How the Internet fried your brain

No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo

Ever imagined a world where original ideas were the norm?

That wasn't too long ago...

Before the Internet

Lets consider a century prior to ours, when everthing was local - stores, services, social interaction and worries.

Back then, all you had to do was make it work where you live. Which is still the case today.

To make ideas work; you need persistence, patience and perseverance to bring that idea to realisation.

L&P - Laziness and Procrastination
Everyone wants more time because they waste it away browsing or socializing away on the internet for hours, reading up on all the latest news and gossip and sitting hours on end infront of a screen.

The easiest product/service to sell nowadays are ones that enable laziness and procrastination. We have proactively dubbed this - consumerism.
 
Take care not to believe by being lazy and procrastinating yourself - you will bring your big idea into the world!

Unique ideas 
To bring your unique idea into fruitition, this is what you'll need to know:

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.
Mark Twain

So here are a couple of rules:

• Be ignorant but not stupid
• Have confidence but not headstrong
• Be humble but not a pushover
• Have faith and do not doubt

Don't go looking for problems to solve - and definitely don't ask people for ideas. I reckon the only good time to ask people for business/idea advice/feedback is when they are potential or existing customers.

The Big Question
Why do a lot of people fail doing business?

Simply because they aren't working on their idea. Pun implied.

The Challenger: Larger Size Matters

Our biggest challenger, is not ourselves - but our perspectives.

Image from ideachampions.com

Think small

We believe worthy challenges are bigger than us.

You may have heard some people perform better under stressful situations, while others crumble.

The truth is; persistent challenge-seeking causes fear to perpetuate in most people.

We make everything harder than it is. Fear and anxiety are partners; anxiety will woo you over while fear breaks you apart.

We are big, problems are small

We live in a challenging world, we constantly find a need to challenge ourselves because everyone else is doing it.

I believe beauty is in the eye of the beholder - and so is a bad perspective.

We are actually big, problems are really small. It's Occam's razor: simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones.

Big problems are made up of little problems

Well that's obvious, we just don't believe it.

So lets try this instead:

Any big change consists of many small changes.

or consider this quote:

"We have not really looked too hard at low priced stocks over the years. Then we started to look for stocks that could gain hundreds, or even thousands of percent, and we found ourselves with small cap penny stocks. ~ William McKinley

The real challenge lies in the preparation of solving these little problems.

And remember, every small change has an effect.

3 reasons to include developers in strategy meetings

I'll aim to keep this short and sweet:

“When you're building your strategy around the user, it changes the business imperatives. This world of Web services really is not about the technology itself, it's about business. The business issues are so much at play that they are really more important than the technology.” Herman Baumann quotes

In the end it's all about the business. Software. Strategy. Customer Support. Sales team. Project Managers. Developers. Techies.

Not a lot of software businesses get this and they opt to exclude developers from strategy meetings.

1. You can't code what you don't know
Programmers need to know the industry, because after all - you can't code what you don't know.

2. Know what works and what doesn't
Programmers, UI and UX designers are generally familiar with the needs of their users and are usually the first to know when something doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

3. We create things others use
In general, over a period of 3 years a developer working at a dev shop will probably gain experience developing up to or over 20 applications that consumers or businesses use. In essence, you could almost equate applications developed to businesses started 1 to 1 - or in this case 20 businesses.

Now, wouldn't it be silly to exclude the developers from strategy meetings?

After all, they are the ones who will be doing the work.