Experiential advertising takes a Jamaican turn!

Here is the “making of”…

If you are interested in invention, creativity and design, take a few minutes to watch Woody Norris describe how his hypersonic speakers are revolutionizing the audio world, then read the Five Steps to Becoming the World’s Greatest Inventor below.

An extended bio is available on his website that offers further insights into his creative design process. While he might not describe it in these terms, Woody Norris is following some powerful invention and design routines that can be applied across a range of settings:

1. Fill Up Your Chicken Coop With Radios
Woody’s electronic knowledge was entirely self-taught, but his method for learning involved repairing dozens of broken radios he begged from the local repair shop on the way home from school. “I had a chicken coop full of 20 or 30 or 50 radios… I fixed most of them.”

“You know how some people can play the piano, they just pick out notes? I’ve always had that ability with electronics and I know rudimentary things about circuits just intuitively, or like it’s psychology, know how they worked. And if I don’t, I can figure it out pretty quick with just a clue here and there. So most of my electronic training is pretty elementary.”

Although his training was indeed elementary on one level – filling his chicken coop full of radios and trying to fix them was a PhD course in practical electronics. The takeaway is that whatever field you are working in, if you want to develop ground breaking solutions be sure to surround yourself with examples, models, prototypes, case studies, etc. and then tinker, play, fix, improve, tear apart, and rebuild. Fill up your chicken coop and start playing!

2. Crank Up the Curiosity and Charisma
After a brief stint with the Air Force, Woody got a job with the University of Washington. “I was making four hundred bucks a month, which was terrible at the time. Because I worked for the university, I could take classes for free. So I just took one during the day and then as many evening classes as I wanted for free. So I was having a heyday. I had a little old English Riley car that you cranked to start.”  The courses varied — electronic engineering, philosophy of religions, Spanish, business, psychology, accounting, etc. Woody was having a heyday, not just because he was meeting a lot of girls with his English Riley – but because he had the chance to follow his curiosity and hone his gift for salesmanship.

“They say life is what happens to you on the way to doing what you want to do. And I’ve just had a series of good things happen. But most of the good things that have happened to me in my whole life have been because I’m a good salesman. And that’s probably the basic skill. If you’re a good salesman and you can communicate well, you can almost be anything. Almost be anything. That’s what I think.”

3.  Work Weekends
Using his experience in the Air Force, Woody came up with a sonar version of radar to listen to sounds inside the body.  Once he had the idea, Woody immediately spent an entire weekend making a workable prototype of his invention. This ability to harness uninterrupted blocks of extremely focused time is often what separates idea people from actual inventors. Here Woody describes the process of inventing the first sonogram – a breakthrough product that launched his career:

“When a car or truck or train goes by and you hear the whistle go, aaaayuuuuu, it goes up and then down in pitch because sound waves travel at a finite, fairly slow speed. The pitch changes if the waves are moving as they are being produced. So I got this idea to emit ultrasonic sound into the skin, just with a little thing on the end of a flashlight I bought at Radio Shack. I put a speaker on the other end and through some little tricky math and manipulation, if anything under the skin was moving when that ultrasonic wave went in, it would bounce back — the movement would cause it to shift its pitch. And by some tricky circuitry you could hear the movement under the skin.”

“I made it on a weekend and I sold it and I quit working for the school. And I haven’t really — except for a real brief time — worked for anybody since I was in my early 20′s. I made my own living by my wits.”

4. Invent Stuff
There is an African proverb that especially applies to the creative process: “You learn how to cut down trees by cutting them down.“  At the risk of stating the obvious, becoming skilled in invention, creativity and design depends on actually inventing, creating and designing things! Woody Norris decided to take the money from his sonar and set up a full-time invention studio. “So then I just started inventing stuff. And it’s like anything else, once you start doing it, you get good at it. You get the routine down. Inventing is mostly a routine, I think.”

So what sparks invention? “Thinking about it. If you are interested in math, and you read books on math and you do formulas, pretty soon you’ll get insights that other people don’t get because you attend to it. If you like music, writing music, or whatever, you’ll develop a skill. Now, I will tell you that people who play the piano strictly by rote, taking lessons for 20 years, will never be as good as a guy who also has a knack. It’s like an athlete. You can go to a certain limit as an athlete, but if you don’t have the muscle structure and that and this and the other, the way the whole body is fixed when you’re born, you’ll never be a Michael Jordan. So there’s a combination.”

5. Don’t Invest Time or Money in Stupid Ideas
This last principle might be the most difficult one to master – basically knowing which ideas to kill before they waste too much of your precious time. Not only has Woody been a prolific inventor, but he has consistently come up with inventions that make it to market and make money.

“I’ve got a really good gift of determining before you spend any money if a product is stupid or not. And most people lose that objectivity when they get involved in anything. Writing songs or writing a book. They think everything they do is wonderful.”

Conclusion:
Not many people will become as prolific as Woody Norris, but all of us can be inspired by his open-mindedness, and no-holds barred pursuit when following our curiosity and intuition. So – it’s time to get started, NOW!

1. Fill Up Your Chicken Coop With Radios
2. Crank Up the Curiosity and Charisma
3. Work Weekends
4. Invent Stuff
5. Don’t Invest Time or Money in Stupid Ideas