Smarter in :60 IV: Time to Rally…or Quit? Mark Hermann Takes "The Dip"

January 31st, 2011 by Mark Hermann

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The latest in a series from SonicScoop columnist Mark Hermann, where he builds on the inspiration he draws from sage sources.

HARLEM, MANHATTAN: Do you remember the feeling you got when you decided to try something new for the very first time?

After the Big Idea has kicked in, Mark Hermann and Seth Godin ask: Can you get past "The Dip"?

Maybe it’s when you decided to pick up the guitar. Or when you tried to sit down and write your first story. Or wanted to learn HTML so you could design websites. Maybe you took lessons or read books and articles on the subject. At first you didn’t care if you sucked because hey, you’re just a beginner, right? Who cares? Then you started to get a little bit good and there was this growing sensation of accomplishment. “Hey, this is fun!”

On a graph with an X / Y axis where X=Effort and Y=Results, this might look like a rising curve starting from the left. You’re showing real results for your early efforts. You’re improving each day. The curve keeps rising. And so then you decide to turn this into a really big goal. “I’m gonna start a band. No, I’m going to be the next Jimi Hendrix! Yeah, that’s it”, or “I’m going to write the next Alice In Wonderland“, or “I’m going to start a software company and kick Bill Gates‘ ass!”

But somewhere around the time you blew through novice and amateur status and arrived at intermediate, or long after your brilliant idea got you funding and now you have to figure out how to actually build the right team and bring this thing to market, things started to slow down. You plateau. Suddenly, you aren’t seeing those big gains anymore. You’re finding out it’s a lot harder to get to Mecca.

The curve is starting to fall, resembling a kind of trough where not much happens and in front of you lies a very steep wall curving upward…REALITY. What it’s really going to take to get where you say you want to go. Doubt begins to set in. Do you really have what it takes?

This curve is what Seth Godin describes as “The Dip” in his best-selling 2008 book by the same name. It’s a book about quitting and all of 80 pages. But the message is clear and simple:

“Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.”

But hang on. You don’t quit! You never quit! That’s what we’ve all been taught. Quitting’s for losers, wimps! Why, it’s downright un-American, damn it!

Well guess what? Sometimes you should quit. And often, in fact, if you’re not doing what you should be.

Godin defines The Dip as “any rough patch you have to get through before achieving your big goal…if in fact you’re chasing the right goal.”

Seth Godin's "The Dip".

Yes, but how do I know if I’m even chasing the right goal? Well, first you have to decide you’re going to be the best in the world at something. Not the whole wide world, mind you but someone’s world; your particular niche. You have to know that at any given moment, someone somewhere is looking for something to fulfill a need.

It could be for a clown that speaks Punjabi and is available tonight within five miles of Hester Street. It could be for an app that rates chiropractors in your area. They have to make a choice and the only thing they’re interested in is, “What’s the best choice for me right now about this thing?”

You have to become that choice. And then you have to be able to back it up. Most people can’t back it up. They can’t make it through the Dip and quit before they should have. If you’re not going to be the best, don’t even bother. Quit and find something else to be the best at.

Because you could find yourself in a Cul Du Sac, the other curve described in the book, which is French for dead end, as in job. The one that goes nowhere, where every day, every year you stay you’re just average. And average won’t get you through the Dip. Average won’t get you anywhere. If you find yourself in one of those, you basically have two choices: turn it into a Dip or quit. But then if you truly believe your cause is just, you cannot quit.

When I moved back to the city from the West coast in the late Nineties, it seemed everyone was yapping about one of these three things: the New Economy (Remember that? The growth chart that only went up? 20% gains a year, baby! Tech stocks. Woohoo!). Then you had Y2K, the tech equivalent to the Black Plague. Locusts would surely ooze from your hard drive at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. And finally there was “The Sopranos”. You couldn’t walk three blocks without hearing someone talking about who was going to get whacked in the next episode.

Well, about this time I was working for audio guru, Mark Levinson, selling really expensive AV systems and in walks David Chase, well known TV writer, director and Godfather to the aforementioned Sopranos, TV’s most infamous Goomba family. We ended up building him a system and I got to know him after going over there several times to show him or his wife how to use it.

One day he was looking at the daily’s from the show and we got to talking about the phenomenon he created. I said it must be pretty cool to have a great story like this and be able to just get it made after all his other successes in television over some thirty years. He laughed and told me it didn’t quite happen that way. Far from it, actually.

It turns out he had this idea for the show kicking around for almost ten years before it ever saw the light of day. He took it everywhere; the big studios (“Nah, the gangster theme has been beaten to death and who’s going to watch this on a weekly basis? Fugettaboutit.”) Agents, network bosses. Nothing. Dead fish. He would eventually put it on the shelf and every now and again he’d dust it off and try again but to no avail.

It would have been totally excusable for anyone to come to the rational conclusion, after a year or two of shopping, let alone this man’s credentials and access to the industry, that maybe this just wasn’t meant to be and the idea really wasn’t as good as he thought. But nine years!? How do you stick with it? David Chase believed his cause was just and he never lost sight of that. He made it through The Dip. And we are the richer for it.

At the end of the book there’s this little quote:

If it scares you it might be a good thing to try.

Peace,

Mark Hermann

NYC-based producer/artist/engineer/more Mark Hermann spends his life in the professional service of music. He has toured the world with rock legends, produced hit artists, and licensed music for numerous TV/film placements. Hermann also owns a recording studio in a 100-year old Harlem Brownstone. Keep up with him at his homepage.