This week’s focus point –
Post-Rapture Special – Cliffhangers.
Hello? Hello? Is there anyone else out there?
If you’re reading this, either the rapture didn’t happen “as expected” or you and I are in the throws of a planet upheaval over the next 5 months, if I read the article in the New York Times on Friday correctly. It would certainly figure that the end of the world would come right when the Seattle Mariners are playing great baseball. wouldn’t it?
It would also mean that I would miss out on all the great shows I enjoy watching that have major cliffhangers that just aired and won’t be solved until September. I think the 1980’s iconic series Dallas made cliffhangers a “must” for all serious dramas on television.
In business, you can learn from cliffhangers. A terrific season finale will create curiosity, emotion, suspense, foreboding, and an actual passion to find out what happens. If you’re a speaker on any professional level, you must create that same emotional response to engage your audience and have them focus on you, not their text messages. If you’re in sales, you must know that logic makes people think, and emotion makes people act. Creating curiosity, suspense and passion will more quickly get you the business than spouting out statistics. What can you do in your business to create the same emotions the great television dramas do that keep their audience coming back for more? If you can figure that out, then you have your own hit series!
That is, unless the calculations are a week off and the end of the world is actually next week instead. I think I’ll still keep my golf tee time just in case…
This week’s quote – “If evil be said of thee, and it be true, correct thyself. If it be a lie, laugh at it.”
– Epictetus (Greek sage and stoic philosopher from the 2nd century)
© 2011 Dan Weedin. All Rights Reserved
