QUOTE OF THE DAY
“As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
IDEA OF THE DAY
I’ve got an interesting story to share with you today.
In the late 1800s, a company marketed a special liquid as a floor cleaner, hair tonic, and cure for everything from smallpox to gonorrhea. Despite these fabulous claims, sales remained sluggish.
In the early 1900s, the company began to market this “cure-all” as simply “mouthwash.” What’s more, they took an issue few cared about, “bad breath,” renamed it “halitosis,” and instilled fear of its social consequences. (You’ll lose friends. You’ll never get married. Nobody will ever tell you why!)
Soon after framing it as a “mouthwash” that cured “halitosis,” Listerine’s yearly sales jumped from $115,000 to more than $8 million. (That’s 7.3 gazillion dollars in today’s money.)
But it doesn’t end there. Later advertisements called Listerine “The taste you hate, twice a day.” The burning in your mouth and terrible taste? That’s Listerine killing all those halitosis-causing bacteria!
How we frame things is powerful.
The words we use and the names we give dictate how we think about the world. They can lock us in… or set us free. So get curious about your thoughts, write a few down, and look for other perspectives you can adopt:
Is it that you can’t do something? Or you don’t know how to do it yet?
Is it that you’re a failure? Or just that you didn’t achieve one of your goals?
Is it that you lost your job? Or do you get to find a more fulfilling company?
Slight shifts like those can radically change how you approach a challenge. So be sure to kill the mental bacteria that plague your thoughts with this simple “mindwash.” (Ohhh Joyna, the puns are STRONG today!)
QUESTION OF THE DAY
What other ways of framing this situation could open new possibilities for me?