Greatness
Contagious was an ironic way to find a new passion of listening to books. Audiobooks have opened a new door to expanded knowledge that I had given up on, because as I freely admit, I read the Internet, not books.
Most recently I finished listening to a classic, “Good to Great” by Jim Collins.
The business examples were interesting, as this book was originally released in 2001. Looking past the outdated company examples, I was still able to confirm many techniques I already knew, while expanding my deep understanding of other powerful and important ideas.
In fact, for this book I thought I would create a string of #GoodtoGreat Tweets that highlight a few primary takeaways I enjoyed and shared while listening to this book. Below is the final Tweet I shared as I finished this experience. It links to the original Tweet, which includes the entire string of 15+ thoughts I especially enjoyed while listening to this book. Nice!
Why did I chose such a classic book?
I still remember June 15th, 2012. I don’t often attend motivational speaking events, but I was at the annual Iowa Association of Business and Industry convention where the author of this book, Jim Collins, was keynoting.
This was at a time when Jet Set Studio’s original product, the video game community at www.GatheringofGamers.com (“GoG”) was five years old and starting to lose steam. We needed to build a fresh product to expand the momentum of this innovative startup I co-founded in 2007.
Sitting in a ballroom with hundreds of others, Jim Collins spoke on a variety of topics, but the one that hit me the hardest was his insight on luck. Jim Collins explained that one subtle and intriguing element of going from good to great, was properly utilizing your luck in life.
This simple thought made me realize that we needed to act fast and use what GoG had achieved, top placement for our #1 referring key phrase, “video game tournaments” on all major search engines.
We worked hard for this achievement and SEO is anything besides luck, but this worldwide visibility had opened doors and that hot key phrase didn’t even describe what GoG was all about. This valuable visibility would fade as GoG continued to age, so it was at this moment with Jim Collins that the concept of Tournament Seeker was conceived!
People were obviously looking for video game tournaments and since Jet Set Studio had a unique level of experience producing video game events, Jim Collins’ talk allowed me to realize we could use the existing GoG visibility to create a bridge between event organizers and people looking to compete.
