Olympic Inspiration & Real Estate 2.0

This Ad for Visa by TWBA/Chiat/Day really got me thinking about innovation and in particular how Paradigm Shattering Dick Fosbury was and in my opinion still is.
Watch this if you haven't seen it already.





“The problem with something revolutionary like that was that most of the top athletes had invested so much time in their technique and approach was that they didn’t want to give it up, so they stuck with what they knew,” Fosbury said.

Sounds a lot like how most Real Estate Sales and Marketing Programs are currently conducted.

He said it took a full decade before the flop began to dominate the sport.

I’m hoping we can shift our industry faster than that.

You would have thought that all the other high jumpers and their coaches would have copied him because after all he did win the '68 Gold Medal and break the World Record.

They didn’t - the elite high jumpers and their coaches were too invested in the straddle.
They could not and would not undo all of the years of repetition and the results that they use to get with going with their old style, the Straddle.

Does that look or sound similar to our industry?

It certainly does to me as I see all of these new tools/skills/techniques that so few are using and I keep wondering why.

So what happened next in the High Jump World?
The establishment "attacked" him and his Flop - they were not going to have their paradigm shattered.

Check out this quote:

“Kids imitate champions,” said U.S. Olympic coach Payton Jordan at the time. “If they try to imitate Fosbury, he will wipe out an entire generation of high jumpers because they will all have broken necks.”

Fosbury laughed long and hard when reminded of that quote and then said:

"There were some doctors who felt I was threatening kids’ lives".

His stunning, and almost comical, break with the conventional straddle high jump sparked a revolution in the sport.

Today, the “Fosbury Flop” is the standard technique for high jumpers from high school to the Olympics.

But Fosbury still recalls the debate that raged in the press over his radical approach to the bar.

So what are you doing to shatter the paradigms in your industry, are you trying new approaches or are you happy to continue to do the “Straddle”