Discover More About a Person

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. - Plato

There are several sayings like this. In writing they say "Show, Don't Tell" This means you need to find a way to get the reader to participate in what it happening in the story, not just tell them what it going on. Teacher cannot just tell students how to solve a math problem, they have to show them how a problem works on a chalkboard. People learn better when they see and participate in what they are learning. Being told not always enough to make it part of ones learning.

When you see a recipe, you sort of know how to make it, but until you can get the ingredients into the pan and see how they start to react to the heat and to each other, there is no telling how your version of that recipe will turn out. It takes time a patience to learn every aspect of the recipe.

Everyone learns differently as well. It make take a different aspect of something to make it click in my head than it will in your head. I might need to see the contours of a figure before I can see myself painting it on the canvas. You might need to see the colors you are going to paint with before you can start painting. There are infinite points of view and infinite ways to think about things. We just need to remember that people need to see how things work in their own way.

Skate to Where the Puck is Going

"I always skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been." -Wayne Gretsky

I always try to follow my own advice. If you see something that is working, do more of that. In your money making endeavors, you will find a lot of things that just don't work. You will find a few things that sort of work and even fewer things that work really well. You would be smart to continue to do the things that make money and if you are capable, you will do more of those things.

Of the things that are sort of working, you will want to adjust what you are doing and try to make them work better. You want to make those ideas make money for you. If you can't figure out why they are only making a little bit or just breaking even, maybe it is time to set that idea aside and skate towards something else that might have a higher return.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. I heard somewhere that the average person has at least three new ideas per day. The problem is that we don't act on them. We need to find a way to determine the profitability on those ideas and act on the ones that look like they will make money.

Do you have a pocket notebook? You should have one in your pocket at all times. Whenever you have an idea, you should write it down. I find if I don't write the ideas I have down, I forget them within an hour. For some reason, our ideas create themselves in our short term memory and most of them never make it to our long term memory.

A couple of times per week, during your slow time, take the time to look through your ideas and figure out which ideas you can act upon. This will lead you to more creative ideas.