X I D E A S

This is the first part of a 4 part series of articles regarding challenges.

Imagine 5 brilliant entrepreneurs sitting down to consider new ideas. They can’t get started until someone proposes something. But where does the proposal come from? How do they decide what problem to solve? Who decides the focus? How do they determine the goals? If they try to come up with new ideas without having a specific goal, they could consume an infinite amount of time with no purpose.

Before you start looking for ideas, you need to know what your goal is. A problem is nothing more than opportunity in work clothes. A successful businessperson pays attention to problems, converting the problems into opportunities and deciding which opportunities are worth pursuing. These opportunities become productive challenges.

Anyone can learn how to pay attention. As a focusing exercise, select a color at random and spend an entire day looking for items that are that color or contain it. For instance, if you choose red you will discover an incredible number of red objects: cars, books, clothes, houses, shoes, hats, etc. Familiar objects will become new again, reds will become richer and you will find that your perspective toward “red” has been dramatically changed. By tuning in “red” and tuning out other colors, you allowed to understand the color red more deeply.

Unless you set your business problems down in writing, your attention is constantly shifting and you become indecisive about what you should focus on. Listing problems in a way for you to decide which ones are worth solving. It transforms a body of information into a set of components that can be restructured, checked and searched. Start keeping a journal of problems that you find to be personally interesting and that would be worthwhile to resolve. The following questions may help you get started:

What would you like to have or to accomplish?

What business idea would you like to work on?

What do you wish would happen in your job?

What business relationship would you like to improve?

What would you like to do better?

What do you wish you had more time to do?

What more would you like to get out of your job?

What are your unfulfilled goals?

What excites you in your work?

What angers you at your work?

What misunderstandings do you have at work?

What have you complained about?

What changes for the worse do you see in the attitudes of others?

What would you like to get others to do?

What changes would you like to introduce?

What takes too long?

What is wasted?

What is too complicated?

Where are the bottlenecks?

In what ways are you insufficient?

What wears you out?

What in your job turns you off?

What would you like to organize better?

In what ways could you make more money at work?

The mere act of writing a challenge may trigger your mind to create something meaningful to fill in the gaps and solve it.

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