Marketers who have got hold of your email address send you information about clever “retirement jobs”. But when you get to see these lists of jobs you wonder how realistic they are in the real world. How can these so-called “retirement” jobs be applicable to your individual circumstances? Do they really get your heart beating faster?
One night, just after midnight, I was walking from Clovelly corner to Kalk Bay on my own. No cars were on the main road. No one else was walking at that time in the darkness. I had walked this walk many times before and never felt afraid.
I sensed someone was behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a young man with blonde hair coming towards me with a baseball bat. As he struck with his baseball bat, I turned around and raised my arm in defence. This move prevented the blow from smashing into my skull. I told the young man to leave me alone and go home. Something seemed to change in him and he ran away back towards Clovelly. Continue reading “When you face a life-threatening event, will you be prepared?”
A standing joke of an optimist is someone who believes that they won’t encounter a pothole on their way to work, will find their electricity on in the morning, running water from their taps, have mail delivered, experience a drop in energy prices and not get robbed at their home or their car hijacked and stolen.
Creative living requires responding to life’s challenges. Blackouts have provided opportunities. Last Christmas new types of gifts appeared in Father Christmas stockings such as battery-powered torches and lights, LED reading lamps and butane and propane gas cylinders for boiling hot water. Outdoor and camping stores have many blackout survival tools these days. Not to mention the investment in generators and renewables for residents and business. Continue reading “Creative approaches necessary for solving everyday challenges”
You’ve thought of a new product idea but don’t believe that it will match up to what the so-called professionals can concoct. An idea hatched in a bedroom studio, kitchen table, backyard shed or garage doesn’t seem to have the lustrous glamour of those that come from research and development laboratories, test kitchens and design fests.
Start-ups come up with brilliant new ideas but they fail on execution. Take “WeTeachMe”, a course platform, which attracted no clients after 12 months. Living off savings the small team were ready to throw in the towel.
The problem with creativity is that ideas are merely ideas. It’s only when ideas are put into action or implemented that you can know if they will be successful or not.
This is why people can get so confused in brainstorming meetings. Those clever individuals who use their flashes of brilliance to communicate their superiority to their bosses in the room never actually implement the ideas. Their creative ideas that seem so impressive in the moment melt like candy floss when exposed to the real-world reality of business.
A boy in a children’s swimming pool. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Finding uses for products can help to open new markets. For an aspiring entrepreneur or small business owner an interesting task is to take your product or service idea and generate a number of uses for it. Stretch your imagination. Don’t censor your ideas. You may come up with one that could give your product a whole new market – and a whole new life.
Take colas, for example They started out as a medicinal drink and then became a soft drink. Yet people still use colas for some interesting purposes such as for meat tenderising and cleaning battery connections.
Speaking about car batteries, while their primary use is for starting cars, people use their 12 V batteries for powering house lighting, radios, television sets and camping equipment.
If you had to flee your country in the dead of the night to make a new life elsewhere, what idea generation techniques would you want to have with you?
I suppose I’ve been thinking about that question not because I feel under threat in the country am living in but because the question sharply focuses on which idea generation tools haved worked so effectively for me and others.
We’ve all seen the rise of the celebrity entrepreneur, business people who have been able to create public personas that help them promote their products, services and brands.
Now with the economy as it is, formulas, systems and processes to start up a business of your own are flooding email in-boxes and splashing on the cover of small business magazines.
Nothing wrong with that except for the glaring omissions in the advice, making it sound like a small business is so easy to start it’s like child’s play. We’ve covered the importance of transforming personal resources into business resources, market research, testing and implementation plans. But there’s still one secret sauce that doesn’t appear in these offers, books and articles written by gurus (gooroos), academics and instant authors, publishing hundreds of thousands of instant e-book’s each year.
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