Whenever someone asks Andy Andrews what he does for a living, he tells them he’s a noticer.
The New York Times bestselling author, speaker and business consultant made sure that was the first thing his audience knew about him when he spoke Thursday night at the 30th anniversary dinner for clients of local planning firm Financial Concepts at the Trotter Convention Center. Andrews said he’s been making observations, partially for his own amusement, since his childhood and that’s allowed him to become a successful writer and speaker. Andrews has written 26 books, three of which were New York Times bestesllers, and has spoken and consulted with businesses and organizations all over the country.
The three bestsellers include “The Noticer,” “How Do You Kill 11 Million People?” and “The Traveler’s Gift.”
Andrews also has a Columbus connection — the Orange Beach, Alabama resident attended Lee High School in Columbus as a teenager.
“We were there at the same time,” said Financial Concepts owner Rhonda Ferguson. “So I knew him from then. But since then he’s gone on to bigger and greater things.”
Ferguson said she’d been trying to arrange for Andrews to speak at a clients’ dinner for years because his books in particular are so special to so many people.
“It was just a very special evening for us to bring so many families together and so many of them knew Andy or have a connection to him from his writing or all the things he’s done in his career,” Ferguson said. “So it was really special to us for our 30th anniversary to have him back.”
At the dinner Andrews didn’t talk much about his books, focusing instead on the advice he gives people and businesses when they ask him to speak. He said he gives the same advice, often without knowing anything about the business’ industry: Find a new way to compete so that “the other team doesn’t even know what game you’re playing.”
“(That) generally means working in a way that people have never thought of or that people think of and just totally dismiss,” he said.
He told a story from his childhood about the summer he and his friends spent making up games in the pool. They played a game called “Dolphin,” the rules of which were to tread water in the deep end and see who could leap out of the water the highest. One kid in particular always won, Andrews remembered.
Until one day when another kid “did something bizarre,” Andrews said. Instead of going up, he went down until his knees were touching the bottom of the pool.
“Then all of the sudden he pushed off,” Andrews said. “…We said, ‘Oh my gosh, we have a new dolphin!'”
The day “somebody went down instead of up” became the day the game changed, he said. That principle can be applied to business.
People always talk about choices being the thing that determines how a person lives or how successful a business is, Andrews said. But it’s a person’s thinking that determines what kind of choices he or she makes.
“But we can choose how we think,” he said. “We can choose to go to the bottom of the pool.”
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