One day, while I was meditating in my Zen Garden in my house I saw a vision of an e-mail that had the subject line ‘enjoy your coke’..
I was startled and quickly checked my iPhone.
Lo and behold – there was an new mail with the subject ‘enjoy your coke’..!
When I opened the mail – I was SHOCKED – it had the complete Coca Cola formulae, the ingredients , where they came from and how I could actually start making Coke for myself!
I was stunned and excited. The world’s biggest treasure had been GIFTED TO ME!!
I mentally made a plan of licensing the manufacturing, and creating the next 100+ billion dollar Company for myself…
As I went thru the ‘become an overnight billionaire plan’ , I began to feel a bit uncomfortable…
I was stalling on the issues of how I would brand this new cola – obviously I could not call it ‘Coke’ or ‘Coca Cola’.. Also, how as I supposed to market this new Brand,
once the bottles were ready?
How was I going to distribute the product and get supermarkets to stock it? Even more challenging was how I would create the Consumer PULL to make consumers BUY my new Cola?
Suddenly, having the FORMULAE of the world’s best drink did not seem to very rewarding… actually making that formulae into a saleable product seemed to be a Herculean task…almost like a curse than a gift..
A sharp pain stung me and I realized that a red ant had bitten me on my foot… And I figured that all this while I was in a state of deep stupor like dream…. this entire episode had all been a figment of my mediation.
As I thanked Buddha, an angry parrot slowed its flight and barked at me ‘ Rodinhood, the secret in all things successful is executing the idea – not the idea itself. Look around you.. How a iPod works or a Zynga game interacts or how angry birds like me get gamified is public knowledge… but replicating that success once again is impossible. So please dream of being original and executing that original idea like hell’…
And having educated me on the futility of replication, and on the merits of originality and execution the parrot angrily fluttered away….