Have you seen this guy? If not, I’m about to explain the principle behind his national media coverage and the reason I am a gigantic fan of Jesse Cole.

Jesse Cole is the owner of the Savannah Bananas, a small-time baseball team out of Savannah Georgia that is getting massive national media attention. And I do mean massive… ESPN is doing an 8-part series on them, and they have been featured on nearly ever major news network in the last few weeks. In fact, we booked him as the celebrity entrepreneur for this year’s Growcation months ago. But I was talking to his agent recently and discovered that he is getting booked for nearly 10X what we paid for him to come to our event; he has seen such massive success that he can ask pretty much any price he wants to for speaking engagements.

It’s gotten huge! And Jesse recently made a video discussing the success.

It wasn’t always success for Jesse and the Savannah Bananas. Before they were the Savannah Bananas, they were the Gastonia Grizzlies facing bankruptcy. He and his wife sold their house, bought the stadium and team, transformed it into the Savannah Bananas, and looked failure dead in the face.

They were sleeping on an air mattress, down to the last dollar in their bank account, and didn’t even have enough money for Top Ramen… (which, btw, is still less than $1). Initially? It looked like a complete failure.

So how did they find this success?

They pushed through!

Jesse stuck to his guns. He held firm to the “fans first and entertainment always” philosophy that he had developed. They tried different things, gave every idea its chance, and kept what worked well. Eventually they began to see comfortable success, and for a few years seemed to plateau…

It was back in 2019 that I read his book “Find Your Yellow Tux” and realized that he is a genius!

His whole thing is about the bananas, everything he does is over the top and crazy and fun, to the point that even his clothing reflects what they do: he wears a yellow tuxedo everywhere he goes.

How it Changed Things For Me

When I read his book it inspired me to do the same thing.

His whole concept was about being different from the rest of your industry. For me, that meant taking the violin on stage with me. I wanted to be known as the violin entrepreneur, but I’d only spent six months consistently playing the violin.

I’ll be honest, it was pretty bad at first.

But I committed, I pushed through, and made it my own version of the yellow tuxedo. The growth we have seen since then has proved to me that the commitment Jesse made didn’t just work for him: it would work for anyone.

The Key To Making This Work

Honestly, the hard part about this is not finding your Yellow Tux.

Especially for entrepreneurs who are some of the most incredibly creative people in the world. It’s easy for us to make an awesome plan to step out and be unique and change the world. The problem is that we give up.

As soon as it gets uncomfortable without immediate results, we change our plan and go an entirely different way.

I’ve done it, I get the feeling you’ve done it, and it’s not uncommon. It’s instinctual for human beings to pull back when something becomes uncomfortable without visible results. I see it all the time: I just had someone tell me they wanted to pull the plug on a project we’ve been working on for months, even though we were two months from done. Ultimately they agreed to finish it, because there was no logical reason to put in 70% of the effort required to finish something and then not finish it!

If you haven’t heard the Three Feet From Gold story, check it out sometime.

It’s going to be normal for you to want to give up. I even had to fight the feeling this week as we had the latest episode of Doing Business As come out without the major media recognition we expected. But it is imperative that you don’t. Don’t waste all the energy and effort you’ve exerted so far.

Push through the discomfort to find your success.

It might not look like you expect it to, but you may also learn and receive more from the process of getting to your goal than you will by achieving the goal itself.