New Business Development – Page 54

Sabotage By Loved Ones

I told a loved one’s mother
that her son
was extremely busy
with a project
for the next month
and
he had to focus on it.
It was a make or break
project
for his career.
He couldn’t take on
any other tasks
during that time.

My loved one’s mother
tried to assign my loved one
a huge task
later in
THAT SAME DAY.

The task wasn’t time sensitive
although she insisted it was
(with no rational reasons given).
And she applied
significant guilt
to try to convince him
to agree to it.
(He didn’t agree to it.)

Loved ones
sometimes sabotage us.

The sabotage usually
has nothing to do with us.
It is a projection
of their own issues,
worries or fears.

But it CAN f*ck us up.

Know that loved ones
can do this.
Watch for sabotage attempts.
Eliminate those destructive actions.
Don’t allow them to derail
your plans.

Change, Evolution And Survival

The entities
– businesses, species, other –
that survive
over time
change.
They evolve to shifting conditions.
They adapt to changes
in their environment.

This HAS to happen
or these changing environments
render them obsolete.
They go extinct.

What we’re seeing now
in the world
is more and more
people refusing to change.

They are refusing to adapt
to a changing climate.
They are refusing to
change their behavior
to survive a pandemic.

They are clinging to the past
and, if enough people do that,
humans WILL become extinct.

Business builders like you and I
are actively fighting that.
We are encouraging people
to change a little bit,
to try our new businesses.

And if they change that little bit,
they might change a little bit more.
That might make the difference
between the survival
and the extinction
of our species.

You’re adding value
to the world
with your new business.
Never doubt that.

Eat The Rich

Often one of our goals,
as business builders,
is to be able to provide
for ourselves and our loved ones,
to be financially stable
or even financially rich.

But we should also
want to be physically safe
and that might mean,
in today’s environment,
downplaying our financial stability
in public.

As a writer,
a person in the entertainment industry,
I watch trends in entertainment.

One of the HUGE trends
is, what I call,
eating the rich.
The evil character
is a rich person
and that evil is usually defeated
…violently.

The ‘fantasy’ is killing
a wealthy person.

Recently, there were a collection of articles
about how people are increasingly
stealing food and other items from
huge profit-making grocery stores.

If you see one of these articles,
read the comments.
99% of the comments I’ve read
support the people stealing.
The commenters see it
as being justified
as the food-stealers
are stealing from the rich.

There is a growing anger
toward the rich
and that WILL result
in violence.

You might not wish
to flaunt your wealth
right now.

Sentinel Intelligence

One of the activities
I find extremely interesting
is
looking at trends
in different industries
and places
and demographics
and figuring out
how they might converge.

Many of us
call this
‘connecting the dots’
and it helps us
avoid dangers
(like food supply collapses)
and
recognize opportunities
(like awesome new products
to develop).

Jessica Wildfire
has a more professional term
for this.

She
calls this
sentinel intelligence.

She
shares

“If you have sentinel intelligence,
then your brain can aggregate and sift
through extraordinary amounts
of information
in a very short period of time,
especially when it comes to
seeing latent or hidden dangers.”

(This entire post is gold.
She talks about conspiracy theorists
and also why many people
don’t heed warnings.)

If you’re developing
new products or services,
you NEED someone
with sentinel intelligence
on your team.

You need someone
who can connect the dots.

Big Problems Require Numerous Solutions

I was posting
on social media about
how I direct some of my donations
toward planting trees.

An angry guy
commented
that I was a f*ckin’ idiot.
Planting trees
won’t solve climate change.

Of course, it won’t
‘solve’ climate change
on its own,
dumb a$$.
Climate change
is a HUGE problem.
Huge problems
often require
multiple solutions.

If you want to tackle
a huge problem
with the business
you’re building,
consider
tackling a small slice
of that problem
first.

Then build out
from there.

That’s manageable.
That’s doable.

Assume You Know Nothing

I’ve been growing radishes
since I was a kid.
They are one of the fastest
and the easiest
vegetables to grow.

I only discovered
last year
that the leaves are edible.
They’re not only edible
but they’re delicious
when cooked with some garlic
and sprinkled with lemon.

All my life
I had been tossing them
in the compost pile/bin.

Every so often,
assume you know nothing
about your industry or product
or other key factors
in your business
and in your life.

Read the Wikipedia pages.
Take a workshop
or watch a YouTube video
targeted to people new
to the topic.

Look at it
with fresh eyes.

And assume
you know nothing.

You’ll be surprised
at what
you will learn.

Fighting Reality

I was super tired,
my brain wasn’t working
100%
and I made the mistake
of agreeing with another writer
that AI is already being used
to write Romance Novels.

Other writers and some readers
jumped on that post,
telling me it was unethical.
They said no writer or publisher
would ever do that.
They insisted I was full of sh*t.

I wasn’t stating my opinion.
I knew for a fact
that some people were already
using AI to write their stories.

It wasn’t speculation.
It was reality.

They could fight it
all they wanted
but it was happening.

Right now,
you are likely
denying a reality
that will significantly
impact your business.

Accept that reality.
Accepting it
doesn’t mean
you like it
or support it.

It merely helps you
prepare for it.

And, if you wish
for your business
to be successful,
you HAVE to prepare for it.

The Not-So-Obvious Threats

Yesterday, there was storm predicted
for my area.

In the morning,
the skies remained clear.
There was no additional snow
on the ground.
If you merely looked out
the window
(which many leaders did),
you wouldn’t cancel school.

Except…
the winds were
EXTREMELY strong.
As in…
some adults couldn’t walk
without falling over strong.

Kids got hurt.
They fell.
They were hit by
flying branches.

School should have been
canceled.

We notice the obvious threats
to our safety,
to our futures,
to our businesses.

Those threats smack us
right in the face.
We can’t avoid seeing them.

The not-so-obvious threats
are the biggest dangers
to us.
We have to look for them.
We have to pay attention
to notice them.

Look for
the not-so-obvious threats.

Refine Later

The first draft of my stories
consist of basic action,
dialogue, emotions.

I am vomiting the huge chunks
of the story
onto the page.

Once I do that,
I can evaluate
which of those big pieces
are worth saving.

THEN I refine the story,
smooth it out,
worry about word usage
and grammar
and all the detailed stuff.

It makes no sense
to refine a scene
I won’t be keeping.
That’s wasted time
and effort.

Developing other products
follows a similar process.

We figure out the big stuff
– our target market,
the aspect of the product
that appeals to them,
whether we’re creating,
for example,
a fruit punch
or a fruit cocktail.
We make
those types of huge decisions.

THEN we decide
if the package will be blue
or green.
THEN we determine
if it will be promoted
with Facebook ads
or Google ads.
THEN we refine
the product.

Wait to refine a product
until the big decisions
have been finalized.

Drought And Electricity

I can’t run
any of my businesses
without electricity.

In my city,
most of the electricity
is sourced
from hydro,
from water-based technologies.

That means
droughts impact
electricity supply.

(This is also true
of nuclear-sourced electricity
as nuclear requires
a lot of water.)

I monitor the water levels.

I have purchased batteries
to store electricity.

I plan to install
solar panels.

If you can’t run your business
without a resource,
know what drives
the availability
of that resource.

Monitor that driver.

And plan for alternatives.

This is one
of our responsibilities
as business builders.