my boundaries by writing this to you. This is an attempt to reach out, and say loudly the things that have been festering within. And once you begin to speak these things, it’s hard to stop.
The Things We Think and Do Not Say
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The context is an owl-themed restaurant ..
The Moonlight Sonata in the background is just perfect. Read the whole thread.
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Bennett