Photo by dailyinvention
Life is Good is a company that got popular by making tee shirts with catchy, optimistic, and warm taglines. I bought a few when I lived on the East Coast; my favorite was their “Think Outside the Box” with a graphic of an old-school television with a blank screen. The following is the Life is Good story pulled directly from their website:
In 1989, Bert and John Jacobs designed their first tee shirt. They knew nothing about the business. For five years, the brothers hawked tee shirts in the streets of Boston and traveled the East Coast, selling door-to-door in college dormitories.
They collected some good stories, but were not very prosperous. They lived on peanut butter and jelly, slept in their van, and showered when they could. Chicks were not impressed.
By the Fall of 1994, heading home from a long, less-than-fruitful roadtrip, Bert and John were desperately searching for answers to keep the dream alive. Little did they know, the only answer they needed was back in Boston, hanging up on their apartment wall.
Jake’s contagious grin, simple as it was, seemed to express everything the Jacobs brothers believed in. One fateful September day, they printed up 48 Jake shirts for a local street fair in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They laid the shirts out on their rickety card table. By noontime, all 48 of those tees were gone. A star was born.
Soon Jake was introduced to local retailers, and his simple message of optimism was embraced like nothing the brothers had ever seen. As demand for product soared, Jake’s team grew, and the Little Brand That Could began to spread across America.
Today, the New England based brand stays close to its roots, with an emphasis on humor and humility. Through Life is good Festivals, positive products, and a steady dose of ping pong, Jake’s crew does its best to keep the good vibes flowing.
Bert and John developed a very profitable company from scratch, as Life is Good products are sold everywhere nowadays, from REI and Dick’s Sporting Goods to Marshalls.
The “Think Outside the Box” tee shirt that I bought could not have been imagined if it wasn’t for Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, a 20-year old university student in Germany who patented the first electromechanical television system in 1884. I wanted to tell the world or at least anyone looking my way that I was one of those who was thinking outside the once original box, but I wasn’t. Being more concerned about how I saw myself and how others might perceive me, I was actually thinking inside. Attitudes, whatever they may be, are not something you can own; rather, they are embodied in ideas and actions.
There are a few problems with attributing oneself to thinking outside the box. The first is that many of us do a less-than-stellar job of thinking inside the box, and the second is that thinking outside the box can only be attributed to the process by which something was imagined after it’s creation by those looking from afar. Bert, John, and Paul were simply following their passions. It wasn’t thinking outside the box that specifically made them successful, but rather a willingness to fail, and a belief that they would prevail.
Mahatma Gandhi is famous for saying that, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Rather than talk about thinking outside the box, or trying to convince others that you embody any specific attitude for that matter, simply be it. Trying to think outside the box may bring you back inside.