Cashing in big time!
What’s the Equivalent of Money?
There is an equation for money. If you understand it you can have lots of money. If you don’t…then you may be broke. I have always been entrepreneurial all my life. One of my first businesses I had I was 8 years old and decided I wanted to make some money and I was thinking about how I could do that. How could I make money, with no product, no service and no experience? Suddenly, in my mind, I remembered seeing girl scouts going door to door selling Girl Scout cookies. I remembered what they said when we answered the door and my mother always bought the cookies…which I liked. Then I came back to where I was sitting and thinking… how I could make some money with no money, product or service.
Trusting Your Vision
Then I just suddenly stood up, walked up to the door of an unknown neighbor’s house and I confidently knocked. I had a flash of an insight and I thought it was my brilliant idea…without thinking or consulting anyone first, I wanted to try my theory out. I was young, innocent and nervous. What would I say? I hadn’t thought it out, yet, I was also expectant…my idea was going to work and I did not have room for a “NO” and I could feel that certainty in my heart along with fear, anxiousness and a feeling of following something—I could not name, as I was very young…as an adult I may have called that feeling…guidance.
The door opened and a woman about 5ft 4’ medium build with blonde shoulder length hair answered the door. She looked down at me with some wonderment and I just opened my mouth, “Hello my name is Vickie and I am collecting left over Coke, 7up or Dr. Pepper bottles, so I can… and she did not wait for me to finish, she opened her basement door and handed me more Coke bottles than I could carry. I managed to hoist all of them and took them back to the story to return them for the deposit that was left on them and walked away with about 0.75 cents.
Cashing In Big Time
This was back in the day when soda pop bottles were made of glass and purchasing soda also meant that you paid a deposit for the bottles. Where I lived, most people did not like taking the bottles back because many people did not own a car. I lived in San Francisco where public transportation was how a lot of people got around. These bottles were heavy and it was a hassle to carry them back to the store. Many people just let them sit in their basements and they had a lot of empties stored in there. They would gladly let me take these bottles to the store for them and save them the troubles of having to take them back themselves.
This proved to be a very profitable, long term money making business for me as an 8 year old kid and it grew as people began saving the bottles for me to pick up. When I was seen by my sisters, with all this money, they too wanted in on my money making idea. I formed a team of 3 other interested girls, “my sisters and one other” and we each had a grocery store shopping cart from Safeway, we would fill our shopping carts, until we could barely push them up hill, with bottles collected door to door and then take them back to Safeway to get the deposits and then we would split the money between us. Not to mention we got great exercise too.
Faith or Analysis Paralysis
Thinking back to that time in my life, what was most important about being an entrepreneurial kid was my ignorance and expectation. “What I didn’t know” was actually a blessing. I didn’t know how to make a business plan, I didn’t know how to set up accounting systems, I didn’t know how to make contracts for service, I didn’t know how to write copy or scripts and because I didn’t know I had an innocence to my plan. My mindset had an expectation, faith and certainty that it would work without it being clobbered by, my now adult mindset, giving me analysis paralysis. Being young and inexperiencd, I only concentrated on the outcome I desired and then I took action.
Not everything had to be perfect before I took the plunge into my work day. I went to the first door and received so many soda bottles that I needed to figure out how to carry them all. When I asked the question…”how am I going to carry all these bottles?” The answer showed up in my mind and I trusted it. It was, “to get a Safeway shopping cart,” so I could put the bottles in and return the cart to Safeway full of returnable bottles. My point is that solutions showed up when I needed them and I trusted my solutions. Ideas are so very important and having faith in your ideas is also important. Faith requires that you pursue your ideas. Not everything has to be perfect in order for you to take action on an idea.
Wide Open Playing Field
This is so important to understand, in the new economy, because, there is a lot of “new” meaning; it is a wide open playing field and nothing has been “over time” tested. We are doing that now. So, there is a lot of room for the exploration of new ideas and this includes your new ideas: New
- Systems
- Applications
- Businesses
- Services
- Markets
Because they are “new” they will require you to take action and listen and watch for solutions. Ideas for solutions and improvements will come from your customers and colleagues. Word Press is a great example of this. WP is a content management system that has thousands and thousands of pluggins created by WP users that most people can access for free. These pluggins improve the performance and features of WP and some of these pluggins have a cult like following.
Ideas come from a place that I call “the field of possibilities” for me this is an actual dimension. Kinda like Google. When you ask the right question an answer will pop up. Your job is to act on the answer that FEELS correct.
I also believe that when you are given a strong idea and you do not act on it, there is a time limit. When that time limit expires, it flows back out into the field of possibilities to be grabbed by someone else’s attention.
In the old economy we are taught to ask questions in a way that does not help our brain connect with the field of possibilities. Instead we may say…”What am I going to do?” In the field of possibilities we ask…”how am I going to do?” This is a very different answer.
When you answer the question with a
How can I improve this product?
How can I solve this issue, pain or problem?
How can I make this, faster, easier, more convenient?
Then you are stepping into a gold mine of new ideas. Your brain will begin to create with the universal flow to deliver a solution to you. In the new economy, in order to make a fortune you do not have to do what you did in the old economy, which was to invent something. You can have a poor credit score, be broke and still have a new business without inventing something. You can still invent something if you want to but it’s not necessary.
However, what if you have no money, no product or no service? Well, you do have “ideas” and ideas are just another word for money. Could you look at a product that has already been created and improve on it…like WP users did when creating Pluggins to improve the functionality of WordPress?
Ideas are Just Another Word for Money
If you make an App, (application) that improves a current product, then you can sell the application that enhances a product to customers or to the primary company that sells the product. That’s why Microsoft has Window’s 95, 98, Millennium Addition, XP, Vista, and 7. These are not a completely new invention but applications that have improved a product over time. Most apps have 1.0, 2.0, 2.03, 2.62 and so on. Updated downloads happen all the time because people like you and me have “ideas” on how to improve the quality and efficiency of products and services.
Becoming good at trusting your observation skills and asking “how” then stepping into the field of possibilities expecting to have strong ideas will be a key skill set that will make you very wealthy in the new economy. Practice asking yourself, “How can I?”
The sixth new leadership skill set for the new economy: Ideas are another word for money. Develop and trust your ideas. They are everything.
As always, I would love to hear your comments and ask you to please forward this post by using the share the love tabs below.
May you direct your dreams.