Saturday, March 29, 2008

How to Attain Greatness



How does one go from selling one product to selling millions of products? How does one go from one reader to millions of readers? There must be a tipping point to this if you want to follow the book it's fine but here is another theory. Let me tell you about the 100th Monkey effect, and how it can help you attain greatness.

The story goes that in 1952 Japanese Scientist were studying the macaques(type of monkey) on the island of Koshima. The scientist were observing the monkeys eating habits, which consisted of the monkeys picking up sweat potato's from the beach and eating them. The monkeys would pick the sweat potato from the root, and eat the clean half tossing out the dirty root half. This you can imagine was a waste of the potato and also more time consuming because the monkeys had to search and pick more to fill up their bellies. One day while observing the macaques a research noticed that one sole monkey began to wash the potato in the a near by stream. The researchers were puzzled maybe the monkey saw the researchers do it to their food. The monkey after washing the potato in the stream ate the whole potato because it was clean from root to tip. The monkey could for the first time eat the whole potato instead of having to discard the dirty portion. One would think this was a break through and monkeys would embrace this everywhere, but this is where it gets interesting.

At first the sole monkey who discovered the washing technique of the potato was ostracized by the older monkeys. He was no longer able to be in the group, the older monkeys would hit him if he tried to rejoin the group. But the sole monkey still washed his potato in the stream, he ate more and had more time for other things. Slowly the younger monkeys started to imitate the sole monkey and they began to eat more in less time as well. It still wasn't done by all monkeys, until one day the researchers noticed that when the 100th monkey decided to wash the potato that it became wide spread. Hence the 100th Monkey effect, the number 100 seems to be the key for your product, your daily viewers, whatever it maybe to take off into greatness. For my blog to truly become great and become widespread I'd have to have 100 daily viewers a day. That should be my goal and that's the key for my blog to take off.

2 comments:

Peggy said...

yeah did it on the DS, if ya check out one of my early posts in february i write a little bit about it. you just need a special r4 game cartridge, micro sd card and that free homebrew 'colors' program.

Who is "the Manager"? said...

no update for awhile?