Join A Team.

Today's Marketing Cookie is about teamwork.

I believe it is nearly impossible to reach the full potential of your personal capability without working selflessly on a team toward a singular goal. It's true. Whether it be a team sport, a band, or a committee, a team will learn to maximize the specialized skills of each member. This, in turn, will encourage each specialist to perfect their contribution for the success of the team, and will likely lead to achieving greater personal performance. As counterintuitive as it may sound, the best way to increase your mastery of a personal skill is to do it together with others.

I have been teaching myself to play the guitar for the past twelve months, using an incredibly innovative game on the Xbox called RockSmith. There is a special cable I can use to connect the Xbox together with my guitar, and then let the game teach me to correctly play hundreds of awesome rock songs with absolute accuracy. The Xbox monitors the pickups from the guitar with extreme sensitivity and will not permit me to proceed in the game until I have plucked and strummed every note and chord with perfect timing and pitch.

After breaking dozens of strings and after thousands of hours of playing guitar nearly every day, I still haven't learned to perform. There is a difference between playing and performing. Although I know hundreds of chords and can produce harmonics, bends, slides, tremolos, and other techniques, I don't feel like I'm making real music. So, I've signed up to join a band at a local music school.

The school will put me together with a drummer, bass guitar player, a keyboard player, and we will form a band. As a bonus, my wife has agreed to sing lead vocals in the band, which is so awesome. Anyway, our band will practice together for twelve weeks, have a recording session to create our album, and we will perform a live concert in the spring. I am so excited because I believe I will finally transform from a guy just trying to learn the techniques of playing guitar into a member of a band who creates music.

It will only be awesome, however, if I can learn to play with them.

There's an old proverb that says, "Just as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." If you have a knife sharpener in your kitchen, you'll notice that it is made of the same material as the knives themselves. It's the same way for you and me. Just as a knife in the drawer cannot sharpen itself, playing guitar in my room won't make me a rock star. To do that, I have to get out there and be a part of something bigger than myself... and you do too. Whatever your skill or interest, I encourage you to get ready to go out there and play with others, because as today's fortune says, "You will soon be asked to join a team. Work cooperatively."