CHAPTER 3Finding Common Ground

When Harry Houdini was barely 20 years old, he discovered he was quite adept at slipping out of handcuffs and other types of shackles used to restrain human beings since ancient times. Unfortunately for Harry, no one cared. There wasn’t much of a market for this kind of spectacle. To have a skill like that back then would be similar to developing a smartphone app in 2005—a full two years before the iPhone debuted in 2007. That’s the challenge when taking on a new market: make or do something consumers are quite familiar with, and you’ll have lots of competition. On the other hand, pushing something completely new will require you to establish its worth to everyone else—no mean feat. One way to make it easier is ...

Get Breakthrough Communication: A Powerful 4-Step Process for Overcoming Resistance and Getting Results now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.