When a tragedy turns into an opportunity.

What we can learn with a Heavy Metal guitar God.

I’ve seen an amazing video of the History Of Heavy Metal and the first episode was about Tommy Iommi, the genius guitar God of Black Sabbath. His story is brilliant and we can learn a lot with his adversities.

He was born in Birmingham, UK. It was an industrial city and he was working as welder in one of the industries. He used to like the job, but his main thing was music. When he was 13, he got his first guitar and before that he used to play accordion as his whole family used to play it too.

He met one band called The Birds & The Bees and was invited to go in a tour around Europe. One day he told his mother that he wouldn’t get back to work. She was furious and told him to get back to it.

Tommy was angry and went back to work. He was so disappointed and angry that he started to push some metals in the machine and suddenly the machine hit his fingers and he lost 2 pieces of the mid finger and the ring finger. He went to the hospital with his finger pieces inside a match box. In the hospital the doctor threw away the fingers. It was impossible to save them.

He was depressed. He could never play guitar again. He was hopeless.

The factory manager went to see him at home and told him the story of a guitar player called Django Reinhardt who have lost his 4th and pinky fingers in a fire. Tommy Iommi got inspired to move on with it and decided to try to play guitar again. But his fingers was so sensitive and painful.

He got a plastic bottle, melted down and reshaped to put on the fingers, but it was too big. It was hard to play and feel the strings. The strings were very heavy for him and he decided to use Banjo strings. With this idea it became the very first light gauge guitar strings.

He tried to sound strong and powerful because of his disability, so he decided to tune the guitar down. He wanted to be dirty and distorted to sound aggressive. He plugged his guitar in a Bass amp and that’s was the way he found his sound and the sound we know as Black Sabbath.

This sound created this new genre we know as Heavy Metal.

The adversity, became an opportunity. He adapted himself to find his sound and music and that’s what we should do in advertising. If there is no budget, let’s be more creative. If the briefing is not good enough, let’s find the relevant human truth. We need to solve problems with creativity. So let’s be more creative and use the adversities in our advantage and create the unexpected.

Let’s be inspired as Tommy Iommi was with Django Reinhardt. Everybody wins.