The Power of Yet
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The other day I was talking to a speaker friend of mine and he mentioned that he’d booked a certain event that I’d done in the past. “Haven’t you already done that one?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said, “They said this is the first time they’ve ever had the same speaker come back.” For the record, he totally deserves it. The guy is an amazing speaker. But the conversation made me think. The event we were talking about is a big deal. It has its own lore in the speaker world. And part of that lore is “They never hire the same speaker twice.” For years, I’ve heard that exact statement from agents and bureaus and speakers. These were people with way more experience and knowledge than I had, and they stated it like it was a hard fact. And it was. But it was a temporary fact. The actual truth was “They haven’t hired the same speaker twice… YET.” I wonder how many other “hard truths” are like that? How many other things do we believe are impossible because someone else told us so? And how many of those “hard truths” could use a “yet” on the end?
“Yet” is a powerful word. Those three little letters can do an awful lot of heavy lifting. They transform something impossible into something possible. They take “this will never happen” and turn it into “We’ll get there eventually, but we haven’t cracked it yet.” That’s powerful stuff. There’s a quote I love that goes something like this: “People saying ‘It can’t be done’ are always being interrupted by somebody doing it.” In my life, I’ve found myself on both sides of this quote. From personal experience I can tell you, the latter is a lot more fun. But if you want to be the first person, do me a favor: Happy Friday, friends. Make it a good one. Kyle Scheele |
Kyle Scheele
One useful idea about creative leadership, once a week
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