Truth Roach Onward Bella

Have you ever been talking to someone but it feels like you two are talking about completely different things but it’s really the same topic? It’s very, very strange, right? I’m going to show you a great visual example of why that is. I have a great marketing approach for a zoo in San Antonio that they recently promoted, it’s absolutely genius! And if you’ve ever done any traveling and you’ve been faced with having to have an onward ticket, I’m going to show you how to get around that problem. The last part is a tiny, but beautiful, island in Northern Italy. 

Let’s say that I had you walk into a room, and the room is circular with a bunch of doors around it, and I say “Open this door, walk through it and look at the object in the middle of the room. What do you see?” and you looked and said to me “Well, it looks like three different rings. It looks kind of like an archery target.”

Let’s say that there’s a door, about 45 degrees down from where you are, and I tell a different person to open the door and look at the object in the middle of the room and describe it to me.

And they go, “Well, it looks like three rings that are sort of overlapping, and the one to the left is bigger and then a smaller ring and then an even smaller ring.” and you go, “What are you talking about? Those are three perfectly sized rings.” And they go, “No, they’re overlapping, they’re ovals, they’re not circles.”

It’s going to get even weirder in a second. 

Let’s say that there’s another door, about 45 degrees down from the second person, and I tell a different person to open the door and look at the object in the middle of the room and describe it to me and they go, “Well, I see three lines. The line on the left is larger, the middle line is a little smaller, the line on the right is a little smaller in that.”

Confusion. Chaos. What is happening?

You’ll say, “No, those are three perfectly sized rings not touching each other.” And the person next to you will go, “No, they’re rings overlapping,” and the person at the end will go, “No, they’re not even rings or circles. What are you two even talking about? They’re just lines.”

And here’s why. Let’s say that these are three different rings suspended magically in the middle of the room. And they’re different sizes, and they’re separated a little bit.

When you come in that first door, you see three perfect circles aligned right in the middle and you go, “Yes, that’s the truth, that is what I am seeing here.” 

The person next to you, they say “No, I see three different rings,” because they’re looking at it from a different angle, and for them it’s a three-dimensional object.

The person at the end (let’s say at about 90 degrees from where you are) they’re only seeing the side of these rings, so that’s why they say it only looks like lines.

Life is like that. Life is 3D

You can imagine how something as simple as three little rings would cause confusion because all three of you are going to think that you’re seeing the truth and speaking the trust. 

Yes, you’re speaking the truth when you say there’s three rings, you honestly believe that. But when the person, let’s say 90 degrees down, says no, the three different lines, they honestly believe that too, and that’s where I think a lot of confusion and conflict comes in. 

I hope that this little visualization of these rings in a three-dimensional space helps you understand that we’re all looking at things a little differently.

I was recently in Lisbon for a layover and they actually have (what feels like) a mall inside the airport and there was a very interesting escalator. You know the part underneath the escalator which is typically closed off or there’s just nothing there? Well, the owners of this “mall” rented out this unused space to Mercedez and they used it as a promotional space for one of the cars. I’m assuming at some point that was just unused space – not making any money, not bein犀利士 g useful – and someone saw the potential there and then they said “You know what, let’s rent that out.”

And you’re gonna see a pattern with the next two examples. I’m in Spain right now and there’s a parking lot at a hotel that my wife would always walk by, it’s a really big parking lot and it’s mostly empty. But one time that we went for a walk there, they had all these small vendors set up in rows, selling their goods. Some people were selling produce, some vases, some other handmade goods, some clothes, whatever. The owner of this parking lot must have saw the unused potential here and said, “Hey, let’s rent this out to all these vendors and charge them.” I’m assuming they’re charging these vendors and making some money from this parking lot. That’s another example of unused potential. 

Unused potential can also be seen in promotions. To show you an example, here is an excerpt from a local news station out of San Antonio: “Back for its third year, the San Antonio Zoo is hosting its Cry-Me-A-Cockroach fundraiser. You’ll once again be able to buy and name a cockroach after your ex for five bucks. The zoo will then feed the insect to one of its animals. The feeding will even be live-streamed on the zoo’s Facebook page on Valentine’s Day. You can also pay a little bit more to name a rat to be fed to a reptile. The zoo even offers a herbivore option for vegetarian animals.” How amazing is that?

The idea here is to find the unused potential in your organization that you’re not utilizing yet. So, for example, the Lisbon airport saw the unused potential underneath that escalator. That hotel with the large parking lot saw unused potential and now they’re renting it out and generating some revenue from it. At the San Antonio Zoo they were going to feed those animals these cockroaches and the lettuce and the rats anyway but someone had the great idea and said, “Hey, why don’t we try and market this as something kind of funny, viral thing? We could name the food after an ex and then you feed it to an animal and it’s live streamed.” 

Where in your organization do you have some unused potential? Look in the back room, look in the closets. Do you have a parking lot, that’s an easy one to figure out, right? Do you have a commercial van that you’re not really using right now? Why don’t you take that van (with your organization logo on it) and drive older folks to the doctor’s office or to pick up their prescription or something like that? There’s bound to be unused potential in your organization if you look. 

One thing that you might not know if you don’t do a lot of international travel is that sometimes some countries (not all of them) require you to have an onward ticket before they’ll even let you into their country. What that means is that you cannot even get on the plane to go to that country unless you have a ticket out of that country. It’s a real pain.

This is a big problem for my wife and I because we go to countries for three months at a time and we don’t know where we’ll want to go in three months, so we don’t have a ticket somewhere else. 

How do we get around this? 

There’s a service called Onward Ticket that I’ve used many times and I highly recommend it. Right on their website, it says, “Get a verified flight reservation within 60 seconds. Lightning-fast verified booking, flexible delivery.”

You basically go on their website and choose where you want to fly from and where you want to fly to. Something like “I’m going to be leaving Madrid on March 15th, and I’m going to go to New York City” but see it doesn’t matter what we enter as the destination as these countries don’t care where you go, they just want you out of their country on a certain day. 

Once you enter the date and the location it figures out the flights and it gives you a real flight confirmation that automatically cancels itself after 48 hours, you don’t have to do anything. It’s such a time-saver as compared to really booking a ticket (to anywhere) and dealing with trying to get your money back. The cost (as of this writing) is $14 per person. 

Talking about travel, there’s this island in a lake in Northern Italy on Lake Maggiore and it’s incredible. It took four hundred years to build the structures on this island. There’s an incredible art gallery, one hundred and thirty paintings, and outside it looks like a James Bond villain’s hideout. It has incredible gardens and wonderful architecture including “Statues, obelisks, and fountains that are perfectly integrated with the vegetation of ten scenic terraces.” 

These gardens are so intricate and so beautiful, and there’s even a family of white peacocks that live on this island. It’s been so popular for so long. People like Napoleon, Emperor Leopold II of Hapsburg, the King and Queen of Sardinia, Queen Victoria of England in 1879 (not the one that just died, I’m assuming her grandmother), Kings and Queens of Italy and Belgium, and even Charles and Diana, as well as people that have written amazing works of art like Tolstoy, Dumas, and even Hemingway (the last few chapters of A Farewell to Arms take place there). It’s absolutely incredible. If you do go there, let me know how it is.