232 Who Do You Think You Are?
accelerate my own learning and accelerate my productivity so that I can
get more done in less time.What event or series of events led to your discovery?I learned all about training on a park bench, after I’d lost a quarter of a
million dollars in a business venture. It was my first business venture
after getting out of college. The park was Macarthur Park in Los Angeles,
California.
Eighteen months before, I’d started this new venture. It was a
frozen yogurt and bakery store, which turned into a devastating loss. It
was not just a loss of resources, because ninety percent of the quarter
million dollars wasn’t even mine, it was money that was handed to me
through relatives and grandparents, and money that was gifted to me by
my parents. I had a lot of guilt surrounding this, and I wanted to learn
how to never have that happen to me again.
On the way home from Long Beach, California I took the long
way, and I went to Macarthur Park. I wish I could say it was a brutally
cold winter, but it wasn’t. It was summer and sunny outside. It was very
comfortable. I was sitting right across the street from a hotel owned by
one of my father’s friends. I figured if it got too uncomfortable, I could
at least go up to the hotel and sleep there.
While I was on that park bench, I was watching a heavy-set woman
who was there in the park. She put a dime into a bird birdseed machine.
She turned the knob, and the birdseed came out. Her goal was to get the
pigeons that were at the park to feed from her hand. So, I was just watching
this from the park bench. There was someone else on the park bench,
too. We thought about what to call this woman, and she became The
Pigeon Lady.
What was interesting was how she went about having her first
beak-to-hand experience. The first pigeon that walked up to her – you
know how pigeons walk – it bobbed up to her and put its beak into the
palm of her hand. It had that level of trust, and all the other pigeons
followed the one pigeon that started it. I considered it a dance – she was
dancing with them to get them to that level of trust. Once the trust was
initiated, they would always come back.
How she did it was she started walking gently and quietly and
casually – non-invasively – towards the pigeons. There was a whole flock
of pigeons bobbing along on the concrete there by the park. She’d walk
towards them and they’d walk away, and so she’d turn around and she’d