The one thing that drives me more than anything are ideas. I love ideas. I always wanted to work at a think tank or be the creative guy. Marketing was my first love. Marketing, Advertising. I was the kid in school reading Ad Age magazine and Adweek. Forbes. Inc. BusinessWeek. Those type publications. Those were full of ideas. And the successful people they profiled were full of ideas.
Reading all those magazines and Barrons and the Wallstreet Journal made me think the world was made of Open Doors and Opportunity.
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Simple Solutions, Inc - that was the name of my "consulting firm" and sure enough, I had a city license and everything for it. My goal, at 17, was go to businesses with my ideas and present ways I could help transform their dying business into something that could thrive. How? Presenting them with Simple Solutions of course. From the brilliant mind of a know nothing.
Tonight I was just thinking about some of my most successful ideas - and some ideas that failed. My personal ideas - along with a couple business ideas - that ultimately succeeded or failed based on whether I personally tried them, or someone else did them.
Maybe you can make a list too - and maybe revisiting your former business ideas isn't a bad thing. It might lead to new ideas - which leads naturally to more Open Doors and Opportunity.
Here are a few of my own.
Successful: Car sensors telling you the exact distance you are from someone in front of you, or, if you're backing up, someone behind you.
I actually had this one notarized back in 1997 and talked to an attorney about getting a patent. It's successful because someone actually did it many years later. Now it's a standard thing on most vehicles. Good for them. That could have been retirement money. But, I didn't get to do it.
Failure: Using a garage door opener to increase the strength of a home cordless phone.
Cell phones weren't even really around at this time and I liked this one.
I actually talked a garage door manufacturer to let me work on it for a little while. So you have a receiver and a transmitter and you could be down the road and hit your garage door opener and the thing would open - but you couldn't go 100 yards from the house if you were talking on your cordless phone (remember those?). "What if we create a 'booster' (what would now most likely be called a dongle) and plug this device into each side of the cordless telephone?" Cool.
I'm not technically savvy and I never really got anywhere with it. Cell phones took off years later. So not cool after all.
Successful: Speaking of cell phones, I had read about NTT Docomo in Japan and how they had basically created a walled garden system and that system was dominating the market. Today we would think of Apple and the iPhone, but back then there was nothing like it.
I became an evangelist and everywhere I went I wanted to talk to people about c-HTML and all the "future things" we could one day do if we would just do them now. They've all been done now.
One of those things I named 3Gv2 - as in, Third Generation Mobile, version 2 - because 3G was the system others were using and America was lagging behind (it was "are you a TDMA, CDMA or GSM"?) ... um.
3Gv2 I pitched as a "think tank for future mobile apps" - one of which was a bar code scanner that told you the price of an item in the store, and it's price online relating to that price. Success. Again, not for me, but that's one of those things that took off eventually.
Failure: Another idea during that time was Airport Movie Rentals. The Palm Pilot was the "hot" technology of the day. It had an actual screen and you could see things on it. The "browser" was better than anything and so, it made sense to me to start a rental kiosk system in airports whereby you could rent a movie in Iowa and drop it off in California.
There would be cartridges, like game cartridges, that could hold a movie - 750 megs. Yikes.
But storage was shrinking and people were finding ways to pack more bits onto them and so I thought, "first mover advantage - we have a few years to build out the infrastructure before 3G comes and streaming becomes ubiquitous, and then we'll keep renting but won't have to have those kiosk, they can just order from their phone."
That one actually might be a successful idea - because that's actually Redbox meets Netflix - minus the whole "renting a cartridge for your Palm Pilot in one airport, watching it on your flight, and dropping it at another airport".
Failure: 1991 Mail a Balloon in a Box. This one I actually got a provisional patent on. A real one. From the Gov-dash-t.
The idea was to send a small balloon anywhere - for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.. The person who got the little 4x4 inch box only needed to unwrap it, pull a string and a canister of c02 would fill the balloon and confetti would pour out of the top of the box as the balloon filled up with air.
My cost, a little over a buck all in. Retail for 9.99.
I never filed an actual patent because I could never get the prototype made and I didn't have the money for the actual attorney you have to have to actually file an actual patent.
I searched the USPTO database a few years later and sure enough, someone else had the patent. It failed though because I've yet to see it in stores.
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I've got notebook after notebook and more notebooks - full of drawings and ideas of every nature and everything.
Suppose I always wanted to be Edison or Kamen or someone like that. Always just dreaming up ideas. Cool inventions. Things that would make life better for people.
I'm asked every day, "what do you want to do?" - that's it.
Stare at my dry erase board (you should seriously get one) and come up with new ideas every day. James Altucher says to write down 10 new ideas every day. That's not extreme, but you shouldn't have to do that. You just want to get going.
But then make them happen. Use one success to fund every other next project.
If they don't work, erase the board and start over.
Whether products, advertising and marketing plans, or even, art - songs and paintings.
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Not having ideas or thinking creatively cannot lead to Open Doors and Opportunity. That only comes from new ideas every day, all night, all the time.
If one wants to create Open Doors and Opportunity for themselves, the best thing they can do is have a new idea every day.
Whether it's a new way to wash dishes, or a better way to mow grass. Always be working on being aware enough to notice when there's the possibility of a better way.
Do it every day and in just a few months it'll be second nature and you'll find that you love it and don't want to stop.
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