"The Dip" on getting tickets

In an earlier post, I waved some tickets in your face and promised to say more about a little lesson I learned in the process of buying them.

To understand the lesson, you have to grasp how utterly unprepared the Live Nation ticketing system was for the deluge of Phish fans trying to get tickets to eleven concerts all at once:

• At 9:59 a.m., one minute before the on-sale date opened, I opened the event page. At 10:00 a.m., the page wouldn't reload. It wasn't until almost twenty minutes later before I could even view the event page again.


• Once the event page loaded, it was another half hour before clicking the "Buy Tickets" button would load the next page.


• When I finally got to the next page in the system, where I could select the number of seats I wanted, the server timed out on the way to reserving them.


• When that page finally loaded... well, you get the picture. There were still two more pages to go, as I later learned. All the while, the phone system was a nonstop busy signal. (I redialed over 100 times.)

After about an hour of unsuccessful attempts, I told a friend over IM, "I should probably give up and get some work done." I did have some work to do. And it seemed pointless to keep fighting the system when I was pretty sure the tickets were gone anyway—after all, these shows sell out in fifteen minutes, and it had already been an hour.

That's when I remembered Seth Godin's little book The Dip, which I read about a month ago. The central idea of the book is that you achieve excellence by knowing when to quit and when to persevere. The first concept—quitting well—is probably more interesting, but it was the second concept that helped me with the tickets.

Godin suggests that in any difficult endeavor, there will be an inevitable "dip" before you can achieve your goal. This is true of learning new skills or crafts, where the initial satisfaction of the activity wears off after a while, but if you want to get to true mastery, you have to "lean into the dip" by practicing. There is also a "dip" in career arcs, business growth, spiritual formation, and so on. Those who are willing to push through the dip will excel beyond the average precisely because most people are unwilling to persevere when it gets hard.

So when I felt like giving up on those tickets, it occurred to me: All around the country at this very moment, there are thousands of hippies thinking the same thing I am. They are all quitting, literally by the second, and when enough of them do, the Live Nation server will actually load these pages. So I kept plugging away, pushing through what I hoped was actually a Godin-style "dip."

Within twenty minutes, I had four tickets to the concert of my choice.


Buy The Dip from Amazon.com and I'll earn a few pennies, which I promise to use for a grilled cheese sandwich in the parking lot.