-James

Now offer the janitor a commission based on t-shirt sales. Tell him that for every t-shirt he helps to sell, he gets a percentage. He plays a small role in every single sale, but what is his measurable effect? How much should he get for keeping the bathroom clean? Sounds like a tough calculation; where would you even start? How about the stager–the company responsible for organizing or designing the way products are presented in the store. They certainly influence sales, but how much? Who have they influenced and how? They never directly interact with clients, so how can you offer them a commission? The answer: You can’t.

The Online Marketer faces the same dilemma. According to a 2007 study by Yahoo! 1 in 6 in store sales occur because of something that a customer has seen on the website. Maybe that number is higher or lower depending on the product and how good you are; in any case, it’s a difficult task to convince a business to give you a cut of their in-store sales when they’ve hired you to do online marketing! Even if you do somehow win them over, they will forever feel like you’re getting the better end of the bargain and maybe harbour some resentment because of it.

Here’s the biggest problem: You’re working for free. Even if you eventually get paid, at first you get nothing. It’s hard to justify to yourself spending countless hours on somebody else’s business when your compensation hinges on two dubious intangibles: A promise, and their ability to success in business. Too many times I see business owners hire somebody using a profit sharing model at 10 or 15%, then expect them to do all the work to drive sales. Maybe they’re hoping for a miracle, or maybe there is a flaw in their business model. Also consider what happens if a new client arrives and wants to pay you up front, in cash. Realistically, who would you prioritize? If you want to build a positive reputation, you need to be fair to yourself and to your clients.

If someone isn’t prepared to pay you what you’re worth, you should think carefully about why that might be. What happens when you have finished your job? Their website is done, you’ve seeded the marketing strategies and designed their graphics and you are no longer doing work for them. Do they still have to give you a cut? For how long? What if your client changes their mind about sharing the booty? Now we’re entering a grey area: Can you trust them to be honest with you about their sales? I know it seems a bit paranoid but I’ve had clients that I liked hide things from me and withhold payment, saying “I did almost all the work!” Yes, they did almost all the work so they deserve 90% of the take–but I was involved, we had a signed contract, and they broke it because they never really expected to make a lot of money. To someone who has no business, 10% sounds like nothing; tell them that they owe you 10% of one million dollars and they recoil at the thought.

If the client you’re dealing with isn’t willing to take a risk on you and pay what you’re asking, why should you take a risk on them and work for free? On the other hand, if someone offers you a share in the company as a reward, and you are not expected to do any work, that’s a way better deal. In that case you can also get a lawyer involved to formalize the arrangement and you will be far less vulnerable. But make no mistake, marketing on commission is a fool’s game and it would take a lot to convince me to go down that road again.

You can never stray from your routine. If you rely on adrenaline or emotion, you burn out. Inspiration comes from doing the work, not as a catalyst to do the work.

I think that, while that may be true for Todd, it isn’t true for everyone. I have long debated the advantages and disadvantages of working using inspiration versus working with a routine. I find it nearly impossible to follow a set work routine, and the times when I have done it have yielded comparatively small returns.

Routine
If you’re one of the people who can get up every single day at the same time, eat the same breakfast, go for the same run, and start on the same self-directed work as yesterday, then I envy you (sometimes). I’m not talking here about going to a job where you dig trenches all day–even I can do mindless tasks–I’m talking about building your business. This approach means that you “work” every day for 6 – 12 hours, although what you might actually accomplish on a daily basis is fairly insignificant. The strength of this approach is that, after months of doing a tiny bit every day, you will actually have a lot to show for it at the end. Sometimes the daily routine can even take on a life of its own and sweep you up so that what you’re doing feels inspired. It is very predictable, reliable, and guaranteed to produce some kind of result. The disadvantage is that it takes up nearly all of your time, keeps you tired, and is very hard to maintain for people of a more capricious nature.

Inspiration
Right now the routine people are probably wondering why I’m even writing this post if the benefits of routine are so obvious. Well, here’s a question: Have you ever written a book…in a week? Working on inspiration is all about structuring your life to maximize the potential for flashes of insight and moments of frenzied passion. You spend more time working to make sure you are happy, healthy, and open than you do plugging away at a particular task. When inspiration hits, you might work for days without food or rest (much, anyways). You will be unable to fall asleep at night, become distracted to the point where you’re unable to have regular conversations with people, and produce tremendous results in a short period of time. In the same way that I cannot appreciate routine, most routine people cannot fathom the truly inspired state of mind. The quality and quantity of work can be orders of magnitude greater than the cumulative result of a routine (Eureka! happens in the bathtub), and the amount of time required to complete most tasks becomes nominal when you are operating at full potential. Unfortunately, you are subject to moods, you may get no work done for weeks (feast or famine), you can’t force yourself to work, the results–and even the processes–are unpredictable to the point where you cannot honour deadlines, and by embracing it you become a social deviant. Think about it, would you hire someone (any pay them a lot of money) who was inconsistent but potentially brilliant?

Here’s the happy ending: No matter which type of person you are, you should be okay with it and not try to force yourself to change. Realize where your strengths are and capitalize on them. By working with people who have complimentary abilities, you will maximize your potential for growth and success. If you get the right mix, you will be able to optimize your work habits and dampen your weaknesses. Just don’t forget: Routine people need inspiration people to shake things up, and inspiration people need routine people to get down to earth.

89.4 per cent of the companies with over 100 years of history are businesses employing fewer than 300 people.

WalMart, Starbucks, and McDonald’s are very successful at out-competing small businesses and have experienced tremendous growth over the last decade. Surely most people expect them to continue growing indefinitely, but the reality is that large businesses fail relatively quickly (read about the oldest companies in the world). The two factors that will contribute to the “Relationship Revolution” of the next decade are the backlash against market domination and the search for information.

Is your community the same as one in another city? province? on the other side of the world?

Large multinationals become successful by creating systems that can be deployed anywhere in the world using the most readily available class of worker (i.e. minimum wage labourers). The inherent strength and weakness of this approach is that it is uniform. Here is a case study: WalMart is successful at displacing existing competitiors because it is able to offer the lowest price to consumers; it does this by gouging it’s suppliers and stocking low quality products (i.e. “Value”). As WalMart saturates the market and shuts down its competitors, it becomes a form of monopoly. Without competition, they will be free to gradually manipulate their product structure in order to make more money; this will eventually lead to a backlash against the initial problem, which is that WalMart has no connection to the community where it exists and is untrustworthy in the sense that it sells people crap. Historically, this reaction leads to a grassroots movement that engenders a regression towards more human values.

Profit is easily derived by minimizing costs, labour being the largest. In order to grow you must create a system that allows you to duplicate your initial business without requiring too much direct involvement. Systems employing minimally skilled labourers only function if they are rigid and uniform because you are hiring people who lack common sense. Uniformity is the antithesis of human culture, but social responses have a lag time compared to the comparatively rapid pace of business activities. Therefore, a business will initially make profit by exploiting some aspect of human nature, but it will ultimately be destroyed by the resulting backlash against anti-social business policies. This is a logical argument proven by history; the question is, does it apply to large corporations like WalMart, Starbucks, Home Depot, Loblaws, Best Buy, Ikea, and CostCo? I think it does.

Do you ever use the internet to research a future purchase?

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “The Information Age” hundreds of times without really thinking about what that means. The Pew Research Center has some interesting statistics showing how there has been an exponential increase in the number of people who regularly use the internet. They also show that most people use the internet to search for knowledge–humans are addicted to information, and always have been. Think about shopping at a large chain grocery store like Loblaws: Does someone ask you what you’re having for dinner and suggest recipes for you to try? Millions of people search the internet for recipes every day. Do the employees tell you what’s freshest, highest quality, or what new products they just got in? No, but the flyer lets you know what’s on sale. Now think about walking into a Starbucks to buy an Espresso machine: Does the Barista even know where it was made, or what makes it better or worse than models made by other manufacturers? The answer is almost always no.

Although “price” has always been a driving factor in purchasing decisions, by coupling it with the mentality that everything is disposable and renewable, and the temporally unprecedented level of weath enjoyed by most North Americans, corporations have been able to artifically boost their growth and extend their life span despite a staggering externality defecit. Now that people are actively demanding information and making socially repsonsible decisions, we will see a wild push for “Relationship Building” as companies struggle to retain their customers.

Humans are social creatures: They like to have relationships with other people, and derive satisfaction from the energy exchange that accompanies a transfer of information. To add information value to their products and services, businesses will have to spend more money on labour and training, and things like customer loyalty initiatives and local adaptability will be the marketing push of the 10′s.

The phrase “too busy” is actually redundant–you are either busy or you are not. People usually say it to excuse themselves from something; they mean that they are normally “busy”, but now they are “even busier” and have no time for anything else. Appropriately, the phrase “too busy” is a double entendre–it can mean that there should be an absence of busy: e.g. “The wallpaper makes this room too busy, therefore the wallpaper should be removed”.

If you are saying “I’m too busy” a lot, then removing “busy” from your life should be a top priority. Are you working at capacity, all the time? If so, then you will soon become a world leader in whatever it is that you do, and you can stop reading now. Unfortunately, it’s likely that most of what you do is a waste of your time. Many people deceive themselves into thinking that every little thing is integral to the success of their operation, but most of it has nothing to do with growth and everything to do with maintenance. Be honest with yourself: examine every task you do each day and ask yourself, “am I the only one who could do this?” If every time the answer is “yes,” then you are doomed to mediocrity.

Over Growth
The most common cause of being “too busy” is growing too quickly, or too unevenly. If you are trying to build relationships with large numbers of clients by yourself, then you will quickly be overwhelmed. If you are building infrastructure without the client base to support it, then you will be stretched too thin. If you are building staff before you have infrastructure, then you will collapse under your own weight. If you aren’t making enough money to do any of those things then you are undercharging. The right balance for a business is difficult to find, but “too busy” is a good litmus test. Your job is to be as efficient as possible with everything you do so that you will never be “too busy”.

How Busy Can Be Bad
It starts with simple things like “I’m too busy to see my family”, then builds into stupid things like “I’m too busy to listen to my clients”. You are never too big to make that mistake. Multi-billion dollar companies are falling like redwoods every year because they are struck with this destructive group-think. The key to a successful business is for you to never be busy, but always actively looking for things to do!

This is good for two reasons: You are less likely to miss opportunities when they smack you in the face; and you get to enjoy your life more. Isn’t that what it’s all about, anyways?

The Lottery
When people become hugely successful, they feel justified in espousing their own personal beliefs as a requisite for success. You might read about them in the Business section of the newspaper: Model business people who devoutly believe that 8-6 workdays and rigid employee regulation are the sole reasons for their success. The fact that they are believed really annoys me. Maybe reading about them in the paper helps some people sleep at night as they scurry along in the rat race, but those attitudes certainly have nothing to do with financial success. Just ask the lottery winner.

The Evil Empire

“Bob Smith, CEO of SomeBigCompany, swears by exploiting child labourers in third world countries. He started just two years ago making t-shirts in his basement and now Forbes calls him one of the World’s Most Powerful People.”

There is one tried and true method for achieving success: Do it at the cost of others. This is a time tested, hallowed recipe that is brilliant if you are interested in short term financial gain and don’t care about the havoc you wreak in the process of getting it. From outright slavery to spam e-mail, there is a wide range of attractive options available to the unscrupulous entrepreneur. Then when the heat gets turned up because people don’t like what you’re doing, just take a lesson from the corporations: beg, borrow, steal, lie, poison and sue. Is that how you want to live your life?

So It’s Hopeless?
No, it’s not hopeless. If you have a positive attitude, some good ideas, patience, and a willingness to adapt to changing circumstances then you can achieve your dreams. There are a few good ideas and best practices to follow along the way, so keep reading these articles to find out what they are.

Wordpress.org

Today I’m going to talk about how you can use a blog to make money online, legitimately. It’s hard work, and there are a few requirements: You have to be literate, know how to use a computer and be willing to spend several hours each week devoted to writing.

What’s Valuable?
There are a few things that almost everybody can do to make money online. Can’t think of anything? Here’s a list to get you started:

1. Share your experiences. Everyone likes talking, listening and sharing. So make it your job. Tell people funny stories about your work day, your kids, your dog, your friends, whatever! Tell people what makes you angry, happy, sad, thoughtful. Everything you experience is valuable to someone else because humans are social creatures.
2. Share your perspective. How do you feel about politics? Are you conservative or liberal, republican or democrat? Or are you a communist? If you have opinions about anything in the world around you, share them. Such things will generate an emotional response in the people who read them, prompting them to reply to you. Encourage that discussion. Think about things you like: cars, art, music, sports, etc. Share your thoughts about the latest band or car model and you will find that people are not only interested in your opinion, but they want to participate in the discussion!
3. Teach something. Can you bake? Build? Clean? Organize? Do you know how to do anything? If so, tell the world! There are millions of people searching for information about anything you can imagine, all the time! Share your knowledge.

Here’s the catch: You have to do this every single day, often multiple times a day. You can write things in advance, but the blog has to be active otherwise you’re wasting your time!

When Do I Get Paid?
The first step is to establish something of value. The second step is to bring in the visitors–the website “traffic”. Tell your co-workers, your friends, your family and your neighbours. Share your blog on Facebook, Twitter, tattoo it into your forehead, get a bumper sticker or even change the license plate on your car–just do whatever it takes to get the word out! Now stop and think about this: Who would care if hundreds of random strangers are visiting your blog?

Advertisers.

Advertisers want to sell everything from t-shirts to soft drinks to computers to cars, and they want to sell them to the very same people visiting your website. Signing up for something like Google AdSense is trivial and incorporating it into your blog is even easier. Every time you give an advertiser business, you get paid. It’s really that simple.

The Webmaster
While everyone has stuff they can share, not everyone knows how to register a domain, get a web host, optimize their site for search engines, set up analytics, and configure their site for advertising. That’s where I come in. Today I set up two blogs: Angry Waiter and Mosaic Musings. Each of these blogs is a forum for an individual who will spend several hours each week writing stories, blogging about things they’ve seen/read/heard either on the web or in the real world, and facilitating discussion among their visitors. It will take a couple of weeks for them to get going, but these individuals can easily reach their immediate network which consists of anywhere from 200-500 people. If they’re consistent, they can reach their 2nd degree network (friends of friends), which numbers in the tens of thousands. Get the idea?

Do It Yourself
If you feel confident managing websites, you can easily set this up for the people you know. Here are the steps:

1. Get a domain name. Catchy, short, and relevant is key. I use GoDaddy for my domains.
2. Get a web host. I use HostPapa for my websites
3. Install a blog. I use WordPress. It’s open source, free, easy, and very powerful.
4. Get a theme. I love the themes made by The Theme Foundry, although there are literally thousands of other free themes to choose from.
5. Sign up for analytics. You will get useful information about who is coming to your site, where they’re from, and how they got there.
6. Sign up for adsense. This will take a day or two, but this is the key step if you want to get paid for your work.
7. Install WordPress Plugins. Get “Google Analyticator”, “The Ultimate SEO Pack”, “Akismet”, “Advertising Manager”, and “Sociable”.
8. Set up your users and let them run with it. Help them out by advising them on how to use “Press This”, trackbacks, and other sharing techniques.
9. Stay present. Make sure that your users are happy, productive, and paid.

This is not a “get rich quick” scheme, but a way to capitalize on the social nature of the internet. Each site will take a couple of hours, including the time it takes to give some basic instructions to your user. If you want to learn more about how to make a blog successful, I highly recommend reading Steve Pavlina’s “How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog)“.

How I Found Out
I first heard about this series of events when I was trying to register a .ca domain name. After running into several brick walls, I had to e-mail the Canadian Internet Registration Authority only to find out that I would have to wait six months before the domain was released. Frustrated, I picked up the telephone and called CIRA, explaining that I had a legitimate business and wanted to register that particular domain name. I was told that each domain has a scheduled “release date” and that no exceptions were being made. Six months later, I got the domain name.

Last week, I was considering starting another affiliate business. I went over to CIRA to see what domains were scheduled to be released that day, knowing that I would have first pick of some pretty premium 3- and 4-letter .ca domain names. I found a couple of good ones, but decided to wait a couple of days to think it over. What a mistake!

Someone Else Got There First
Everyone has heard of .com, .net, and .org, but there are a finite number of word combinations within each Top-level Domain (TLD). Every single three and four letter and number combination has been registered in the .com TLD. It turns out that .ca domain names are also fast becoming popular, with over 1.5 million already registered. Canadian businesses are realizing that, whether they like it or not, their future is intimately tied to the internet. They need websites, and they want intelligent domain names. Unfortunately, they are realizing it too late.

Historically, a boom of consumerism is preceeded by a rapid increase in the number of prospectors who recognize the signs and are willing to risk staking their claim in a theoretical future market. On the internet, the practice of staking your claim is known as Domain Parking, and it can be insanely profitable. Here is a simple, hypothetical example of how it works: Let’s say I notice that www.bmo.ca is not registered, or has lapsed. Knowing that the Bank of Montreal would kill to have that domain, I register it myself. It costs me something like $5. BMO comes along later and tells me that they want the domain. I tell them that I will sell it for the paltry sum of $20,000. They write me a cheque without hesitation because they know that Insure.com sold for $16 million in 2009.

Domain Parking and Cybersquatting
Many companies are devoted to registering and “cybersquatting” on as many domains as they can, in the hopes that they will be able to sell some of the more desirable ones for astronomical amounts of money. In the meantime, they can “monetize” their parked domain by running advertising. For some insane reason, a lot of these sites end up in Google search results and some of them can have a lot of traffic. This means that the squatter actually makes money while they wait for their big payout! Having seen it on the list of domains to be released, I had hoped to register webcity.ca. When I looked it up, it turned out that someone had poached it the minute it was released. Unfortunately, instead of actually using it to make a business, they are using webcity.ca to sell “Travel Cheap Flights”, “BuyV 1 A G R A50/100mg” and a whole range of other spammy, quasi-legitimate products.

The Conficker Opportunity
On Wednesday of every week, CIRA releases several thousand domain names. They have an alphabetically ordered list on their website that shows, in advance, every single one of those soon-to-be-available domains. This week they’re releasing nearly five thousand domains. These are not random combinations of letters and numbers, but domains that can actually be used for existing or new businesses. It costs less than ten dollars to register a domain name, and there are no restrictions on who can have them. The gold rush has just begun.

Do It Yourself
This week, www.bap.ca is one of the domains up for grabs. Three letter TLDs are rare, but who has ever heard of “bap”? Well, a quick Google search reveals that “BAP Equipment” sells forestry, surveying, mining, engineering and safety gear in Canada. I wonder, if I registered this domain and sent them an e-mail, would it be worth $1000 to them? It would only cost me $5 to find out. Have a look at the list, there’s plenty to go around!

I have been involved at the Don Rowing Club of Mississauga for many years and I’m currently working with the committee that oversees membership. We needed to have a meeting this week, but most people aren’t available until after 8pm and that means that we would lose our whole evening on a weekday night. I had been toying with the idea of setting up a teleconference line for a while, but I had no idea how to go about it. After hours of searching, reading, comparing and debating, I finally made the decision to deal with Vesta Networks. Keep in mind that the teleconference industry is highly competitive and there are many different ways to have “free” teleconferences—all you have to pay are the long distance charges. Yeah right. After talking to David Morris from Vesta this morning, I felt quite pleased with my whole experience with them and thought I would share their business model because I think it’s quite good.

How Did They Find Me?
Vesta Networks showed up on Google Adwords. I have no idea what their pagerank is on the searches I did for various combinations of “teleconference”, but they showed up on nearly every results page at the top in the paid advertisers box. They may only be advertising to specific geographic regions, but to be so consistent they would have to be bidding high and spending a lot each day. I know a lot of small businesses are afraid to dish out money for advertising when it seems so “unreliable”, but $20/day is not high if you are getting customers out of it. Yes you heard me, that’s $600/month or $7200/year and I’m saying it’s still low.

What Were My First Impressions?
Okay, so they use stock “business” photography for their splash image, but who doesn’t these days? Personally I hate stock photography, but I recovered from my revulsion when I saw the rest of the page. It’s designed well. Very well. They use a 980px wrapper, meaning it will fit on the screen of any web browser. They don’t use flash, meaning that it will be fast on any computer and won’t crash your browser. It’s written to be compatible with all web browsers. Information is laid out in three columns, making it easy to read. Font’s are visible (not too dark or too light) and readable (not too small). The navigation is so big you can’t miss it, and the iconography is intelligent so you know exactly what each link leads to. There is Canadian branding and Toronto contact information so I know I can at least chase them down if there’s any funny business. All of the links are blocks, so I don’t have to hunt for the correct place to click. There is a healthy amount of redundancy built in and every page is concise. Tasteful highlights and subtle reflections in the graphics mean that the awesomely simple site looks like it is actually very “high tech” (or web 2.0 – ugh, I hate that term). Nevertheless, I’ve built enough pages to know that their appearance has no relation to the business behind them, so the website alone didn’t sell the product to me.

How Did They Close the Deal?
I knew what I wanted and it was right there in a 15px bold font, 3px letter spacing, with an image of a telephone and a bunch of people around it. The only button available took me straight to “Pricing”, which, to be honest, was what I cared about. They gave me a ballpark figure and a list of the features: A local number, a toll-free number, no reservations, no extra fees—wow, it sounded too good to be true! So I headed over to their “Clients” page to see who else dealt with them. I immediately recognized some big hitters: The Toronto District School Board, Hydro One, Manulife and many more. I know from experience that people are very funny about being listed as clients, and these pages are always either legitimate or litigated. Back to the pricing page, the next step was to request some more information using a form. This is a difficult decision for an online business: While they have to separate the wheat from the chaff, they need to be careful not to scare people away with a form. Fortunately, they had done a good job establishing their credibility, so I filled in my name, company, phone number, e-mail address, and captcha, then clicked download. Instantly, a new e-mail appeared in my inbox with the pricing sheet and an invitation to sign up from someone named David Morris. I knew that the message was automated, but it wasn’t one of those insulting, generic ones. There was a degree of personalization that integrated well into the rest of the content (e.g. The signature was the same font as the body, there weren’t two greeting lines, etc.). All I had to do in order to sign up was give them my contact information and business address. Really? No Credit Card? I thought that was unusual, but also brilliant. They screened me effectively to make sure that I was someone who was actually serious about signing up, took all my information, then offered to trust me.

Where Did The Automation End?
After I sent my information, the process reverted from automated to manual. David Morris authorized the creation of my account, and I received an e-mail with a phone number and access code. I Googled the phone number, found a few more of their clients (e.g. Federal/Provincial Government bodies) and immediately felt more comfortable. I also received a phone message. It was from David, and he was calling to see if I had received the information and wish me a good teleconference. He sounded like a nice guy. I called back and said thanks.

How Did the Call Go?
After all of that research and preparation, it was only a four person call. It was also an excellent, low risk pilot for a new business tool. I called the local number, entered my code, and the call was up. The instructions were clear and concise. The other participants had absolutely no trouble getting in and we unintentionally came up with the perfect test suite: I was using a VoIP phone, somoene else was on speaker phone, another participant was using their blackberry in the car, and the last was on a land line. The call went flawlessly and I was quite pleased with the instructions sent to my e-mail.

What Made Me Write This Blog?
First thing the next morning, I received a phone call from David. He asked how things went and if this was a one-off or if I would use Vesta again. I told him that I didn’t have a regular need for it, but that it was very useful and I would probably find one. We chatted for a few minutes and he asked me about the rowing club. He told me that they could send me an invoice at the end of the month, or because it was such a small transaction ($6 – hah!), I could give him a credit card and settle up that way because it makes everyone’s life easier. He told me that they do thousands of calls every day and that even the smallest customers were important to them. What!? I know who some of their clients are. Not only had he taken the time to talk to me about my experience but he told me that my business was important to them—and he seemed genuine. He said sometimes small clients turn into big clients. He said sometimes big clients turn into small clients. He said everyone who reviews or references their company is good for business. He said things and behaved in a manner that makes good business sense but so few companies actually follow. I was so impressed with the attitude and effectiveness of this company that I took the time to write this entry: Vesta Networks can serve as a model for businesses who are trying to create an online presence, but failing to do so.

Spurn Tradition
One of the biggest limitations that people impose on themselves is the belief that, because something hasn’t been done a certain way before, it can’t, or shouldn’t, be done that way. Sometimes, there is a good reason for that: You shouldn’t eat mushrooms and berries you find in the forest, you shouldn’t throw gasoline on a fire, you shouldn’t drive a snow mobile onto an apparently frozen late in late March, and so forth. These kinds of rules have kept (most of) us alive and we are rewarded for following tradition by our continued survival.

When it comes to business, however, there is no real consequence for failure. If your idea doesn’t work out, you’re unlikely to die from it. Unless you build airplanes. Or parachutes. Or both. In all seriousness, one of the biggest challenges to generating new ideas is forcing yourself to open your eyes. If you really pay attention to every single thing you do during a day, you will soon stumble upon an idea that is so obvious and so revolutionary that it’s a wonder someone hasn’t discovered it before.

A Roundabout in Swindon

Where in the World?
The irony of the whole situation is that someone has probably already conceived and implemented that great idea. Having travelled through Europe and Africa, I can tell you that there are things that people in other countries take for granted every single day that are completely unheard of in North America. And vice-versa. Don’t believe me? Most people outside of Canada and our closest adopted States will be utterly shocked if you tell them that our milk comes in plastic bags. Really.

There are many, many similar differences from one region to another, but because we live our lives in relative isolation from the rest of the world, we never even notice. Probably one of the easiest ways to “innovate” is to visit other countries and observe how they do things. While some ideas are only successful because of local conditions, others have the potential to be successful anywhere.

Those Who Forget History are Doomed to Repeat It
We like to think that because we have computers, we are at the technological peak of human evolution. Unfortunately, this is simply not true. Just as many aspects of language and culture fall out of use, some technologies suffer the same fate. Whether it’s changing fashion, cheaper options, or bad timing, as a society we often fail to recognize the importance and usefulness of many ideas and innovations. We regress, then “rediscover” what we had forgotten. Marketers, educators, and politicians are particularly vulnerable to this vicious cycle. The reasons for the change and subsequent reversion are not always clear; often it’s less about what’s smart and more about what’s popular or financially lucrative.

As Seen on TV: Overly Elaborate Ideas
Some people try so hard to find good ideas that they invent overly complicated and unnecessary conveniences like the “Slap-Chop”. If it wasn’t for the aggressive and tenacious marketing of these products, nobody would buy them. I’ve used one, and believe me when I tell you that a good knife beats a slap-chop every time. Gimmicks are good for short term success, but you can be assured that the simplest solutions (e.g. the knife—a.k.a. razor) will always prevail in the long term.

Everywhere Around You
How do the systems around you operate? Have you ever noticed that good ideas from one industry rarely transfer into other industries? It seems like a lot of people lack flexibility and imagination when it comes to solving problems. Sometimes all you need to do in order to figure our your problems is to think like a child. Pretend like you don’t “know” anything, and the only experiences you have to draw on come from your day-to-day life. Ask yourself “why” something works a certain way, then follow up with “how” you can make it better.

Good ideas are found in your daily activities, in other industries, in other countries, and in the past. Use those ideas and you will truly be standing on the shoulders of giants.