BOBC Episode 1: Learning To Leap With Dick Fosbury, May 26, 2020
INTRODUCTION:
On today’s show, I’m gonna be talking about a story that is near and dear to me. I’ve told this story and it’s important to create business. Many times I’ve even told it a college commencement speech. I was so honored to give a few years ago.
BODY:
It’s the story of Dick Fosbury and his path to winning the gold medal for the high jump in the 1968 Summer Olympics in New Mexico City. You might say, huh, what does this have to do with my business? Well close your eyes, jump over the bar backwards, and let’s find out if you’re gonna land safely.
Hello everybody. So this is my first full episode of my podcast and I was really thinking about, well, how do I get going? What am I talking about? And how am I going to share what I most wanna share with all of you who are in the business of being creative and really looking to figure out how to get better and be better?
Especially I’m starting this in the time of Corona and all of the, well upheavals that we have all had, you just can’t get around it. And, what do we do?
And so I was thinking and thinking about what I wanted to do for my first episode and kind of how to be here. And we hopefully are gonna be talking about a lot of things up and around that have to do with your creative business. Everything from pricing and contracts and client management and all of those things that are really wonderful topics and are evergreens for all of us, right? But at the end of the day, the question is where do we start and how do we leap in?
And it got me thinking when I’m thinking about starting and leaping. About really a story that’s been so near and dear to me in my career as a consultant and in creative business, and is just inspiring to me every time I think about it and every time I want to tell it. And so go with me. If you’ve heard it before, listen again. You can always hear it with new ears. And if you’ve never heard it, jump in and really hopefully own it with me because it inspires me every time I think about it.
And so it’s the story of Dick Fosbury, and so you’re like, who the heck is Dick Fosbury? Dick Fosbury was born in Oregon in 1947 and in the 1968 Olympics, he won the Olympic Gold medal for the high jump and set an Olympic record for it.
And you’re like, okay, who cares? It’s nice. He’s a good athlete. And that was a nice thing for those of you who really are not necessarily fans of Dick and what he did and what he inspired, let’s take a step back.
So, as I said, he was born in 1947 and he came of age in the fifties and early sixties, and he was really not that good of an athlete.
He was very interested in running track and very interested in being involved in track and wanted to actually be a high jumper. But the thing was he wasn’t really very good. And the thing was is that he wasn’t good because the technique at that time was to jump over the bar and scissor kick your leg.
So if you imagine the high jump, he had to kick one leg over and then the other leg because the ground underneath his feet was sawdust, and underneath that was concrete or tar or road, something hard. So if you landed on anything other than your. Feet or didn’t hit well, you’re gonna get hurt and probably die.
So he tried to learn that technique and he just wasn’t very good. But as he started to move through his adolescence and into his deeper into his teen years, well things started to change. So anybody old enough, like I am, I’m 53 and had seen the movie called The Graduate, you know, plastics, my dear Boy, Gregory Plastics.
And so what started to happen in the sixties, is that plastics and specifically foam started to be used for track and field. And instead of having these really aren’t very dangerous landing sites with sawdust and and pavement, foam pads started to be used and they started to make it softer for the landing, safer for everybody.
Well, one day, Dick, as he started to practice and practice, he started, you know what? You know what? I don’t need to necessarily land on my feet anymore. So one thing I could do is use the strength of my hips and my thighs and my back, which are the strongest muscles in your body to push myself over the bar backwards.
And so we did. He did. And so the first few times he started to practice it and started to do it. And remember, and then he was born in 1947. And so as he became a teenager in the late, , fifties, early sixties, right? He was young and no one had ever really done this technique. Maybe they had, but it certainly wasn’t popular.
And people looked at him trying to practice in doing this, going over the bar backwards with his, using the strength of his thighs and his lower back and his butt, to be perfectly honest, to get over the bar, said that he looked like a flapping duck. Right.
And he wasn’t really good at that, right? ’cause he was trying something new. But I gave away the ending at the beginning, which was that he was really terrible until he wasn’t right, until he started to get it down and he realized that, hey, this technique was pretty good, right? And he got better and better until the point that he won the Olympic gold medal in 1968 at the ripe old age of 20, I think it was 20, maybe 21.
So what does this have to do with creative business? What does this have to do with anything in your world? Well, if you take the story outside of the literal, that you just look at the allegory, why I love it so much when the ground shifts beneath your feet, go over the bar backwards, close your eyes, have faith that you’re gonna land safely and things might just work out.
That’s the beauty of the Dick Fosbury story. And so what does it have to do with what you’re doing today? Well, The ground is shifting underneath your feet. Maybe it’s shifting because we’re in the midst of a pandemic and that’s what you think is causing this upheaval. Might I tell you, it has nothing to do with anything.
It’s just a symptom of the upheaval that has already begun. I think about ideas of creative businesses that 20 years ago could never have existed. Digital photography, digital videography, the idea of floor planning, using your iPad to sketch out a floor plan, to do design using artificial intelligence and virtual reality and augmented reality.
All those things that were just figments of people’s imagination, but 20 years ago. So the ground literally is shifting underneath your feet as we speak. And your opportunity. Is to decide how you’re gonna go over the bar. Here’s a few facts for you. Dick won the Olympic gold medal and he set an Olympic record.
That doesn’t mean people gave up on the old technique. And quite a fact, the person who holds the record using the old technique scissor kicking is actually higher than what Dick did, right? So Dick’s Olympic Gold Medal one, he set the Olympic record for, has not sustained in the old technique, ran past him.
However, using the Fosbury flop, which is what it’s called, right? Those records have been set at the high jump and are the seventh and ninth longest lasting records respectively for men and women, right? So the technique itself has been improved and improved and improved. And the lesson there is the following.
You want very much to always look to be better, to be better tomorrow than you are today. Even if you have the right technique, you still have to work to be better, right? And then that technique will carry you forward. And so that is really what , this whole podcast is about. That’s what my riff is about.
That’s what Dick Fosbury has taught me, is that always look to the ground. Is it changing underneath your feet? And what are you gonna do about it? How are you gonna change and how are you gonna evolve? And how are you gonna become more radically authentic to who you most wanna be as an artist? And that to me is what creative business is all about.
Am I here to tell you that you need to make millions of dollars and that’s what that you’re going to do? Well, if that’s your goal, great. I think that’s wonderful.
But really what I hope you’re here to do is to learn how to change the world, because Dick Fosbury did and he did it because, he decided that the way the world was was changing and he wanted to adapt to it, and by adapting to it, he’s able to find success and joy, right?
And that is what your world is too. And so my goal is to hopefully inspire you to become different, to become more true to what you most aspire to be, to desire to literally go over the bar backwards with your eyes closed, hoping and praying that you’re gonna be okay when you land. That is the story of Dick Fosbury and why I really, really want for this podcast to be that place inside you where you take a look around and say, do I have to do it the way that somebody else told me to do it?
And that’s really what I mean by erasing the box. Because if all you’re trying to do is do something a little bit better than the next person, be a little bit more, more be a little bit different, be a little bit that way. A little bit. Today can’t work, right? Why? Because there’s a lot of little bits. And we need in this world more than anything, for us to speak to the smallest possible audience to make a change that will serve ourselves and possibly create a technique that will change the definition of what the HighJump is, which is exactly what he did.
But he didn’t know that going in. He just knew that for him, the him being Dick Fosbury knew that it was gonna work for him. And in that moment in time and in that place, he took advantage of a world that didn’t exist but 10 years before his time. And you are living in that world too.
And so for my first episode, that’s what I hope to share with you.
And what I hope that you can see is that you can take away right away and ask yourself, what am I doing? And not looking at the ground that’s underneath me. Am I not drawing? Am I not learning to be present? Am I learning what I have to do in order to, to capture the essence of what it is that I wanna share with the world?
And that’s where I wanna finish too today. Is that the whole point of creative business, while it might be to make money, might be to earn a living, might be to do whatever it’s to do?
No, it’s to create joy. That is the essence of creative business, to create joy. And for me, creating joy is not just a woowoo thing or euphemism, it’s a legal term to me.
Right. Not legal in the legal sense, but a term that has a real definition. And the definition is the essence of what it means to be alive. And if you think about that for a second, it means what? Create to make something come to life that never existed before. Create joy.
Joy isn’t just a little smile, little whimsy, little thing like that. Joy isn’t a romcom. Joy, truly is that essence of feeling happiness, of feeling alive, of feeling your feet on the ground and feeling that this is the life you most wanna live. So that is your responsibility as a creative business as an artist, is to create joy, right?
And because you create joy, your mission then is to transform a life by the work that you do. And in that transformation, not just the client is transformed by the experience, not just Dick Fosbury, but the rest of the world is too. And that’s the essence of art. The essence of art is that it’s commissioned and created for one person, but then the rest of us get to enjoy it.
And that is true, even if what you’re doing is a wedding that’s gone the second it’s over, but the memories are forever. And in that memory, you find yourself home. Create joy is your mission as a creative business, and in creating joy, you transform yourself, most of all, and then you earn the right to do it again and do it again, and do it again until you are fulfilled. And the world is fulfilled. That’s the definition of creating joy, and that is your mission as a creative business. And there is no higher calling for yourself. And if you wish to trivialize it because it’s a business, because it’s for money, because it’s for that, then quite frankly you’re gonna lose.
And it’s not because woo woo or anything else like that, what it is about. Is that those who feel the passion for it, those who feel the mission, those who own the responsibility, those who own the gravitas in a way that you don’t. Are ultimately going to win because they care more and because they care more, they’re gonna find people who care more about them.
And those people who care more about them to be right down on the ground about it, are gonna pay them more. And that doesn’t mean just dollars, although it probably does. It means that they’re going to give them more of their energy, more of their willingness to invest in not just the artists, but in themselves.
And in that sense, they’re going to demand the best of the creative business in front of them. Those who are willing to own the gravitas of that responsibility will earn their permission to do great work. So if you don’t have that gravitas with yourself, right, with your work, with the, the respect you have for your client, then you will never get the chance to reach the stage that the person, aside from you does.
And that is my hope that none of you will ever allow yourself to be in a world where you don’t own the responsibility to make a difference. ’cause that’s what creative business is all about. And that’s what this podcast is gonna be all about, trying to inspire you to do.
So thank you very much for my first episode.
