Let limitations guide you to creative solutions
There’s never enough to go around. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough people.

That’s a good thing.

Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage.

This is a timely reminder for me. I am working at growing my own coaching business, Key Coaching, and I at times think along the lines of “there’s not enough of….”. After reading the text above I shall embrace these limitations and start working with what I have.

WOWNDADI writes about The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Pitchers.

Moolanomy has a post titled Seven Traits of Successful People.

Freelance Switch has a post with 18 Travel Tips for International Freelancers.

Mary Jaksch from Goodlife Zen has a guest post at ProBlogger with The Comprehensive Paint-by-numbers Guide to Writing and Publishing Your Ebook.

Get this and other articles from the source at fortyplustwo.

Harvard Law, Columbia Business School, Insead and McKinsey & Co. do it – why don’t coaches? Meditation is a way to build critical emotional awareness, reduce reactivity and gather wisdom outside the traditional. Using role plays of difficult conversations, dialogues and interactive sessions, coaches will access places beyond reason and emotion where some of their true wisdom and best skills reside.

At Mark Thornton I found this quote from Mr. Claude Rameau, Former Dean of the World at INSEAD:

We do not know how to teach meditation and intuition, so we built a large meditation hall for teachers, executives, and students to just sit quietly and contemplate resting within.

At Mark’s website it says that:

His meditation courses have helped industry leaders — including The New York Times, Deloitte Touche, the Harvard Negotiation Insight Initiative and others — learn to reduce stress, maintain focus, and stay inspired, while building inner mastery and enhancing overall creativity.

I do short meditations before client sessions in order to focus and prepare mentally.

At my other blog are posts about Meditation, including about the book The 5-minute Meditator which talks about spot meditations – an interesting topic.

What’s your favorite question? Over the years we’ve found that the most popular answers to this question are ‘why,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why not’ in that order. A trend we’ve also observed is that those who ask ‘why’ are typically more holistic or whole-brained thinkers, those who ask ‘how’ are typically more box thinkers, and those who ask ‘why not’ are typically the challenging thinkers. All types, of course, are equally valuable and equally required for innovation!

I love this part of the text: Why does the typical 5-year old ask about 65 questions a day while the typical 40-something only asks about 6 questions a day? In other words, ask like a child – be inquisitive!

Goals can be useful but you mustn’t depend on them to define yourself. We are taught that if you don’t have an aim in life, you’ll end up nowhere. If you don’t have concrete goals and work towards them, your website will never grow. Not true.

Goals are pathway markers and destination points. But they are also simply thoughts, conjured up and made concrete in one decisive moment. You can change them as easily as you flick a light switch. It takes less than five seconds. Try it.

So for 2008, be flexible and open. Grow. Take a chance and do something beyond what you consider to be realistic or practical.

Maki points to Bruce Mau who has written An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, that list has a lot of good points.

I totally agree that goals shall not be set in stone, we need to review and change if needed.

Maki at Dosh Dosh also has a post titled How to Prepare Yourself for the New Year. There is a list of eight things to consider and a great final paragraph:

Think of yourself as a machine. You are a woman or man of enormous potential. Everything is possible in the new year if you have the heart for it. What you need to do is to grease the wheels, make sure you’re all well-oiled and ready to roll. Take care of the periphery details and you’ll find that you’ll reach your goals a lot faster.

Note: Photo by JoF.

In September about 20 executives, mostly from Scandinavia, hopped on a plane for a trip designed to shatter their notions of how to do business. The group, comprised of the first batch of students at a new Danish school called 180°academy, jetted off to South Africa. There they worked with a group called the Business Place to help would-be entrepreneurs realize such dreams as opening a hair salon or starting a toy business, though they had no relevant experience or skills.

The program isn’t anything like business school, where students focus largely on areas of their expertise. And that’s the point. Conventional business education leads executives to build on their strengths—improving profit margins, boosting efficiency, and benchmarking the best practices of rivals. This school aims to teach midcareer executives something many think is unteachable: how to be innovative. “We’ve got to break them from what they know best,” says Anne Kirah, the academy’s kinetic, gum-chewing, American dean. “When you’re only focused on your competition and what you know best, you don’t innovate.”

The 180°academy does turn things upside down, just look at the picture. Their concept sounds really interesting.

At 180°academy we educate Concept Makers™ who have the ability to develop, design and execute radical business concepts. Traditionally innovation has been technology driven. At 180°academy we believe in people-driven innovation. We want to revolutionize traditional education by merging together students with different competences and thinking styles in a praxis-oriented learning environment.

Their tag line says a lot: Radical innovation comes from moving outside our comfort zone.

The first link is 5 Ways to Enhance Your Creativity at Problogger. The fifth one, record your ideas, is important. Always (well almost always..) have something around so you can make some notes when brilliance strikes.

The second link is over at ChangeThis, Hugh McLeod (known from gapingvoid) has created a PDF-file called How To Be Creative. The document is spiced with his cartoons.

The third link is also from Problogger, 9 Attitudes of Highly Creative People. The first attitude listed is curiosity, I have loads of that.

The forth link is from CopyBlogger, Three Easy Ways to Expand Your Creativity. The posts starts with the first sentence of a quote by Albert Einstein.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

The fifth and final link is also Problogger, How to Be a More Creative Blogger – Methods of Creativity.

The next step could be to create and sell T-shirts at places like CafePress.com or Spreadshirt. Spreadshirt has a cool tagline, “You think it. We print it”.

Update.
Blogging Expertise is Announcing the winners of the Clever Blogging T-Shirt contest. I like “I came, I saw, I blogged” and “Blogging is the new … (read more)”.

The interview is really interesting, there is a discussion about time management and things like how to handle email. It makes you think about your own workload. I for one do a bit more than four hours a week…

One question raised in the interview is “are you busy or are you productive?” Focusing on the right things makes a huge difference. The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule) states that, for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. In other words, find the 20% of your work that really makes a difference and cut down on the other 80%.

Firefox is there, I like the fox and the globe. Rollyo and Campfire are nice too. The most creative one, in my opinion, is the logo for the BROMANoDELL tackle design company.