Are skateboards anything special?  Anything worth looking at?

Well, they're certainly nothing out of the ordinary, right?  And that's the problem.  Skateboards are so ordinary it's hard to even see them.  Want to see them for real?  Take a look at this video

By injecting a little visual incongruity into the mix, this video actually allows you to SEE skateboards the way a little kid might see them the very first time he looks at a boarder doing his thing.

And this trick isn't something limited to the magic of digital editing and special effects.  All artists pull this same trick.  Cezanne rescued apples from the everydayness of apples in exactly this way.  That's why we're fascinated by a painting of something as putatively boring as a still life.

Writers do it, too.  Just take a look at how Neal Stephenson was able to transform something as boring as eating cereal into a riveting experience:

"World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. The best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap'n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap'n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds… He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when cold milk and Cap'n Crunch are together but have not yet begun to pollute each other's essential natures." – Neal Stephenson, from Cryptonomicon

So the next time you're thinking about your passion for what you do or sell, try figuring out a way to inject a little incongruity into the picture.  Getting your audience to see it anew is often the first step in bringing them to share your passion for it.

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