Tickling your opponent to win a UFC fight. What comes to mind?
Sheer unmanliness? Bush league? Genius?
Something very close to that actually happened last year.
In an amateur MMA match in Maine, fighter Mason Lewis got trapped in a nasty choke. No angle, no leverage, he was doomed.
So he did something nobody could have fathomed.
He reached down and tickled his opponent’s bare foot. The guy laughed, loosened up just long enough, and Lewis slipped out and eventually won.
Totally legal. Totally ridiculous. Totally effective.
The UFC world tried not to make a big deal out of it. “Tickle your way to victory” is not the image they want.
But to me, the tickle was beautiful.
It was surprising and creative. The octagon suddenly turned into wrestling your older brother in the family room.
And it got me thinking about all the innovations that look stupid… right up until they work.
It reminds me of Wilt Chamberlain, who some people still say was the greatest basketball player ever. Wilt was a mutant combination of size and talent. Yet he had his own tickles.
Wilt used to dunk from the free throw line during foul shots. A ridiculous but legal idea that forced the league to rewrite the rule book.
After they banned that, Wilt was so bad at free throws that he tried something arguably more taboo—the underhand granny shot. It enabled him to shoot in the 60 percent range—remarkable for him.
But then he changed back to shooting like everyone else, because in his words, he did not want to look like a sissy.
The man who scored 100 points in a game, one of the greatest athletes in history, abandoned the most effective solution he had because it felt embarrassing. Because it felt too much like tickling.
A lot of us have ideas like the granny shot or the MMA tickle. Moves that might actually work, but we’re too embarrassed to try.
Our used machinery business, Graff-Pinkert, seems to get tougher every year. Whatever edge we used to have with refurbished cam multi-spindles, my beloved “sexy ugly treasure,” much of that advantage is gone. People still run those machines, but they do not want to pay much for them anymore.
These days it feels like half the time we are selling the same stuff as most dealers: CNC turning centers, CNC Swiss, the usual suspects. It’s fine and it often pays the bills, but it’s the same game as everyone else.
It’s the other half of our deals that keeps things interesting.
The “weird machines.” The oddball equipment. The brands and models that fewer dealers even know exist, let alone know how to value or explain.
Those deals require creativity, curiosity and nerve.
And those are the deals that bring big wins. They also feel extra satisfying and fun because that’s when we still get to be different.
So now I find myself looking for our tickle. Something beyond just buying and selling machines that fewer people know about.
I want our own dunk-from-the-foul-line idea. A business granny shot. Not a gimmick. Not something silly just for the sake of being silly. Just the clever, surprising move that gives us an unfair advantage.
I wonder if maybe I already have that audacious tickle idea rattling around in my brain. Maybe I’m so afraid or embarrassed to try it that it’s remaining dormant. Maybe it’s something so simple and obvious that I’m blind to it.
I wish this was the place for my big reveal but I don’t have it yet.
Question: What are your favorite tickles you’ve noticed in sports or business?
