I haven’t seen Avatar yet. I can hardly believe it myself. I wanted to go opening weekend, but my wife who had recently had surgery wasn’t feeling up to it Christmas, and I really want to go with her. We tried the next day, and it was sold out. We tried again two weekends later, and again it was sold out. Why didn’t I buy tickets online, you ask? Because it was the third weekend out, and in this day and age, who expects a movie to sell out in its third weekend? Its rare enough to get a sell out on opening weekend, certainly not 3 weekends into the run. We had made further plans which have been thwarted for the past month due to family circumstances. We’re making plans for this weekend. Let’s hope.

Anyway, I’d intended to write this post after that third weekend sellout. As bummed as I was that I didn’t get in, I was also happy. You see, if you catch what I’m getting at, this is a big deal for the movie theater industry. You’d probably agree that its almost unheard of for a movie to sell out after opening weekend, and this movie was a prime example of someone trying something and doing it right. Movie theaters have been trying new things for decades; contending with home videos since the very early 80s, shorter and shorter time spans between the theatre and home video releases, and contending with home theater systems and direct download movies. Instead of doing nothing new, theaters, as well as movie studios who enjoy the double income from both box office sales and home video sales, have come together to produce ever better viewing experiences. They are constantly looking for new ways to deliver unique and better experiences.

This stands in stark contrast to the book store industry who seems to be doing not much. Last year, J.C. Hutchins teamed up with viral game designer Jordan Weisman and they created the novel, Personal Effects: Dark Art. I say created rather than written because even though it’s sold in book stores and the main component is the stand alone novel, there is much much more to it. Each book ships with a number of artifacts, all with clues so that you can follow along and try to work out the story as you go. Phone numbers in the story and on the artifacts work, as do website addresses. You can even google the characters and find sites for them. Its a bold new experiment for sure, but more than that, its the kind of idea that could help keep printed media relevant. You simply can’t get these artifacts on a Kindle.

What’s my point? Its that the movie theater industry has been trying lots of new things, from IMAX to 3D to unparalleled audio to pre-roll advertising. Not everything they try sticks, but at least they’re experimenting. Book stores on the other hand don’t seem to try so hard. J.C.’s book should have been front and center in EVERY book store in the country, just to SEE if it was an idea that could take off. The stores, if they were interested at all in finding new ways to stay relevant, should have embraced the effort. Instead, either not wanting to take a chance on a new author, a new idea, or simply because they didn’t understand the concept, they pretty much ignored it. Its too bad, too, because I love book stores and would like to see them remain relevant (see previous post for more on that).

What does this mean for you? Well, what’s going on in your industry? If things are changing, especially if those changes are starting to make you irrelevant, it might be time to start trying something new. Pay attention to what others are doing differently as well, and take note of what seems to be working. Do a bunch of things differently. If an idea comes along, just try it. If it fails, fine, but at least you know what doesn’t work, and its harder to weed through the bad ideas and find the good ones if you’re not producing any ideas at all.

See, I stopped freelancing almost 4 years ago because I realized my business wasn’t going in a direction that made me happy, and reading Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth Revisited, had pretty much showed me why (I swear that book was written just for me). The E-Myth also laid out a very solid foundation for designing and starting your own business. I just needed some time to think and regroup, so I shut down my time-sucking (60+ hours per week) ‘business’ and took a ‘day job’, where I could show up from 8-5 and then go home and think about and build whatever I wanted, NOT worry about clients.

Now, I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but from my cubicle over the past 4 years, I’ve watched the entire world change. There have been hints and foreshadowing for decades, what with outsourcing of first menial, and then later, highly sophisticated tech jobs; with factories in industrialized nations closing and new ones opening in developing nations; with “health” vacations to India and Thailand becoming more and more common; yes, hints and foreshadowing that much of what we had built, systematized, and standardized was now going to someone other than ourselves. This factory-based system that worked for so long just seems to have stopped working for any but the most rich and the most poor. The rest of us in the middle have been forgotten.

Its not that the systems from Michael Gerber’s E-Myth in and of themselves aren’t a good idea (in fact, I regularly create systems for lots of things, including my personal life, to help smooth things along), but the entire world has been so systematized and outsourced, that our ability to actually participate in these systems seems to be disappearing at a rapid rate.

This seems to be where Seth’s book steps in. Where Gerber’s book looks at the world from an old-system business owner who seeks to standardize the entire business and where the workers in a business are all interchangeable, Seth’s book is looking at our emerging era where the owners (us) actually own our own factories ($500 for a new PC, or $2000 for a new Mac?!?). Where we stop fitting ourselves into the standardized cogs of old-style business and start recreating ourselves as unique, indispensable artists.

The thing we need to realize is that we can’t afford to be compliant laborers anymore, because companies can no longer afford to hire employees who are simply good at their jobs. As Seth writes in his book, “The compliant masses don’t help so much when you don’t know what to do next.” Companies have no idea where to go from here, and a worker who simply shows up is becoming a waste of space. The world we all operated in 10, even 5 years ago is disappearing rapidly, and what we all need are thinkers and creative problem solvers to help find a new direction. And smart companies will pay for it, whether as an employee or a consultant.

I believe that this book will speak directly to most of the listeners of Creative Independence simply because doing things on our own is in our very nature; its in our core. This book is written in such a way to speak to those of us who are part of a new, emerging class of people; those who both own and are the key employees of our own businesses. Check it out when you get a chance. I’ll update more as I finish up this book.

You can pre-order your copy from Amazon by clicking here (affiliate link): Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?