bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

Get behind what you’re doing.

No one else is going to back you, if you don’t back yourself.

And if you can’t back yourself you’re not doing the right thing.  Change.

No one will think less of you for it.

Is often hard.

Start with where you were, the initial problem or objective you were trying to achieve

List what you tried.

What failed miserably.

What worked a dream.

And then the end result.

Just start doing that, even if it’s bullet points, then you can tidy it up later.

I get a lot of ideas pitched to me, most are good, they get somewhere.

There’s a category that flounders.

It’s those that aren’t generous enough.

The idea is pitched to give most of the value to the the pitcher.

A great pitch communicates the value both parties will get out of it. That’s what you have to offer. You have something novel which will deliver your partner excess value. And that’s why people buy.

A coke doesn’t cost the $2 or $3 you pay, yet it seems great value, that’s because they’ve communicated that it’s worth much more than that. Would you buy cokes for $10?

Most likely not!

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Although but what scenarios would you?

Great video by Tom Peters in his Little Big Things Video series (an absolute must watch).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ygT8FBVhu0

In essence curating your context, so that you’re in a place where you’re surrounded by people pushing themselves & pushing you.

Great analogy & a little change which can be very defining.

There are thousands of broken systems around the world.

Find situations where:

• It’s a mass system affecting or touching everyone we know
• There is a consistent nuisance problem, that is struggled to be solved by the stakeholders

And come up with a novel idea to solve it.

Get an agreement for fixing it and negotiate to get paid an annuity based on how much would have been lost had it not been fixed.

Some ideas:

• Finding mail not delivered addresses – then finding the correct addresses. save businesses cost
• Water leaks in the water system.
• People that drop out of school.

Often it’s not worth the individual cost but the cumulative cost. That is one last mail address could cost the overall system $50 over 3 years. Worth trying to fix that up. A water leak could cost tens of thousands over the next 20 years…

It’s often outside points of view which bring the fresh thinking to solve them.  So no reason why you or I can’t have a stab.

I want you to think of computers, how you buy upgrades to a game, new upgrades to your computer. Things that make it perform much better.

Now think of a service you can plug into a business. A service that once plugged in will upgrade the overall system.

Some ideas bouncing around:

Retail Sales Training – plug this technology into your retail chain and watch your average revenue per customer rise.

A catering company that provides healthy food in the workplace, watch overall health & wellbeing increase (maybe less staff downtime / sick leave).

Financial management (often a place it actually does exist).

That is a series of steps to share your logical thinking.

Teach your logical methodologies.  What’s logical to you in your specialist field of knowledge is not logical to everyone else .  They don’t know your tricks & tips.

Even if it’s absolutely simplistic – it’ll help other people make consistent exceptional decisions.

You won’t get it right initially but if you can get it 80% right, then you greatly reduce what’s coming over to you.

To get great ideas, you need to have great input.

Great input, is information that is reasonably filtered & qualified.

The better quality information you process, the better your ideas.

Is based on your prior knowledge & experience.

That is the greater knowledge & experience you hold, the better your gut reaction.

Realise that constraint, sometimes new stuff feels wrong because it’s completely out of your field of reference & prior experience.

What that means though is if you want to make better decisions, you need to feed & fuel your knowledge & experience.  That way you’ll make faster, better snap decisions.

Are those right in front of you.

It becomes the new benchmark.

Once you extend yourself to run 12km.  Suddenly anything less is poor performance.

Once you establish a new behaviour that is successful, anything less is mediocre.

Although…. the inverse is also true, once you let a standard slip, that becomes the new benchmark.  And you start sliding.

That you’re good at half a dozen things.

Not a pro.

But good enough to get things moving along and effect change.

That is a skill within itself.

A skill that you can work on and get very effective at.

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Thanks to @jamesmadelin for sharing.

The consistent things about change:

1) It’s always relative.

2) It’s not that bad.

3) Our receptiveness to change depends on our internal risk scorecard (see: Risk Homeostasis).  In short we are happy with change in some parts of our lives not others.

4) It’s good for us.  Keeps us on our toes.

5) Change has flow on effects.  Always.  Ensure that change is having positive flow on.

When the first try is the only one.

You almost never get it right do you?

Everyone becomes a critic.

Everyone has some advice for you.

There is in effect a line of people, waiting to give you advice.

The key is to vett the advice, in the same way you would (hopefully) vett a financial advisor, find out a place of experience as to where that advice comes from.  And then interpret it.