Entrepreneurial Daydreams

Successful entrepreneurs are always looking for opportunities. Many times these are all around the edges of changes taking place in industry or local venues. Exploiting these new ideas requires a venturer to be creative—a creative entrepreneur. Can you imagine yourself as creative?

The best ideas often come from daydreams which the dictionary says are reveries, dreamlike musings or fantasies, absentminded dreaming, or a visionary creation of the imagination, all of which are experienced while awake. The dictionary further describes reverie as a state of dreamy meditation or fanciful musing, fantastic, visionary, or impractical ideas, absentminded dreaming while awake, or a state of pleasant dreamy thought.

A lot of home-based proprietors will say they are not creative and don’t know how to become that way. John Hoff, in “How To Become Creative,” says there are ways to learn creativity.

He says the first step is to believe you are creative. This isn’t the biblical faith where you believe something may happen; it is the solid belief that you have already achieved what you are trying to do. To get to this belief, you must first blank everything from your mind so you are in a state of “openness” where you simply react to what is going on around you but don’t worry about all the things that might happen. You have to learn how to develop your creative thought process and practice them while your mind remains open to the all the possibilities that may occur, no matter how far-fetched they may appear to be.

Some of the steps in learning creativity are:

Listen. This does not mean only hearing; it means analyzing the consequences of what you hear. For example, listen to an unusual radio station and try to determine what its market might be.

When creative thoughts aren’t easy, you may need to brainstorm. Some ways to do this are writing the next thing that enters your mind regardless of what it is, then develop the next ideas you have.

Use the Yin-Yang symbol as an example of the kind of crazy ideas you may build upon to get your creative juices going. When I first saw this it looked to me like two sperm cells going ‘round and ‘round for what reason? Where can you take this?

A very important step is learning to replace negative thoughts with positive. Many times you will want to do something, but your mind tells you that you can’t do it. When this happens, write the thought you don’t think you can do and next to it write several reasons why you can do it. Do this quickly and often; soon you will notice that you have trained your mind to react automatically with a positive thought whenever you think of a negative one. Develop this technique and it will help you in many other situations; negative thoughts will poison any activity you ever attempt. Never allow them to linger.

Because you never know when a creative idea will come or when you may need to write some of these helpful thoughts, you need always to be ready with a pencil and writing material. If you are totally away from any writing material you may consider getting a free JOTT account, which will allow, you to leave telephone messages or e-mails to yourself.

Use as many of these tools to learn new ways to be creative: read blogs, books, take classes, or do something you have never done.

Evaluate what you see when looking at a magazine or surfing online and try to determine who will act on the information. Or take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side list your perceived strengths, on the other your weaknesses. Consider which strengths offset your weaknesses.

Develop your creative processes by creating a flow chart from any topic you think about to see where it leads, or read half a book and then write your own ending.

Use travel to give you new creative ideas. No need to go anywhere. Use Google plus its map programs. That will take you wherever you want to go and tell you all about the place—more than you would learn on the ground.

One of the comments to Hoff’s article caught my eye because this happened to me just this week:
One respondent said sometimes he can’t write or do anything so he just says, “The heck with it, I don’t care anymore. Suddenly I’m a creative genius and the job gets done above and beyond my expectations.”
Before I read this article, as I was pushing a deadline, I said the very same thing to myself. The whole world opened up.

Something else affecting our ability to create is the way we are educated in school and other institutions. Entrepreneurs must decide whose ideas they are using. Are they really yours or do they belong to your parents or teachers? Education is necessary to some extent, but we are all taught the same old stuff in just about the same way. All of us need to realize this and change our thinking accordingly so that what we are working with is from our own mind.

Something unconventional I’ve never before heard is how to work whatever plan you have backwards. In spite of all my college and working years, this idea is completely new. If you only use the linear means of getting from where you are now to where you want to be a few years from now you will miss all the things needed to get where you want. By going to the end objective and working backward all the little intermediate goals will reveal themselves.

Other creative ideas are discussed at Entrepreneurial Creativity. This notion is about coming up with innovative ideas and turning them into value-creating profitable business activities. Here is a brief review of some ways to develop such creative ideas:

• Steve Jobs’ success rule #2 is “Think different.”
  
  
• From Harvard Economic Review, “only creative people can reach the moon and make a company successful.”
  
  
• Tip #4 from Glenn Ebersole’s How To Achieve High Visibility, “Commit to being an idea generator.”
  
  
• From Guy Kawasaki, break down inevitable resistance to innovative products by offering free trials, money back, or whatever it takes to move the product or service.

From James Allen’s As A Man Thinketh:

Why?
Why not?
Why not me?
Why not now?

Always search for industry changes and the resulting opportunities surrounding these changes.
Successful home-based entrepreneurs are continuously creative. They never stop searching for ways to add value to their products or services, because that’s what customers buy—VALUE!