Say you’re a goddess who’s been assigned an impossible task: to recruit the greatest acolyte your religion has ever known to undergo a nigh-impossible quest that will take decades of their life.
You know all the best monks will be meeting at a grand mass hosted by the emperor. But the problem is, nobody knows that you’re a goddess.
Your earthly form is that of a leprous monk. Your body covered in open sores, your possessions all but non-existent, and in the eyes of the organized religious in-group, you are simply “uncool”.
So what do you do?
In the Ming Dynasty Chinese novel, Journey to the West, the Bodhisattva of Mercy, Guan-yin, faced just such a problem. She couldn’t just barge in. There were guards and bouncers and an emperor that wasn’t exactly shy about lopping off trespassers’ heads. And if she revealed herself in all her impossible glory and power, then the sort of applicants she’d get would be glory-seekers and power-mongers. Kind begets kind, after all.
Instead, what she does is divinely brilliant. She staged the Tang Dynasty equivalent of hosting an award show: she got an unusually good-looking robe and staff, and ascribed to them all manner of magical properties. Then she charged an impossibly high price for it, something only an emperor could afford.
But, she stipulated, if the buyer of her wares was a truly virtuous person, then the goods would become a gift and the price would go down to zero.
The first customer to pass buy was also a beggar-monk (Guan-yin had not shed her guise as a mendicant monk and appeared to everyone as a beggar with some shiny things for sale). He walked away laughing at the astronomical pricing, and the ridiculous exception made for the ‘truly virtuous’ person. More a cynic than a monk, he failed to grasp the items’ true meaning.
Next came a palace official. Knowing instinctively that his emperor was a man interested in notions of virtue and worth, he realized just what a gift he had on his hands. Such unique encounters are truly rare. Staff and clothing aside, how often have do you meet a beggar on the streets with a story and a challenge like this? The physical value of the objects on offer is nothing compared to the chance for a lowly official to demonstrate what taste and values he and his boss share. Like Supreme: If you don’t get it, it’s not for you.
So the official brings the monk to the emperor. After hearing the story, the most esteemed ruler and his bureaucrats can think of nobody more worthy of receiving the staff and robe than his top lecturer. And just like that, Guan-yin has her recruit.
This is creativity at work. What Dave Trott calls predatory thinking: conventional wisdom would be to interview everyone. To try and get in front as many people as possible. That kind of approach leads new graduates to beg every creative director in the country to meet them for coffee. Not that coffee is a bad thing. But people are busy and the chance that somebody remarkable is going to ask them out for coffee is about as rare as a sore-covered beggar being a Bodhisattva in disguise. Besides, most graduates don’t actually want advice, they want a job.
Instead, think hard about what you want, and offer something irresistible to the people who could get you there. Not something that’s irresistible to everyone. Price and brand it so that you waste as little time with the cynics who ‘don’t get it’ as possible. And if you don’t know who/what you’re looking for? Be invaluable to the one who does. If you don’t know who the perfect recruit is, get the foremost expert to tell you. If you can’t stroll in to see the emperor, make it so that the gatekeeper will be rewarded for introducing you to him.
It helps if you have something shiny. A story and experience that people can’t help but pass on. Take this one. It’s a story that’s over 500 years old, but it repeats itself every nanosecond in our attention-seeking economy. Somebody has something or knows somebody you need. While you may not have the power to take it, anybody possesses the power to make them want something you have.
All you need is something shiny and a damn good hook.