Nicky and I started a new TV series a few days ago called Succession.
We were overdue for another series after steamrolling through the final season of “See” and House of Dragons’ first season. Succession has well and truly filled the void.
We downed the first season last week and started the second last night. Without giving anything away, it follows a family who owns a media conglomerate, and my take is it is basing it off the Murdoch empire.
It has drama, politics, murder… and my favourite- a tonne of business lessons.
Well worth the peruse if you’re feeling stranded right now.
And watching this has got me thinking about learning from industries other than our own.
A strange fact that most don’t know about me is I am utterly blind to what goes on in our industry — I don’t have IG, I don’t go to conferences, and I don’t care what the “competition” is doing. I spend little time concerned with any of that.
Instead, I pay attention to two things:
1. What is going on in entirely unrelated industries and,
2. What went on in entirely unrelated industries.
This is why I have read and learned from far more people in their 70s this year than those in their 30s.
Because learning what used to work, gives you an invaluable insight into what might work for you today.
Take my newsletter, for example.
I didn’t come up with that idea myself.
I stole it from a genius marketer — who’s dead now — called Gary Halbert.
He used to write physical newsletters, and tens of thousands of people would pay to subscribe.
When I first heard about this, I was surprised that I’d never come across a paid, physical newsletter. It was big in the financial space, but had never made its way to us in health & fitness.
It got me thinking about the viability of a paid newsletter.
First, why would you make a paid newsletter when you can just PDF and email it?
Secondly, would people even want to read it?
Finally, even if they’d want to read it, would they want to pay for it?
But, given I’d never heard of it in our industry before, and especially since everyone else is getting distracted by TikTok and IG reels, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to zig while everyone else zagged.
And as we all know, stealing that idea was like finding gold because it permitted me to do something I love while getting paid to do it.
As Alley-Oop subscriber Alex said, “Let the broken ships become your lighthouse.”
The lesson?
If you’re feeling stuck not knowing how to move the needle forward but overwhelmed by what the industry is doing, perhaps the best thing you can do is look the other way and zig while everyone else zags.
We’ve done that dozens of times, all to the significant effect:
Just look to our 12-month training commitments (even in the face of Fitness First destroying consumer faith in gym contracts) or, the success of our fixed-fee, long-term sports rehab model, or our go-big-or-go-home attitude to coach education for evidence of that.
While everyone is zigging, it’s almost always true to zag.
Food for thought on your Monday.
– Karl Goodman
