Back in the day, the milkman delivered us glass bottles of milk, with foil on top.
Blue tits were the first birds to come up with the idea of pecking through the foil to get a drink of fresh cow’s milk.
The trick was first recorded in Limerick in 1921 and by the forties, every Blue Tit up and down Ireland was robbing us in our sleep.
Do you think the Blue Tits were passing the trick on to their peers, or that there were several pockets of Blue Tits around Ireland with the same idea?
Blue Tit enthusiasts can’t account for how or why they all figured it out over those twenty years, but when they acted on their idea, life was better for them.
Isolate them sheep
Here’s another analogy.
Remember those cattle grids that stop livestock from escaping from farms down the road?
Well, in the sleepy town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, Wales there’s a small colony of sheep that have figured out the traps.
They tuck their little legs up into their wool and roll over the bars.
A trick that no shepherd would want repeated.
The unions of Blaenau Ffestiniog contained the flamboyant conduct, “to isolate them so they don’t go to market and boast about their grid-rolling activities to other sheep.”
Act, don’t hold back
The moral of the story is, if you have a great idea, act on it!
Because if you don’t, the chances are someone else will.
Ideas are rarely unique. Let’s say we’ve just come up with the greatest campaign idea of all time, a certain winner at Cannes this year.
Well there’s a pretty strong chance somebody else thought of it first.
The difference is, was it acted on? So don’t hold back.
Alfred Tennyson famously said, “It’s better to have tried and failed than to live life wondering what would have happened if I had tried.”
If Thomas Edison had stopped, we may still be living in darkness.
If Henry Ford had given up, we may still be riding on horseback.
And without Tim Berners-Lee there may not have been the Internet.
Or…
Perhaps these great innovators just got their ideas out first?
Need help with your next marketing campaign? Contact paul.james@ardmore.co.uk to set up a chat.
