Paired Opposites and Third Gravitating Bodies

Henri Poincaré did not discover Chaos Theory but he clearly heard its footsteps in 1887 when he published The Three Body Problem.

His math is still used by NASA today.

In astrophysics, stars and planets are “gravitating bodies” because they attract and hold mass and alter the orbits of one another.

Gravity is a useful innovation model for professional ad writers since our goal is to attract and hold the attention of potential customers and perhaps, even, to alter their orbits.

A Gravitating Body is anything that tugs at your attention.

Two gravitating bodies with a high degree of divergence are known as Paired Opposites. 

Employ them and you’ll get attention.

But when you add a third gravitating body – something highly divergent from each of the first two – and it fits – you are about to see things get exponential.

Its degree of divergence is determined by how unexpected the thing is.

Its power of convergence is determined by how well it fits.

First Gravitating Body:

A musical about the Founding Fathers

Second Gravitating Body:

George Washington is black and most of the other “white” characters are played by minorities.

Third Gravitating Body:

The dialogue is delivered in rap music, with each character having their own cadence and style.

A third gravitating body with a high degree of divergence and powerful convergence is the ever-present secret of widespread, mass appeal success. Hit songs, blockbuster movies, bestselling novels and the signature dishes of gourmet chefs always have them.

A successful third gravitating body doesn’t belong… but it fits.

Three gravitating bodies are also the secret of successful ad campaigns. This is a formula is known to every Cognoscenti of Magical Worlds.

1. We can easily imagine a play about the Founding Fathers. But a musical?
2. Be honest. If you were told that a play was to feature ethnic minorities as the Founding Fathers of the United States, you would assume the play to be:
3. (A) a satire
4. (B) a comedy
5. (C) an alternate history about the America we “might have been.”

But Hamilton is none of these.

1. The play’s dialogue in rap is divergent because rap didn’t exist during the time of the Founding Fathers. And it’s not the style of speech we associate with venerated historical figures. Rap is associated with passionate, creative people who are downtrodden, overlooked, abused and angry.

Wait a minute. The Founding Fathers were all those things. Hamilton’s rap is divergent – highly unexpected – but convergent as well – it makes perfect sense as it brings together all the other divergent elements.

Third gravitating bodies seem out of sequence to the brain’s linear, sequential, deductive-reasoning left hemisphere but they feel perfectly elegant to the pattern-recognizing, big-picture right.

We are rarely conscious of third gravitating bodies because they always make sense. This is why we don’t realize how much they don’t belong.

If you want your business to go exponential, you have to do something unexpected; something that doesn’t belong, but fits.

Do you want to make 2017 a bigger year than 2016?

The first step is to visit the rabbit hole where Indiana Beagle will tell you a secret.

Just click the image at the top of the page and Indy will greet you on the other side.

Tell him I said hello.

Roy H. Williams