In 2005, Kyle MacDonald was a 25-year-old unemployed guy in Montreal, being supported by his girlfriend, a dietician. She was close to ending things with him, because she was so tired of him mooching off her for rent and other expenses. He had to think of something fast. He applied for a few more jobs (again), and heard nothing (again.)
What he really wanted was to own a home, free and clear, so that he and his girlfriend could live there, without worrying about paying rent or getting kicked out.
But, as a guy who was barely making ends meet, working itinerant gigs promoting products at trade shows, that seemed a far-off dream.
Pondering what he should do, he remembered a game he played as a kid, called “Bigger, Better,” where you trade a small, common object, for something else better, and trade that for something else, and on and on, and see what you can get. He remembered some kid in his town started with a penny one day, and ended up with a couch by the end of the day.
In a spark of genius, or madness–is there a difference?–he decided he would try to realize his dream of getting a house. By playing the game. “I would become the greatest Bigger, Better player the world had ever seen, bar none,” he wrote of his plan.
He spotted a red paperclip on his desk, and decided he’d start with that. He posted an ad online, soliciting trades. “I’m going to make a continuous chain of ‘up trades’ until I get a house. Or an Island. Or a house on an island. You get the idea,” he wrote.
He traded the paperclip for a wooden pen carved like a fish. Progress!
Then the fish-pen for a doorknob with a hand-carved ghoulish face on it. (Questionable progress.)
Then the doorknob for an old Coleman camping stove. (Definite progress.)
Then the camping stove for a used generator. (Progress!)
This is when things started to get tough for Kyle. The offers for the generator were pretty lame. A rusty, broken-down treadmill (Bigger, but definitely not Better.) A used refrigerator (!)
Kyle was demoralized, and thought about giving up. He was still so far off from giving a house to his girlfriend. “The day I’d traded away my red paperclip was fun, but now the trades seemed like a chore. I felt ready to scrap the game, or at least put it on the back burner and find another way to pay the rent,” he wrote.
Almost ready to give up, a got a call that changed his life.
A popular national radio program in Canada heard about his project, and wanted to have him on the show.
After he was on the show, BoingBoing linked to his site, and his phone (listed on his website) started ringing off the hook–every manner of newspaper, TV show, magazine and website around the world wanted to interview him. And he started getting offers for his generator again.
The coolest offer was an “instant party”–a keg, a neon Budweiser sign, and an IOU to fill the keg with beer once the next trade was complete.
He decided to travel to NYC to make the trade. When he woke up the next morning in his hotel, he went down to the hotel’s basement storage unit, where he had put the generator.
It was gone.
He ran to the front desk, frantically. It turned out, the gas was wafting up the stairwell–guests were complaining all night. The fire departent came, and removed the generator as a fire hazard.
He saw his whole project–and his dream of making things right with his girlfriend–flash before his eyes. He had come so far (a paperclip into a generator–and international news!) And it all seemed ruined.
?He visited every fire department in a 30-block radius of the hotel. Finally, he located the generator. His story was saved.
A Montreal radio personality, Michel Barrette, heard about the quest. He offered to trade Kyle the instant party for a used snowmobile, and Kyle accepted.
This is the first thing Kyle received that had significant value. And why did Kyle get offered that?
Because Kyle’s efforts were becoming a story. A good one. Would Barrette have traded that snowmobile for a keg of beer and a neon sign, without a story attached? No way. But as soon as you’ve got a good story going, people want to get involved, even if it costs them money.
On another national radio program in Canada, and the host asked Kyle if there was anywhere in the world he wouldn’t travel to make a trade (Kyle was making all the trades face-to-face, in order to meet the people, get a good story, and make new friends.)
Impulsively, Kyle stated, “I will go anywhere in the world except for Yahk, British Colombia.” He said that because, well, he wanted to make a joke, and “Yakh” sounded like a good joke.
As you can imagine, the good people of the tiny, remote town of Yahk got incensed. A local snowmobile magazine said they’d trade the snowmobile for an all-expenses-paid vacation for two to scenic Yahk, with a day of skiing included, to show Kyle how awesome Yahk was.
Kyle figured this must be a sign, so he agreed to the trade. He saw that this game had legs, and that the Yahk connection had the greatest “funtential,” a word he coined. Now he just had to get the snowmobile 3,000 miles across Canada.
Fortunately, Kyle had been wearing a uniform with a “Cintas” logo (Cintas being a uniform maker) when he had been making all his trades, as an inside joke with a friend. A guy from Cintas saw the press, and wanted a vacation (and the PR for his company.)
The Cintas guy offered to trade Kyle the all-expenses-paid trip for a used box truck with a Cintas logo, big enough for a snowmobile. Kyle drove the truck and the snowmobile across the country to Yahk, and delivered the snowmobile there, and the Cintas guy flew out to take his vacation.
Now the owner of a moving truck, Kyle was starting to feel like he was getting somewhere far beyond his paperclip.
A guy from a well-known recording studio in Toronto, who needed a truck to haul a lot of gear, offered a recording contract, including 30 hours of recording and 50 hours of post-production, plus a pitch for the album to Sony Music and XM radio, in exchange for the truck.
The recording contract was one of the hottest things Kyle had to trade. Offers flooded in from around the world (including from a young woman offering her virginity, which Kyle declined.) He ended up giving the contract to an aspiring singer-songwriter named Jody, who offered a year of free rent in a nice duplex she owned in downtown Phoenix.
The year of free rent got traded quickly, to a woman who offered an afternoon with her boss at the restaurant where she waited tables.
Why would Kyle trade a year of free rent for an afternoon hanging out with a restaurant boss?
Because the restaurant was Alice Cooperstown, owned by shock-rocker Alice Cooper (the one who Mike Myers and Dana Carvey bow down to–“We’re Not Worthy!”–in Wayne’s World.) Cooper loved Kyle’s mission, and wanted to help. (See what happens when you get a really good story going?)
Now that was a hot item! Again, offers flooded in from around the world–fans of Cooper were dying for this opportunity.
Kyle traded the afternoon to a huge Alice Cooper fan for…
A snowglobe.
A snowglobe?
It was a KISS (the band) snowglobe, motorized with adjustable lighting. But still…
Kyle faced what amounted to a mutiny on his blog, which now had thousands of followers around the world. They universally thought that he had ruined the entire saga (which was now 9 months in) and had gone noticeably backwards. He traded an incredible experience hanging out with a celebrity for… a snow globe? WTF?!
However, unbeknownst to the haters, Kyle had actually made a double trade. LA actor/producer Corbin Bernsen had heard about the project, and wanted to get involved. He had offered a paid, speaking role in a movie he was producing, but the trades had to be authentic, and Bernsen was already friends with Cooper, so had no use for an afternoon hanging out with Cooper, because he already did that regularly.
However, it turned out that Bernsen was an avid snow globe collector–in fact, he had one of the largest snow globe collections in the world (6,000+) So when Kyle got the offer for the KISS snowglobe, he asked Bernsen if he wanted it. Indeed, he did–as he didn’t have a KISS snow globe yet. So Kyle secured a promise for the acting role from Bernsen for the snow globe. With that promise, he traded the Alice Cooper afternoon to the snow globe guy, and then traded to snow globe for the acting role. (Economists call this “indirect exchange.”)
Now Kyle’s quest was all over the media even more, on CNN, and Good Morning America, and many other major outlets around the world.
The small town of Kipling, Saskatchewan, Canada, decided they wanted to seal the deal with Kyle.
They called, offering an two-story, 3-bedroom, 2-bath home on their Main Street, in exchange for the acting role, for which they’d hold an audition for locals.
Because so much media was following Kyle’s adventure, this was the media opportunity of the century for Kipling, even at the cost of the house, which (judging from other local listings) was worth at least $100,000. They even offered to build “The World’s Largest Red Paperclip” on the front lawn, as a tourist attraction, which they ended up doing.
Kyle took them up on their offer. The town hosted “Saskatchewan Biggest Housewarming Party, Ever.” Thousands of people from across Canada and the US showed up, including most of the people who Kyle traded with. During the party, the town hosted the auditions for the role, and 19-year-old local named Nolan Hubbard won the part.
Kyle was about to enter the house with his girlfriend Dominique, nearly a year to the day since he started his trading saga. Before he did, though, he asked Corrina, the woman who had traded the paperclip for the fish pen originally, if he could borrow the paperclip and use it for a very specific and important purpose. She agreed.
Then, Kyle bent the red paperclip into a ring, and before he and his girlfriend Dominique were about to enter the house they now owned. He got down on one knee, and proposed. She said yes.
What can we learn from Kyle’s amazing story?
While playing “Bigger, Better” is probably not the most reliable way to get a house, or anything else of high value, the story does have replicable lessons.
The main lesson is, once you are part of an interesting story, people want to help you fulfill that story. When you embark on a great story in your life, you are in a sense creating a real life “movie”–and there’s nothing people want more than roles in a movie, whether it’s a major role, a cameo, or even a small part. Creating and living into a great story is, bar none, the most reliable way to motivate people to get involved in what you’re up to.
Another important lesson is that, in the realm of story, money becomes relative. Once Kyle got past the beer-keg “instant party,” most of the trades had real financial value, and a lot of the traders were “losing money” on their trades. In fact, Kyle even “lost” a lot of money with the Alice Cooper-snow globe trade, as the Cooper celebrity afternoon had a very high value (if it even could be bought, which was unlikely), and the snow globe was worth only $50 on eBay at most.
But, while Kyle definitely wanted his house, he and the other traders weren’t in it just for the money. They were in it for the story. This story is now one of the defining aspects of Kyle’s life–and was a meaningful tale for everyone else involved as well.
When you (and your customers and clients) start valuing things in terms of how much they’ll contribute to the value of the stories in your lives, rather than how much they’re worth on the market, common products such as paperclips, fish pens, doorknobs, camping stoves, and generators, and snow globes—and even larger things such as snowmobiles and trucks—become vastly more valuable than their market values. They become central plot points in life-altering stories.
If you’re a business owner, or a self-employed professional, have you thought much lately about the stories you’re weaving in your own business?
Are you offering your clients just any old service? Is your service just any old red paperclip to them?
Or is your service part of a (true) narrative that gets them excited to be a part of your business offering, and has life-changing impact on their lives?
Think about how Kyle “refreshed” the story around a paperclip, in order to create tremendous value for himself and all who followed his tale…
If you’re ready for a “refresh” of your own marketing writing– to communicate the grander narrative that you and your clients are part of in your work together… then I want to help you.
I want to help you take any boring, stale, generic copy you may have on your website, or your marketing newsletters, and turn it into the kind of inspiring story that calls people to action–just like Kyle called hundreds of people around North America to passionate action to be a part of his saga.
Let’s get on the phone for an hour… and turn a paperclip (your current copy) into a house (the copy you’re going to have when I’m done with it!)
Here’s how you can get on my schedule.
In just an hour, I will write copy for you that completely reframes the way you, and your clients, see your business.
Talk soon!
–Michael
