- Compiled and written by Entrepreneurial Business School -

“Entrepreneurship education is a lifelong process. It doesn’t just happen by taking one course”

This statement was written by The Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education, Columbus, Ohio.  This institution, one of the leaders in the field of entrepreneurship education has done extensive research by using the focus group method with entrepreneurs across the United States of America.

Entrepreneurship attributes and skills should be part of each and every person who wishes to excel in the “New Economy”.  You just don’t become an entrepreneur after doing a short course or some modules in entrepreneurship. If you eventually managed to be categorised as an entrepreneur, you are only on the 1^st step of the ladder to real entrepreneurship success.  There are also various grades of entrepreneurship – starting with the street vendor and moving up to people like Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Henry Ford, as well as our very own Anton Rupert, Tony Factor, Sol Kerzner and Raymond Ackerman.

Your progress on this entrepreneurship ladder will be determined by the effort you are prepared to put into your own development. The more you expose yourself to an entrepreneurial environment the more entrepreneurial business  courses you do and books you read, the better you’ll become.  Your success will also be determined by the effort you put into developing your creativity and intuitive abilities.  The other important elements in armouring successful entrepreneurs are the specific attributes they have, like confedence and perseverance. A sound understanding of a market driven economy is also of crutial importance. A succesfull entrepreneur needs to understand the rules of the game and the dimentions of the playing field. In effective entrepreneurship development programs, you should also be taught how to discover your real passions and how to skill yourself in business management principles and techniques.  All these attributes and skills are also relative, and have no boundaries.  You can therefore never be too good in any of the above-mentioned fields.  If we compare entrepreneurship skills development with the skills needed to have a traditional occupation, ceilings appear relatively quickly in the case of the latter. An accountant, for example, is limited to develop the excellence of performing accountancy tasks.  There is therefore a limit of how good you could be in accounting practices and procedures.  If the accountant wishes to excel, he or she should become an entrepreneur and develop his/her entrepreneurial abilities to its fullest potential.  Accounting skills in this instance will then only become part of the arsenal of skills.

In the industrial economy, entrepreneurship was generally viewed as a specific career option to choose from.  In the new economy, entrepreneurship skills have become a critical necessity for each and every person.  The Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education, Columbus Ohio, adds as follows: “When we think about the challenges of downsizing by big businesses as well as in government, the wise person asks where the jobs of the future are going to be.  Fear of failure is a mentality that leads to loss of opportunity.  For those advising youth about their future it is essential that we see entrepreneurial thinking as an opportunity rather than a risk”. The Ohio Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education also found that school leavers, who had entrepreneurship education, all had one advantage in common.  They are motivated to prepare for their careers via a specialised route – all their training are built on the foundation of entrepreneurship.  This Education Consortium feels strongly that a critical component of entrepreneurship development is creative thinking.  It is not enough to enable students to learn about “what is”.  Students need to think of “what can be” and need to practice creative thinking processes.  Education worldwide does very little about “what can be”, even though our future depends entirely on this aspect”.  What a vital statement this is: “Our future depends entirely on what can be”.  The present standard of living, relative safety, security and peace we are enjoying today, were made possible by our abilities to innovate, create and implement.  If we do not develop these attributes, we will never be able to face the challenges of tomorrow.

Entrepreneurship education in the new economy should be the house of knowledge provision, as apposed to a little room in the house.  Entrepreneurship education in SA is, sadly to say, not even a room, but a little outside building.  The result of this mindset is clearly reflected by the latest GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) report. Only 7%of economically active South Africans are entrepreneurs versus an average of 15% in the countries who participated in this study. Our achievements are therefore less than half of the average figure.  The effects of the above non-entrepreneurial culture are also reflected in the high unemployment and high crime rates in our country.  Most South Africans are looking for jobs, which are becoming scarcer and scarcer each year.  We are generally blind for the numerous business opportunities, begging to be utilised.  We need to create a culture where entrepreneurship education becomes the house of education, with other study fields, the rooms in this house.  We need to realise that we are far behind the rest of the world and have to catch up fast.  School leavers, as well as graduates from other tertiary institutions need to catch up on entrepreneurial skills.  An entrepreneurship-training course has become of critical importance for young people before embarking on a career path, which will probably lead to nowhere. Big organisations are still downsizing and employees are loosing jobs on a continuous basis.  Thousands of school leavers go abroad for a year or two; come back and can’t find employment.  Very few South Africans are entrepreneurs who create jobs – most of us are skilled in something, but are job seekers.  We drastically need to turn the situation around.  We need a situation where a critical mass of South Africans emerges to the status of job creators (entrepreneurs).  The solution to this critical problem is, without a doubt, in effective entrepreneurship education.  Entrepreneurship education needs to be viewed as the highest priority in our country.  South Africans also need to realise that entrepreneurship education is not a once-off affair, but a continuous process.  We also need to understand that there are no limits in developing our creative, innovative and entrepreneurial skills.  The more we apply and practice, the better we will get.  The future is there for us to shape.  What we do today, at this point in time, will determine what the future will be like.

We also need to realise that prosperity and peace are created by the human mind.  The more we stretch our minds and develop entrepreneurial attributes, the more the solutions to problems will follow.  Effective entrepreneurial education is urgently needed to shift the old paradigm away from only learning about “what is” towards learning and thinking of “what can be”.

It is also very interesting that 74% of the GDP of the United States is contributed by small companies with less than 50 employees.  The importance of entrepreneurship education, “the new area of education” as it is known in the USA, can never be over-emphasised in the new economic climate we found ourselves today.  We are not only behind the rest of the world regarding the percentage of entrepreneurs in SA, we are also behind in realising the critical importance of such education.  University, Technikon and College graduates should all attend a year program in Entrepreneurial Business Management, before moving into the mainstream of the economy. American research suggests that students with a solid entrepreneurship foundation are not only likely to become entrepreneurs – they are also better employees. This is probably because they now have a more sound understanding regarding the challenges confronting their employers and how they could help secure the future of the business.

The importance of entrepreneurship training in the new economy also goes beyond empowering people wishing to start their own businesses.  Entrepreneurship education has become critical important to people who want to follow the so-called professional routes, like becoming doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers.  The financially successful professionals in the new economy will have to be entrepreneurs as well.

The corporate world, as well as smaller business employers, are now looking for people with entrepreneurial skills and attributes.  The specific name of “Intrapreneur” has been created for entrepreneurial-minded corporate employees.  It is of growing importance for big businesses, as well as semi-government and government organisations, to become entrepreneurial-minded.  The task is even bigger for the education sector, specifically universities, colleges and schools. This is a huge task because these bodies, generally do not personally have what they should teach – “entrepreneurial mindsets”.  We all need to create, innovate, invent and implement new solutions to problems and/or better solutions to old problems.  Effective entrepreneurship training addresses all these issues and provides the foundation for all people to be the best they can.  We all differ and have something unique to offer each other and society in general.  What is needed is a new educational approach from where we can develop the individual and differentiated talents more optimally.  The challenge for effective entrepreneurship education and development is to provide the tools, the principles and the skills to empower people to develop their specific uniqueness.  We also need to create an entrepreneurial culture, via education and training in our country before people can embark on the road to optimum self-actualisation.

- Compiled and written by Entrepreneurial Business School -

Are the education system producing products (people) capable and able to function and excel in the “new economy”?  The aim of this article is to analyse and then attempt to answer the question above.

Let’s start by establishing what exactly is meant by the term “new economy” and how it differs from the old economy.  We should then be in a better position to judge the relevance of the present educational outcomes.  Current economic realities and specifically the key success factors needed to excel, are surely the elements, which will describe the “new economy”.  What are these key success factors?  As to answer the latter, we will all agree that the “new economy” could be described by the following set of new and emerging trends:

v      Ever increasing competition between producers of products and services.

v      The old fear of inflation has been replaced by the fear of deflation.  This means that there are simply too many of the same products and services on the market.

v      Companies have to and are getting leaner and more efficient as globalisation breaks down national barriers.  The world has now become a global village.

v      The so-called right sizing or down sizing of personnel in organisations are causing large-scale retrenchments.

v      The job market is also further shrinking as companies are outsourcing their non-core functions to smaller companies.

v      The introduction of new information technology resulted in even more retrenchments and fewer job opportunities.  This is simply because computers and computer systems are far more efficient than humans (one computer has the administration capacity of many skilled admin people).

The overall result of the above trends, are simply fewer jobs and therefore growing unemployment.  The South African economy is currently, for example, growing at a good pace, but fails to create many new job opportunities.  This is nobody’s fault, but simply a trademark of the “new economy”.

In an article in Die Burger 9 to 5, 2^nd March 2005, it was clearly spelled out that so-called highly talented young people couldn’t find employment.  These so-called talented people include those who had many “A” symbols in matric and achieved university degrees, Technikon, as well as college diplomas and certificates.  These are the current economic realities, the trends and trademarks of the “new economy”.  What has happened to the “old economy”, why are we now in this new economic environment?

How did the world economy progress towards this current state?  An analysis of the economic historic path could be the ideal starting point in order to understand and to find solutions to the unemployment problems we are facing today.  It will therefore make sense to start by exploring the prominent historic phases we went through.

The first definite stage in the history of economic growth is known as the “extraction” phase.  In this phase, man managed to extract metals from rock.  These metals enabled humans to make many new problem-solving products, but also to make artefacts with more precision and effectiveness. In this phase a new energy source, coal, was discovered and utilised. One key success factor for this economic phase was not only the ability to obtain mineral wealth, but also the know-how to find, and also to mine.  Another key success factor was also effective and efficient methods to transport these minerals and metals to strategic locations.

The next and most dynamic phase in the economic growth history of the human race, is known as the “artisan phase”.  This phase was characterised by many new artefacts.  They were invented and made by applying human creativity, utilising theses metals and minerals, discovered during the 1^st phase.  This phase was also characterised by numerous new inventions, new theories and new scientific principles were laid down.

The many theories and principles developed during this phase provided the insights and laid the scientific foundations for the centuries to come.  Examples are electricity, algebra, calculus, arithmetic, statistical analysis, to name but a few.   Other brilliant individuals from this era were Pascal, Galileo, James Watt and Leonardo da Vinci.  This was the era of Isaac Newton and many other people who changed the world.

By manufacturing new artefacts, and by making new scientific breakthroughs, many more problems could now be solved and the economic standard of living was lifted to great new heights.

The additional key success factors for this economic phase were mainly new inventions, better craftsmanship, and also the development and application of scientific and mathematical principles and techniques.

The next phase, the “industrial phase” came about as a result of the numerous scientific breakthroughs made during the artisan phase.  This phase has a really big impact on the economic growth and the standard of living on this planet. This phase sold man-building machines, which were capable of producing products in masses – fast, efficient and effective.  At first, many people lost their jobs as machines took over their functions.  These products, which were produced on a large scale, were much cheaper, and took over the markets of many of the small artisans.  As time went by, many new, but different jobs were however created in the industrial phase.  These new jobs were created by the distribution, administration and maintenance needs of the factories, which were now producing large volumes of products.  This new demand for labour grew at a very rapid pace as more and more new factories were created.  More and more complicated machines were developed, which produced many more and different kinds of products in mass numbers.

The key success factors needed in this phase were mainly administrative, organisational and operational skills, as well as know-how in the fields of distribution, engineering, bookkeeping and accounting.  This was the era of efficiency, meaning that you have to do things right, correctly according to instructions. Doing the right things became the sole function of a small elite.  The majority of people became routine freaks and as time went by, they were conditioned that the only way to success was via good employment. Academic qualifications became the major route towards top posts and into the circle of the elite.  Intelligence was judged by school and university results. Quickness of comprehension, the ability to learn and the quality of the memory, were the main criteria.

It was however a sad day when specialisation of labour, ridged job and task descriptions and the importance of speed in operations. Typical of the industrial phase, it pushed the importance of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship to the back of the queue.  The success of achievements in this automation phase had a blinding effect on people, and the world forgot what the real drivers of economic growth were, and still are.

The industrial phase was followed by a few minor phases, of which the marketing phase was the first one.  As more and more industrialists started to emerge, competition intensified and companies realised that they can’t only manufacture, they also needed to market their products.  This phase had a lesser impact on the standard of living than the previous phases, but new key success factors however, also emerged.

The new success factors for this phase were advertising and marketing know-how.  The science of advertising was developed and people started to believe that if you can advertise well enough, you could almost sell anything.

The marketing phase was followed by the customer knowledge phase.  The primary reasons these phases emerged, were more intense competition in the economies of the world, and because the effects of advertising were neutralised by counter advertising from competitors.

In this phase groups of customers, who had the same needs, were grouped in segments and products and services were customised to satisfy the needs in a specific segment better than the competition.  Niche marketing became the new game.

The additional key success factors for this phase were therefore market research techniques and know-how.  These were of utmost importance in order to understand customers better than that of the competition.  This knowledge was also used for better customer service and to create customer loyalty, which provided a competitive advantage to companies.

The next major phase started to emerge during the 1990’s and brought us into the current so-called “new economy”.  Like the industrial phase, this phase also introduced drastic changes and caused major economic shocks.  Many people lost and are still losing their jobs.  The knowledge and skills provided by the educational system are now marginalized to a great extent.

During the transition from the artisan into the industrial phase, the educational system had to deal with a very similar situation.  The key success factors, required for every new economic phase provided the guidelines for the educational system to follow. The important question to be answered today is, what are the key success factors needed for this “new economic” phase we find ourselves in today?  Since we have defined and analysed the “new economy” at the beginning of the article, it is now relatively easy to identify what is needed to excel (the key success factors) in this phase.

The key success factors are therefore:

v      The ability to create new and revolutionary products, concepts and services.  (A higher degree of creativity and innovation have therefore become key success attributes).

v      Success will also be a function of abilities to develop local and international networks.

v      Successful people will be those who understand the mechanisms of the national and international economies.

v      People need to re-learn how to motivate themselves, take risks and live with uncertainty.

v      People need to learn how to identify and how to utilise new business opportunities.  Successful participants in the new economy need to know how to un-learn and how to shift old paradigms.

v      The over-emphasis on memory needs to be replaced by a much stronger focus on intuition and creative insights.

v      Old paradigms regarding scarcity need to be replaced by new abundance mindsets.

v      Education needs to focus on techniques and principles for creating new mindsets.  Advanced knowledge regarding the mechanics of the human mind has now become critical.

The new economy is providing us with problems and therefore, many potential solutions, where we have to utilise more of our given brain capacity in order to excel.

It is also clear that the attributes and skills needed to succeed in the industrial and related phases are not relevant any more.  What is really needed now, are entrepreneurial mindsets, knowledge, skills and attributes.

It is time to teach our children the basic economic principles in order to understand the rules of the game and the dimensions of the playing field.  We all need to realise that prosperity is a function of the human mind (to solve problems for one another).  We need to realise that we all have different talents and every single normal person is brilliant in his or her own specific field.  We have to stop pushing young people into the few and limited fields of study.  These fields were relevant during the industrial phase, but we now need much more in order to face the challenges of the new economy.  We must stop making people, who do not excel in the traditional study fields, feel stupid. They have other talents, which are outside of the current boxes.  Besides, we are only using between 5 – 10% of our brain capacity – how on earth could any person be labelled as stupid?

We urgently need to develop our natural creative and innovative abilities, which are currently severely depressed by traditional education.  People’s mindsets need to change from that of job seeking, towards that of opportunity seeking.  People, who are caught in job seeking paradigms, will not be able to see new business opportunities.  Business opportunities, needless to say, simply boil down to solving problems.  It could be new solutions to old problems, or solutions to new problems.  We need to understand that solutions are never perfect – there is always room for improvement.  For example, if looking at the transport problem, the ox wagon was fine at a time.  It was a fairly good solution for the transport problem, but we have surely improved dramatically on that one.  Prosperity is not a scarce article; it can never be, because it is a function of creativity and innovation on the one hand, and solving problems on the other hand.  Problems and their solutions are not only relative, like the ox wagon, they are also growing and becoming more as our standard of living increases.  As we move up the ladder of economic prosperity, problems, which were not perceived as problems before, are now becoming problems.  Things you did yourself in the past, suddenly become hassles; like getting your car washed and cleaned, for example.

This is now the time to create a culture from where “new” Isaac Newton’s can emerge.  Newton, the founder of the scientific principles we are boasting with today, formulated his theories in sixteen hundred already.  The other super brain, Albert Einstein, was also born 150 years ago.

We need to teach our young ones that wealth is not a scarce resource – it is in fact available in abundance.  The wonderful principles of “the more you give, the more you’ll receive”, is also a key factor for economic success.  If we can manage to vest these principles as part of our culture, the world will take the quantum leap towards the love and peace we are surely all striving for.

The “new economy” will therefore be known in future as the entrepreneurial phase.  People need to realise that problems we are facing, are in fact potential opportunities when solved.  This phase therefore demands a total attitudinal makeover.  We need to realise that success is not going to be a function of demanding or taking, but success is the result of providing solutions to problems. The human mind always had, and still has, the ability to solve any problem it can conceptualise and formulise.

Similar to the industrial phase, the entrepreneurial phase has the potential to lift the economic standard of living to new heights.  The opportunities are there – we only need to learn to utilise them.

I would like to conclude by asking the following questions:

v      Is the present public educational system capable of producing graduates who are equipped to excel in the Entrepreneurial Phase?

v      Why does the educational system continue to produce people who function in the outdated Industrial Phase that is not relevant any more?

v      Why is the system so slow in adapting to the demands of the Entrepreneurial Phase?

- Compiled and written by Entrepreneurial Business School -

Why are certain economies booming, while others struggle and its people are suffering and sometimes even starving?   What are the fundamental differences between poverty and economic success? Two main factors or forces responsible for this difference will be discussed in this article.

The first distinction is surely the innovative, and entrepreneurial mindsets, people in successful economies have. National entrepreneurial cultures, experienced in prosperous economies, were all sparked by the first entrepreneurs who created innovations (Solutions to problems) and started to trade in the form of bartering. A knife, was for example, traded for a fork. But if one person wanted a knife but the other not the fork the transaction could not take place. To solve this trading problem, money was invented and demand and supply (the market mechanism) was created, in order to determine the prices/values of various product/services. Higher standards of living became a function of the intensity and volume of trading. Economic prosperity is therefore a function of the number of solutions (product/services) an economic community produces, and then trade with. The amount of money a person will make is also the result of how well the solution on offer is perceived in the market. Any solution, in high demand but short supply, will fetch a high price in a market economy. It is also important to state the fact, that the reason to buy, is primarily to solve a problem. Therefore, the more people manage to create solutions to problems and then trade with them, the higher the standard of living will be. In other words the more we help one another, by trading in solutions to problems, the higher the standard of living and the more prosperity we will enjoy.

This brings us to the second main factor responsible for creating wealth and prosperity.  This factor is the climate in which we play the economic game. This climate provides the parameters in which to operate.  It is important that these parameters should create basic order (the legal system). More important however, is the fact that we need economic freedom in order to apply our talents to solve problems and to freely trade with these solutions, utilising the market mechanism to determine prices. In other words; the least this interference is, the higher the growth, and the higher the standard of living will be.  The true free market system, as applied in Hong Kong and in other countries, where economic miracles happened, has proved itself over and over to be the better option.  Studies done by Dr. Milton Freedman (Economic Nobel Prize winner) and many other leading economists, have found that a high degree of economic freedom goes hand in hand with economic growth and prosperity.

The major driving forces creating economic growth are: (1) a climate of economic freedom (which serves as a catalyst), (2) an entrepreneurial culture where people develop and then trade with solutions to problems.

We are all born as highly innovative beings who love to explore, invent and create.  We are also provided with numerous problems, screaming for innovative and creative solutions.  All we need is the freedom to apply our talents in solving these problems.  We therefore need a climate of basic law and order on the one hand, but critically important on the other hand, we also need economic freedom.  It is during this creative problem-solving process that we normally experience self-actualisation.  We are all blessed with different talents, begging to be utilized to the benefit of all on this planet. If we could all apply these gifts, we would not only be able to satisfy the ego, but also benefit one another in an optimum manner.  By using our God-given abilities to solve problems, we will, in effect, not only benefit man, but we will also benefit our planet as a whole. Human and environmental problems are one and the same.  Man needs the planet in order to survive.

Economic growth needs to occur in order to create a better standard of living for all. The general perception of the average person is unfortunately that economic prosperity is a function of resources like oil, gold, copper, etc.  Today, in the modern economy, the importance of these kinds of resources has largely been marginalized. There was however, a time in history, when the wealth of countries, governments and kings, were determined by the amounts of land they owed, and the mineral wealth their countries possessed.  It is the strong memory of these historic times, which is the cause for the current illusion regarding the importance of resources.  This mindset was also the driving force behind colonialism, and the indicator of power and wealth right up to the early and even the middle part of the last century.

Prosperity in the new economy is not achieved by the richness of the minerals owned, but rather by the transformation of these resources into problem solving products.  Creativity   innovation and entrepreneurship are necessary to turn minerals and metal into valuable problem solving articles.  These resources are totally useless, unless they are transformed into problem-solving articles and artefacts like motorcars, aeroplanes and machines.  Wealth is created by those that develop the ability to transform minerals, metals and oil into something useful.

In the new economy today, some of the wealthiest countries in terms of mineral resources are rated as very poor.  The general standard of living is sometimes below the breadline.  These countries are also normally characterised by violent political fraction fighting, diseases, hunger and general poverty.  Examples are most African countries, most Middle Eastern countries, parts of South America, Russia, as well as others in Eastern Europe.  Russia and most countries in the Middle East possess massive mineral wealth, but the great majority of people living there are desperately poor.  Why are these countries so poor?  The simple truth is that prosperity is created by creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship and not by resources per se.

Prosperity is the primary result of the natural abilities of the human mind to solve problems.  The major problem-solving instrument, utilised effectively in the prosperous economies of the world, is called business. Businesses compete with one another in their quest to make money by solving customers’ problems.  The businesses providing the more effective and efficient solutions, will make the most money.  The businesses that fail to satisfy customers’ needs optimally will go out of business. Any business can therefore only survive, if it can effectively and efficiently manage to solve problems for people, and/or organisations.  These problems have also to be solved in such a way, that the receivers of these solutions are willing to pay for it. This willingness to pay is the acid test, determining the real value of the solution.  The word “business” is synonym for the action of trading – “you give me something I want, and I will give you something you want.” If both parties give and receive satisfactorily, they have done business.  Business, however, is more than the trading of articles or artefacts – business is also the trading of talents in the form of services.

Trading in services has become the biggest source of economic activity in the first world today.  The services industries are normally responsible for 80% and more, of the economic activities in wealthy first world countries.  Manufacturing activities account for only between 10% and 15% of economic activity in modern economies.  Most people however, still have the perception that wealth is mainly created by the manufacturing of articles and artefacts. This false impression is caused by the memory of the industrial revolution, and the huge impact this economic phase had on the general standards of living.  Fact is, products are only demanded and manufactured because of their capability to solve problems.  A bed, for example, is used to solve the problem of comfortable sleep, and a car is used to solve the problem of moving from one area to another.  All products are therefore only manufactured because of the services they provide to potential buyers.

The ultimate need for a product or a service is therefore identical.  Both are used to solve a problem for the buyer or customer.  In modern economic terminology, solutions to problems have become known as the satisfaction of needs.  However, if a need is analysed, it always comes down to an unsolved problem in the mind of the customer.  The basic motive underlying the desire to buy is always seated in the perception that a product or service will solve a problem.  Even compulsive buyers purchase things in an attempt to solve a specific kind of problem.  A good salesman will convince you that you need a product or service, by spelling out how the product or service will solve your specific problems.  A solution to a problem is therefore always the primary reason to buy – any good salesman will tell you this.

It should be clear by now, that economic growth and higher standards of living are created by innovative solutions to problems.

All countries with a high standard of living, achieved this growth by solving problems effectively. This became possible through freeing creative minds by upholding a true free market system, and by developing the potential of their people. In this environment, people will develop entrepreneurial mindsets, and apply their creativity and innovative talents, and search for problems to be solved.  We all have different talents, which make each of us a master of a specific field.  If we can apply our unique abilities to solve problems, economic growth will increase, and the world will become a planet of peace, prosperity and harmony.  Prosperity is definitely not achieved through taking, but rather by giving. We need to erase the outdated and harmful mindsets that individual wealth resulted from effectively competing for scarce sources. This very harmful frame of reference is unfortunately still perpetuated by ignorant publicity, as well as by misinformed teachers of the youth.  The more people apply their creative minds and provide solutions to problems, the more wealth they will have.  In a free market environment, people will be more than willing to pay you, if you could solve their problems efficiently and effectively.  These solutions could be in the form of services and/or products or a combination.

The package needed for economic growth, is therefore a free market climate, entrepreneurial mindsets, and, very importantly, the basic knowledge and understanding of how wealth can be created for all.

We have to understand that wealth is not scarce – it is simply a result of solutions to problems.  We have to question our old beliefs regarding the source of wealth.  Wealth is not a function of owning natural resources – wealth is a function of applying the mind, and creating solutions to problems.  The economic history and magical successes achieved by the small island, Hong Kong, is proof of this.  With zero minerals and limited agricultural resources, the community proved once again that a free market climate and entrepreneurial thinking provided the recipe for economic success.  The small island of Hong Kong achieved its success without what is perceived to be the needed traditional resources.  Even more remarkable to most, was the fact that they did not even have a government.  Law and order was provided by Britain thousands of miles away, but apart from that, nothing else.  This remarkable community was largely made up of refugees from Mainland China.  They were people who strove for economic freedom and fled from the bondage of a communistic regime.  Hong Kong provided the right climate, in which they could apply their innovative and entrepreneurial talents for their own benefit.  It is now history, but these people with their entrepreneurial mindsets, managed to create a world-class city from nothing.  It all started very small.  It all began by solving problems for the ships visiting their port, as well as each other’s problems. They used their differentiated talents, and traded these solutions they generated.  Economic activity later started to snowball, and Hong Kong grew into a monument of economic success.  The example of what happened in Hong Kong, has not only inspired the so-called free world to greater freedom, it has also inspired their gigantic communistic neighbour, China.  This giant is now in the process of providing more and more economic freedom to its people.

China today is starting to emerge from poverty, and is expected to fully join the free world within the next decade or two. How wonderful it will be, if their millions of people could also start to use their talents to solve problems, and to trade the solutions with us.  The wakening of this giant, will surely add substantially to the creation of wealth in the world.  We can also start looking forward to the contributions of Russia, India and Africa in the near future.  This will mainly happen when the success of China starts to influence the mindsets and perceptions of a critical mass of people.  This critical mass will help the free world to reach the tipping point, and the world economic scale will swing away from poverty to prosperity.  The mindsets of people will then have changed accordingly, and they will start thinking abundance as apposed to scarcity.  This new mindset will only start developing when people realise the creation of wealth and the solving of problems go hand in hand. We need to understand that the creation of wealth is not accomplished by exploitation or by taking from others – it is created by the process of effective problem solving.  We need to realise that the creative abilities of the human mind is the vital key in transforming scarcity into abundance.  Creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, and not wars and fighting, will therefore provide the solutions.

The first world has shown that they can over-produce food at will.  By applying their minds via new technology, it sometimes happens that foods have to be destroyed in wealthy economies.  This is done in order to prevent surpluses.  This proves the fact that nothing needs to be scarce, not even food.  If the human mind has the ability to formulate a problem, it automatically has the ability to solve it as well.  It is estimated that the average human, at present, is only using between 4 and 12 percent of their brain potential.  We are created with diverse talents, and should start to use some of our potential.  It seems if we are only utilising the tip of the iceberg in relation of what we are capable of.  We have only started on the road to real economic growth.  A free market climate is necessary to be the catalyst, for new inventions and innovations, to come.

We conclude by stating again, that prosperity is a function of the creative, innovative and entrepreneurial abilities.  We need to be free to choose, and be free to develop and to trade our talents, for personal benefit.  The wonderful result, of developing our talents, for personal gain, is that in the process, we are also benefiting all.  We do however, need to rethink the way we educate our people.  We are generally caught up in the job-seeking mindsets, educated into us by school and tertiary syllabuses.  Education is still very much designed to the needs of the industrial era and needs to be redesigned.  As we highlighted in this article, is entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation not only the key to a better standard of living, but also the key to our future growth.

We need to create new mindsets in our students through the contents, and the way, we teach them.  The scarcity mindsets our generation are programmed with need to be replaced in our youth by the belief of abundance.  In analysing the factors, which create economic growth and prosperity, we should realise that abundance for each and all is possible and achievable.  There are, however, huge hurdles to overcome.  The biggest challenges are to change the mindsets of educators, and the people designing educational courses.  These people’s thinking is unfortunately moulded into job-seeking mindsets with limited entrepreneurial thinking or flair.  It is therefore difficult to believe that government employees could be up to this mammoth task.

Economic realities will eventually cause this transformation process in education to happen, but it will be slow and painful.  The education system will keep on producing job seekers to a point where unemployment levels reaches disastrous levels.  It will in the end be up to businesses to solve brooding educational problems as well.

In the next article we will focus more on specifically the educational demands of the new economy.

- Compiled and written by Entrepreneurial Business School -

Work passion is more than just doing what you can and like.  It’s about having a dream. Successful intrapreneurs tend to have a big dream. The first question to be asked in this regard is: “Who am I and who will I be one day”?

Developing a carefully reasoned answer to this question pushes one to consider what one’s choices and decisions should be and to develop a clearer picture of where you need to be headed over the next 5 to 10 years. The answer to this question begins with the process of carving out a meaningful direction for your life and establishing a strong self-identity.

This picture of what one seeks to do and to become is commonly termed one’s vision and mission.  A vision and mission statement establishes one’s future course and outlines who you are, what you do, and where you’re headed.

If you have establish what your mission and vision is you’ll have to convert this statement of individual meaning, purpose and direction into specific performance targets. It is therefore necessary to set clear goals and objectives: something one’s progress can be measured by.

Action plans serve to operationalise the objectives you have set for yourself.  These plans deal with clear time frames that have more impact on one’s day-to-day activities.

Lastly you also need guidelines to control your behaviour.  In striving towards your vision and mission, not anything is acceptable.  These guidelines that control your behaviour are called values.

Learning to do what you love

The fundamental lesson that all the great achievers teach us is this: Do what you love to do. That’s simple enough. However, sometimes people just don’t believe they could possibly be paid for doing what they love. At other times, they have forgotten what it is they love.  Perhaps the most important thing that prevents people from getting in touch with their mission is this: They just don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to go from their day-to-day goals, values and interests to that one unified direction of excitement and fulfilment – their mission.  It is possible, however, to use a step-by-step series of exercises to assist you in determining your passion in life, and what you were born to achieve in your lifetime.

When most people think about their lives, they tend to acknowledge that actually they have lived their lives in a survival mode.  As we all know, there is a huge difference between merely surviving and fully living.

Maybe being motivated to survive is something you’ve always done. When you think back on your life, there probably have been times when you had to discover a very strong sense of motivation for yourself in order to survive.  Now you can redirect the energy of your survival instinct so that you can use it for going beyond surviving to living – to living the life that you choose (your vision and mission).

To find an exquisite example of passion for life, we need to look no further than Susan Butcher, who raced in the most gruelling and difficult race in the world – the Iditarod Dog Sled Race. The Iditarod race stretches eleven hundred miles across the barren, cold wilderness of Alaska. It lasts ten or more days, and it’s an amazing accomplishment to finish it at all. Susan Butcher has won this race four times.

How did Susan Butcher decide that she was going to be an excellent performer in this field?  In 1975, she was living on the East Coast of the United States.  She was twenty years old, and she didn’t know what to do with her life.  She asked herself, “How can I create a life that includes the two things that I love: wilderness and animals?”  Her answer was to discover her personal passion.  She said, “ I just always loved dogs and all animals, and when my first dog died, I just wanted to replace him.  I ended up buying a husky, and he was six weeks old.”  I thought “wouldn’t it be wonderful to teach him how to pull a sled?”  So I did it as a hobby.  Then four months later, I bought my second husky, and then two months after that, I moved in with a woman who had fifty huskies, and then I started mushing in earnest.

So she decided on dog-sled racing. She kept moving west and north. She ended up in Alaska and built a log cabin to live in. She didn’t have any security in going there and following her dream, but she did it anyway. Now she is the foremost achiever on the planet in her sport – a sport that, up to this time, had been dominated by men.

In the case of Susan Butcher, it is easy to understand the difference between a mission and a goal. Here’s how she describes it:

“A lot of people would look at my life and think it’s a lot of hard work. But for me, it’s a labour of love.”

That’s how you know when you are living your unfolding mission – when pursuing your goals is a labour of love. And it comes from finding your life’s passions.  It is important however, to realise the step-by-step process involved in reaching one’s dreams.  You don’t start with your dream; you live towards it, step-by-step, doing what you love to do.

Another person of achievement, who found and follows his passions in life, is movie director, Steven Spielberg.  More people have seen Steven Spielberg’s movies than those of any other director. He started making movies when he was a child, a mere eight years old. He decided that his mission in life was to be a storyteller through the medium of film. He is constantly creating, because to him, making movies is like playing. This is how Spielberg describes his work:

“In my films I celebrate the imagination as a tool of great creations…. I dream for a living.  Once a month, the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make. Sometimes I think I’ve got ball bearings for brains; these ideas are slipping and sliding across each other all the time. My problem is that my imagination (vision) won’t turn off. I wake up so excited that I can’t eat breakfast. I’ve never run out of energy.”

So Steven Spielberg can be an example to us all of what can happen when you do what you love to do.

Ted Turner is another example of a person who is passionately living a mission. He is the founder of the Goodwill Games, founder of CNN, TNT, and Headline News, and creator of an incredible cable-television empire. In fact, he brought cable television news not only to the United States, but also to the world. He was declared by “Time” magazine as the “Man of the Year” in 1991 for his achievements.

How did he start his mission? After he found out that his father Ed had initiated plans to sell his business, Ted stood up to him at age twenty-four. In this verbal battle, he “threw back all of Ed Turner’s own arguments against quitting in life.” Soon after their argument, his father killed himself with a pistol.  From that moment on Ted “sped forth on a quest from which he would never look back….”

His father’s death prompted him to re-examine his deepest values. Up until then, Turner says, his father’s idea of success had permeated his thinking. “He was the one, really, that I had expected to be the judge of whether I was successful or not….”. This re-examination of what was important created some major shifts in his criteria for success. He said, “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it was that he did wrong. He put too much emphasis on material success. I can tell you, it’s fool’s gold….”

Our deepest tragedies can become a springboard for the next phase of our life. In this case the torturous pain of death motivated him to re-examine his deepest values and principles, and, in fact, to develop some new ones.

Another person who deeply examined his values and principles was a coach, John Wooden.  His UCLA basketball team amassed the greatest winning streak (88 games) in any major sport.  He is the only person enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and coach. During his 27 years at UCLA, his teams never had a losing season.  In his last 12 years they won 10 NCAA championships, including seven in a row. No team in college basketball has even come close to repeating these achievements.

His relentless dedication is legendary. He still has records of every minute of every practice of his twenty-seven years at UCLA. He never talked about winning. “To me success isn’t outscoring someone, it’s the peace of mind that comes from self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best. That’s something each individual must determine for himself.”

By combining his athletic skills, his father’s creed of principles to live by, and a love of people, he became the most admired coach in the world. How did he formulate his mission? This is the creed given to him by his father, which made up a key part of living his mission:

1.  Be yourself (live in harmony with who you really are).

2.  Make each day your masterpiece.

3.  Help others.

4.  Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible.

5.  Make friendship a fine art.

6.  Build a shelter against a rainy day.

7.  Pray for guidance, count and give thanks for your blessings every day.

Besides living his creed, what motivated him to choose his mission as a coach? In his own words he said:

“As a matter of fact, I’m frequently asked why I chose coaching as a career and then stayed with it.  Amos Alonzo Stagg, who coached football at Chicago when I used to make my annual “walk to Chicago,” best sums up my feelings on the subject. Stagg, who worked with youth and coached well into his nineties, when asked why he had coached, once said, ”It was because of a promise I made to God.  I feel that my love for young people is the main reason I have stayed in coaching and have refused positions that would have been far more lucrative.”

He wasn’t following someone else’s values. He looked deeply into himself. He made the values and principles he was taught, and those he had formulated, into his own.

In modern life, it is difficult to be yourself, because life tends to push and condition people to function in rigid moulds.  But you can do the same thing that Susan Butcher, Steven Spielberg, Ted Turner and John Wooden did. You can discover your deeply- held values, principles and dreams and embrace them. The following set of exercises will show you how.

PLEASE REMEMBER: Finding your destiny and building your dream is a process, which takes time and effort!

You are probably familiar with the story of the person who opened a chrysalis in an effort to help the “struggling” butterfly to become free.   However, he was amazed to find that the butterfly was unable to fly as a result of his “assistance”.  You see, the butterfly needed the difficult process to be able to master his valuable ability to fly.  Nature apparently knows how to put a price on its most valuable possessions.

Writing and visualising your own vision, mission and values are similar to the process described above.  The following steps can guide you through the process.  Some steps can be dealt with quickly, others will take longer, even months, but each journey starts with a first step.  So get started!

How to get started:

In order to become successful, one needs to know three things about yourself:

v                  The first is a clear picture of what you want to be and to achieve – your dreams – things you would like to achieve and the characteristics you would like to have.  This is your vision of the future.

v                  The second is why you want to achieve all of this – what is the meaning of all this – your life’s purpose – the contribution / difference you want to make in life.  This is your mission in life.

v                  The third is how you want to achieve all of this.  This element contains two different, but narrowly related aspects:

• The first refers to the strategy or action plans you’re going to follow in order to reach your dreams and destiny.
• The second has to do with behavioural guidelines that will control your plans and behaviour – the values or principles according to which you are willing to act.

As a result of the complexity of this process, it’s not a matter of quickly jotting down your personal vision/mission statement.  What follows is a process of steps you can follow in order to help you with the journey.

One of the most effective ways of creating your personal vision and mission is to see to it that you work and think alone and uninterruptedly. Nature provides an ideal environment; utilise it if you can.

The steps you’re going to follow are an expedition deep within yourself.  Try to get in touch with what is really important to you.  The self-examination to which you subject yourself may be at a level that is unfamiliar to you.  However, if you persevere through all the stages, you will really experience how powerful the question, “What do I really want?” is.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

The next couple of steps and exercises are designed in order to take you through a process to arrive at a personal vision, mission and strategy (life plan).  It is very important to keep you focus on the “big picture” and not to get lost within finer details.  If you don’t have “answers” to all the questions, don’t worry about it.  Rather continue with the process.

Step 1:  Discovering your passions in life

Before formulating a personal vision and mission, you first need to think about yourself generally and to make honest notes about the things you really love to do.  The questions that follow will help you with this.  Remember this information is for your eyes only and for no one else’s.

Tap your inner excitement.  Like Steven Spielberg, Susan Butcher, and other great achievers, know your interests.  Or as NLP co-founder John Grinder once asked:  “What do you love to do so much that you’d pay to do it?”

Know your passions, your desires, and your loves.  Only you know what you truly love.  It could be teaching, inventing or hundreds of other delightful possibilities.  You might find hints in a hobby you enjoy.  You might love people or love computers or both.  As you think of those interests, those desires, those loves and those passions, feel your own inner signals of excitement and interest welling up from the depths of your psyche.  Feel them.  Take an inventory of the most fun events in your life.  If you had ten million dollars, what would you pay to do?

Focus on those people and things you really admire.  See and hear your favourite heroes and admired people; the men and women whom you most want to be like, whom you’ve emulated and imitated throughout your life.  These heroes may have similar interests, desires and goals than you do.  Pay attention to them and enjoy them.  See them in the screen of your mind’s eye, in the inner theatre, and feel the excitement you’ve tapped into.

Persist with this exercise.  Keep doing this over and over again until you have a rich collection of images of what you are passionate at doing.  If you cannot answer all the questions, don’t worry about it.  Rather move on with the exercise.

Step 2:  Discovering your Personal Dreams and Ideals

Against this background of things you enjoy, admire and desire, you can now start to formulate your dreams and ideals in life.  The next exercise will assist you with this.

Step 3:  Describing your goals in life

Now that you dreamed about who you would like to be and what you would like to do with your life, it is necessary to summarise it in terms of goals.

NOTE: Are your wings becoming tired of struggling?  Perhaps you should now reward yourself and relax for about 5 minutes before proceeding to the next step.  Don’t take too long – otherwise your muscles will get stiff and cold!

Step 4:  Discovering your Deepest Personal Values (core values)

Personal values are those principles that serve as guidelines to direct and control your behaviour.  It has to do with what is right and wrong and noble.  Values are sets of feelings that let you know what is important to you.  You can look at values from two points of views:

From one point of view, values are those principles (like honesty, fairness, etc) that you are not willing to trespass in perceiving any goal.

On the other side, are values those things in life that are very precious to you like love, dignity, etc.  You are thus willing to go a long way in order to possess these precious things.

Important Note:

You might be wondering how this process will eventually get you to your vision and mission?  You are now busy gathering the ingredients in order to create something of value and not just a hollow statement, which do not really inspire you.

Step 5:  Defining the purpose and meaning of your life

The next thing to do with your values and principles is to integrate them into a big picture of the wholeness of what you want to make of your life.  Let’s go back to Ted Turner.  After he had re-examined his values and principles, he began his mission in earnest.  His newly discovered values and principles led the way to the grand vision of his life’s mission.

Why, for example, did he create the Goodwill Games, which lost eighty million dollars in 1986 and 1990?  “I did it to get the two countries on the playing fields again.  I could just tell the Soviets were looking to be friends,” he said.

When asked why he lives his life the way he does, he responded:  “I just wanted to see if we could do it – like Christopher Columbus.  When you do something that’s never been done before, sail on uncharted waters and don’t know where you’re going, you’re not sure what you’re going to find when you get there, but at least you’re going somewhere.”

But he also continued:  “We have a responsibility, because television news is so powerful, not to only make a lot of money, but to have an influence in our communities.  Our community … is not just the local market or even our country, but the world in which we live…

Why don’t we aim, during the next ten years to have peace on earth, and in the Year 2000, turn the time back to zero, and let it be B.P. and A.P. – Before Peace and After Peace?  That could be the greatest honour we could bestow upon our generation.  So, if we do that, then people will be here two thousand years from now.”  Can you see the sense of mission (making a difference / contribution to the world through what we do) in these statements?

Typical of the mission of a great achiever, he has a huge, nearly unachievable dream as a motivating vision.  And he wants it that way.  He believes that people should set goals they can never reach.  “I’m not going to rest until all the world’s problems have been solved.  Homelessness, AIDS.  I’m in great shape.  I mean, the problems will survive me – no question about it.”

While his mission is a very large one, it is also unfolding.  He has gathered the resources in order to help it to succeed.  He put on the Goodwill Games to create a sense of communication and camaraderie among millions of people watching television during the years between the Olympics.  He provides a worldwide communication network through cable television.  Ted Turner’s mission is motivated by a grand vision of possibilities.  That’s one of the things that give him excitement in life.

No account of achievement in the world today is complete without a description of Buckminster Fuller.  The inventor of the geodesic dome, the namesake of the remarkable, newly discovered family of molecules, buckminsterfullerenes (buckyballs for short), the creator of the Dymaxion map, the Dymaxion car, and numerous other innovations, he is known all over the world as one of the premier thinkers and visionary inventors of the twentieth century.

By 1968, the number of original published items relating to Fuller’s world had grown to over 2 100 per year!

How did Buckminster Fuller achieve so much in his life?  It started with his mission, which he discovered on one lonely night.  After the death of his four-year-old daughter, Alexandra, from illness, his double expulsion from Harvard, losing his company, financial ruin, and the birth of a second child, he found himself in a suicidal depression.  Buckminster Fuller stood at the edge of a dark future.

Literally gazing into the darkness of Lake Michigan on a lonely night in 1927, he had come to a crisis.  “Why am I an utter failure?” he asked himself.  Either he would jump, or think; or he chose to think.  He began forming his mission in life.  After an intensive reasoning process, he concluded that he alone didn’t have the right to determine his worth in the universe and that it was necessary to surrender his fate to the ultimate wisdom of God.  In this riveting account, he explains his discovery:

“I have faith in the integrity of the anticipatory intellectual wisdom, which we call “God.” … Do I know best or does God know best whether I may be of any value to the integrity of the universe?”  The answer was:  “You don’t know and no man knows, but the faith you have just established out of experience imposes recognition of the a priori wisdom of the fact of your being.”  Apparently addressing myself, I said:  “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you.  The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to the highest advantage of others.  You and all men are here for the sake of other men.”

While living this mission, his professional identity grew.  He called himself “a comprehensive anticipatory design-science explorer.”  As you can see from this account, he went through the first few steps in this mission-discovery process and developed a grand vision of his purpose in life and his identity as a person.

Another Story of a Magnificent Mission:

Mary Jane Sheppard died on December 18, 1992.  She was not world-famous, nor did she invent any paradigm-shifting technology or build any business organisations.  And yet, she lived a magnificent mission.  The mission Mary Jane Sheppard lived was as important as any lived by those more famous – raising a healthy, loving family.  As wife of husband Harry Sheppard and mother to their four children in San Mateo, California, she was the light of love to their growing family and friends.

Yet Mary Jane’s family was not limited to their immediate children and grandchildren.  She made it a habit to “adopt” her children’s friends and others she encountered.  She radiated loving feelings.  Her warmth and interest in others attracted friends like a magnet.  While her husband, Harry, referred to her as a saint, her son, Charlie, describes her as a great mentor for helping him find compassion in his life.

In the kitchen they still openly display a series of cords hanging along one wall.  On the cords are hundreds of painted cloth pins.  Each pin lists a person who stayed there for the night, along with the date.  Mary Jane’s extended family became a community of people she had brought together.

Jim Conlow, a member of Mary Jane’s community, wrote a poem about her.  It’s called “The Maker”.  A section of it describes her this way:

A Maker is the greatest of Sorcerers or Saints

Life of love magic and connection

Making baked bread and gardens

Making children and children’s children

Weaving the tapestry of compassion

Early in her life she followed all the steps of the mission-discovery process.  She knew her primary passions – connecting emotionally with people.  She discovered her deep values – love and compassion.  She merged these passions and values into a grand vision of living a magnificent life of service to others.  She picked a richly detailed, specific direction or “cause” for her efforts – her community of friends and family.  She deeply examined herself to align her life completely with her mission.  Whatever internal obstacles to living her mission were set aside, she jumped over, or, best of all, converted it into resources.  She developed a unified commitment, both within herself and with others that guided her every day.  Her legacy, in the form of her village of friends and family, unfolded before her.

As cancer ended her life at the age of sixty-eight, through all of the pain, her love for others shone through and graced all of those who honoured her presence in their lives.  In the final moments of her life, she told her son, Charlie, “I’ve done everything I came here to do.”  This is perhaps the ultimate reward for discovering your mission.

v      How do we know when we are living our dream in life?   No one outside of us can tell us.  It is something each one of us can only discover and know for ourselves.

v      How will we know we are making a difference in life?   Only others can tell.

v      What would you like other people to say about you at your funeral one day?

Step 6:  Identifying your Key Life Roles

In order to live a meaningful life that will make a difference to the world, you necessarily find yourself interacting with other people.  These relationships entitle you to certain roles (areas of responsibility) you have to fulfil in order to make a contribution to life around you.  Examples of roles can be:  Father, spouse, neighbour, friend, colleague, leader-manager, sportsman, chairman of club, developer of people, businessman, member of school committee, entrepreneur/intrapreneur, etc.

In order to make your mission alive, you have to take responsibility in different areas of life (roles) and let your mission “flow” through it.  During the next exercise you will get a chance to identify your life roles and your ideals and goals for each.  Remember that these roles will change over time and that you will have to repeat this exercise from time to time as you move through different phases of your life.

Step 7:  Writing your Personal Vision and Mission Statement

You will now take the giant step and write down a preliminary personal vision and mission statement.  Preliminary because you may still work on it for months before it really says what you want it to say.  Actually you will find that this is a never-ending process and that you have to revisit it on a regular base for two reasons:

v      First, to check if your life is running according to your vision and mission.

v      Second, to make some necessary changes in your vision, mission, values and life roles.

Remember! Such a statement has four basic elements.

v      The first is what you would like to achieve that will give you a sense of greatness (your challenge).

v      The second is what difference or contribution you would like to make to life.

v      The third element comprises the values and principles on which your “being and doing” are based.

v      The fourth element is how your dreams and contribution will crystallise in your life roles – your dreams and goals for each.

Very important!

v      Do not write to impress anybody.

v      Make contact with your inner self.

v      Avoid a potpourri of “to do” list.

v      Use the information in steps 1 to 5 to guide you.

v      Good luck!  You have nearly struggled out of the chrysalis and just imagine the freedom you will enjoy!

Step 8:  Evaluating your Vision and Mission Statement

Now that you’ve spent a lot of time dreaming about your life and it’s purpose, it is also necessary to become realistic and evaluate the “correctness” and importance of what you just wrote.  Remember, it’s not what a vision is, but what it does – that is what is important.  Your personal vision and mission must create direction and inner motivation.  If not, it’s not a real vision or mission statement yet!

Step 9: Keeping Your Vision and Mission Alive

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams”

- Eleanor Rooseveld

You have defined the ideal you in your vision & mission statement.  You have therefore already visited your future.

What you have to do now is to programme yourself with this picture by spending a few minutes on meditation regularly and visualise the ideal you.  Close your eyes see yourself as if you have realised your whole mission.  See yourself in detail talking to your spouse, handling your children, solving problems, leading and managing, etc.  See the fully realised details of your purpose and mission.

You also have to make a date with yourself to repeat this procedure every year, e.g. on your birthday, so that you can make some changes if necessary.

Note: Make some effort with this exercise in order to keep your vision and mission alive!  Otherwise you will simply find that your dreams slowly flow through your hands unfulfilled and that you end up in frustration as you are gulped up by the meaningless rat race of life!

Remember! The difference between having a fulfilled life versus a meaningless rat race lies in the choices you make in life!

- Compiled and written by Entrepreneurial Business School -

New ideas and initiatives are part and parcel of entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship.  As a matter of fact, a person can only be called an entrepreneur if he or she is actively involved in one or more of the following kind of activities:

v      The introduction of a new or improved product or service to the market.

v      The introduction of a new or improved production or service delivery process.

v      The identification and/or opening of a new market.

v      The introduction of new raw materials or components, or sources of supply.

v      Finding and implementing new solutions to problems.

v      Finding and implementing better solutions to problems.

New ways of doing things do not always have to be revolutionary.  The wheel and the printing press were great inventions, but so were the paperclip and the hamburger.  In fact, even a slight adjustment to an existing product or service can qualify as an innovation.  Selling insurance by mail rather than through a broker is also an example.

Doing things in new and better ways is known as innovation. According to Dr. Edward de Bono, who enjoys worldwide recognition for his work on thinking processes, the intrapreneur needs a good mix of two thinking processes, namely

v      Intuitive, creative thinking (lateral thinking). This kind of thinking is exploratory and generative and tries to find many ways of solving a problem as possible, even improbable solutions in an attempt to break the existing pattern of forced thinking.

v      Systematic, logical thinking (vertical thinking).  This kind of thinking is logical and sequential and tries to figure out the best way of solving a problem with existing knowledge.  This kind of thinking is relatively rigid as there is a strong emphasis on the practicality and correctness of each step in solving the problem.  Subjects like mathematics, engineering and bookkeeping play an important role in this kind of problem solving.

Creative thinking without logical analysis is unlikely to result in useful innovations.  For example, organising a sightseeing tour to the bottom of the ocean is a creative idea, but you will need a number of logical solutions to make it happen.

Likewise, analytical thinking without the accompanying creativity is also unlikely to result in a great new business opportunity.

In order to be successful, the manager of any business has to rely on logical thinking processes to assimilate, understand and manipulate a lot of information for example, information about consumer needs, markets, competitors, technology, legislation and the economy.  But an intrapreneur has to create something new and different from this information and therefore also has to rely on creativity and intuition.

Innovation therefore is about bringing in new ways and methods of doing things.  It is a managed process to create new products or services or new uses for existing products or services and then to make it work in practice.

Finally, the ideas generated by these skills, must be put into action through initiative and a strong driving force.  Just generating and playing with ideas is not enough.  The proof of the pudding lies in the eating.  Innovative people thus have a good mix of creative and logical thinking skills, together with the initiative and driving force to push it through in practice.

In this process creativity and logical thinking have to complement each other.

The Role of Lateral Thinking

Of all these phases, creativity is the one that seems to lack most. The reason for this is that focusing on the others (something that all responsible and hardworking people should do) tends to suppress creative thinking.  That’s why creative ideas and solutions often pop up outside the working environment.

To illustrate this statement, here is something to amuse you, but at the same time make you think:

Two men were walking in the African bush when they met a very hungry cheetah that eyed them ferociously. One of the men immediately fished out some running shoes from his knapsack and bent down to put them on. ‘Why are you doing that?’ cried his companion in despair. ‘Don’t you know that cheetahs can run at over sixty miles per hour?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ the first replied as he finished tying the laces. ‘But I only have to outrun you’.

The Role of Logical Thinking

Lateral thinking is a very important first step in innovative behaviour.  However, without logically organising and implementing your creative ideas, most of them will probably end up in the trash bin.

Barriers to Creativity & INNOVATION

A good angle to start looking for creativity is to ask: “What prevents people from being creative? What are the barriers to creativity”?

The following are examples of typical barriers or mental roadblocks to creative thinking:

1. Negative attitude

It’s a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of problems and expend energy on worry, as opposed to seeking the inherent opportunities in a situation.

2. Fear of failure

It is the fear of looking foolish or being laughed at. Yet Tom Watson, founder of IBM, said: “The way to accelerate your success is to double your failure rate.” Failure is a necessary condition for success.

3. Excessive stress

Not having time to think creatively. The over-stressed person finds it difficult to think objectively at all. Unwanted stress reduces the quality of all mental processes.

4. Overwhelmed by rules

Although rules are necessary, it tends to encourage mental laziness. A tendency to conform to accepted patterns of belief or thought – the rules and limitations of the status quo – hampers creative breakthroughs.

5. Over-reliance on logic

Investing all your intellectual capital into logical or analytical thinking – the step-by-step approach – excludes imagination, intuition, feeling or humour.

6. Not challenging assumptions

Failure to identify and examine the assumptions you are making about any situation or problem can prevent you from even trying to find a new way of doing something.  Many of these assumptions are often at an unconscious level and if not challenged deliberately, will block your willingness to be creative.

7. Lack of starting point

No problem can be solved if you don’t start somewhere.  The starting point may not be obvious, but this in itself should not become a problem.  Many people tend to proportionate a problem because they are not sure where to start.

8. Lack of perspective

What is the objective?  Being too close or having struggled too long with a problem may blur the actual problem.  One needs to move away for a while or attack it from another angle to break the “vicious” cycle and regain perspective.

9. Lack of motivation

The goal must never be out of sight.  The problem should not become the main objective.  Why is there a problem in the first place?  Why does it need solving?  What was the motivation in the first place for attacking the problem?

10. Lack of consultation

Never rely only on yourself or your own inner-brain.  Others have brains (conscious and subconscious) too – learn to use them as well!  The more people you talk to about your problem, the more creative ideas you’ll get.

11. Criticism

It destroys ideas if it is given too soon.  If an idea has not been thought over and criticism is given, the thinker may abolish it too soon. Constructive criticism will challenge the thinker and will lead it on the right path, while destructive criticism will kill it or hurt the feeling of the thinker – which may inhibit him in further innovations.  The ideal is to surround yourself with the right people whose criticism will be uplifting and inspire you to work on your ideas.

12. Believing you are not creative

The biggest barrier, however, is BELIEVING YOU ARE NOT CREATIVE! A legacy, often from poor teaching at school, this barrier really stops people in their tracks from even trying to think creatively. This is in fact a restriction or assumption we impose on ourselves. Whatever may or may not have been your self-image in the past, this is an unproven hypothesis about you as far as the future is concerned.

Just look around the room now and you will see evidence of human creativity all around you. Why not assume that creativity is present in you too? Try to concentrate on removing the barriers, dams or blocks that prevent your mental energy from producing new ideas, new ways of working at things.

THE HABITS OF CREATIVE AND INNOVATIVE PEOPLE (from the book Effective innovation by John Adiar)

Basically your habits are ways of acting that become fixed through repetition. So much so, that we use the word habit to imply the doing of something unconsciously or without thinking of it in advance.

We all develop habits of thinking as well as of behaviour – some good and some not. They are our settled dispositions or tendencies to approach problems in certain ways. By frequent use they become second nature to us. Together these habits constitute what might be called your prevailing disposition or mental makeup. The following habits are some of the characteristics of the more creative or innovative thinkers. Of course not all such thinkers exemplify all habits. But you do need a critical mass of them.

1. Going Beyond The Nine Dots

People with a narrow span of relevance are thinking within the tramlines and boundaries of their own experience or field of work.  What is needed, is to go beyond imaginary boundaries.  In living out this habit, you should:

v      Redefining a problem:  To get to the right solution often demands more than one definition of the problem.  The more definitions of the real problem, the better the chance to get to the right answer.  It is very important to define the problem and not the symptoms.  If problems are diagnosed incorrectly, no solution will be the right one. (Think of the story of the hungry cheetah again!).

v      Challenging assumptions:  Do not except every assumption on face value.  Always be willing to challenge your assumptions and new working methods can flow from this or prove the old ones still to be true.

v      Widen your span of relevance:  Get interested in things outside your frame of reference by collecting information – theoretical or practical.  This will indicate the possible link between your area of operations and obvious diverse areas and often generate usable new ideas.

v      Have freedom from fixed ideas: It is best for the creative person not to follow rigid curriculum’s and set ideas.  Creative ideas are easier to come by if this is the case.  It is less so if the person is exposed to a fixed school of thought that limits the borders of his frame of reference.  Move outside your paradigms (thinking patterns)!

2. Welcome Change Intrusions

Change can be a wonderful and needed happening, forcing the receiver to find new answers to questions or problems. This can only be fully enjoyed and appreciated if the recipient is open-minded, always on the lookout, utilising unexpected events and being able to spot potential in such happenings.  The transfer of knowledge and technology from one field to another is one way to find creative solutions to old problems.  An intrusion should always be welcomed, because the subconscious mind will continue to seek the answers to problems or will always play around with ideas.

3. Communicate with your Sub-Conscious Mind.

The sub-conscious mind is the main storage place for all our thoughts, experiences and knowledge.  This part of the brain has the ability to help us deal with problems by sorting things out when our conscious mind goes into a loop.  The major step that needs to be taken is to learn to listen and to observe what the inner-brain gives us.  Only when you learn to listen to your inner-brain you will find the solutions it has to offer.  The inner brain has the ability to shuffle “puzzle pieces” and to make them fit.  It is for the observer to listen and to take notes of the reply the inner-brain gives and then to use the conscious mind to place the puzzle pieces where it belong.  The inner-brain never stops working, as it never sops absorbing facts/events/problems, etc.  On the grounds of what it has absorbed it will always try to fit the puzzle and solve the problem.  But if there is no ability to listen to the message, clue or answer, then the whole process may be for nothing.  It is vital to be alert and to always feed the inner brain with knowledge, experiences and awareness and then give your sub-conscious mind a chance to fit it all together in new creative ways.

4. Using Analogy as Stepping Stones to widen your Frame of Reference

The process of understanding any unfamiliar problem / situation is best began by relating it by way of analogy to what we know already.

v      By looking at existing ‘answers’, taking them and adapting them to become a solution or innovative idea.

v      By taking something that already exists and applying some of its attributes to solve a problem or to become an innovation in itself by looking deeper at existing things and finding other uses for it, or for some of its characteristics.

v      The reverse process of making the familiar strange is equally valuable for creative thinking.

v      Two techniques are very useful to accomplish such analogies:

• Metaphor:  Figure of speech, making use of pictures to describe something
• Analogy:  Relate to something that may have the same attributes, but differs in total.

5. Willingness to Tolerate Ambiguity

v      This is important because if more than an option / answer is available, one tends to become intolerant because too many options are often confusing.  By not being hasty when it comes to choosing the right option, but to sieve through it and make an intelligent choice means to tolerate ambiguity.  To be able to tolerate, one must be courageous and have perseverance because the wrong choice may lead to total destruction or set you back a few paces.

v      Because a problem may be seen to be unsolvable, one tends to think harder about the solution, which is likely to distract you off your path to the goal.  In such a case you may need to step back and give the problem over to the mind’s depth.  Because the answer often already exists in the mind’s depth where every experience and every bit of knowledge is stored, you only need to give your sub-conscious mind a chance to continue to try and make the connection.  This is why it’s so important to be able to listen and recognise when the answer surfaces.  It is also important to make time to relax the mind to enable it to register when the message comes through from the mind’s depth.  Always expect the ‘knock’.

6. Ideas Banking

v      Ideas banking means that you should always be alert to absorb new ideas, otherwise the inner mind will not have sufficient ‘funds’ to withdraw from.  Curiosity is the desire to learn and to become knowledgeable about something.  To be a creative thinker you have to be curious or wonder ‘what will happen next’.  Curiosity is an important key to making yourself knowledgeable and able to gather information.  Curiosity will add to the savings in your ‘idea bank account’ to withdraw from when needed.  You can enlarge your ideas bank substantially by applying the following techniques on an ongoing basis:

• Be an Active observer

When observing, one must forget what you were programmed with before and experience it without preconception.  To be objective when observing is of utmost importance, because it will allow you to experience things in a totally different way and let you have more to store in your ‘bank account’.  To be able to observe to the fullest extent, one must preferably employ all senses.  Learn not only to see the obvious, but also what is hidden. To draw or sketch an object will teach one to observe more closely and then store this detailed information.  You can enlarge your idea bank substantially and continuously by reading, travelling and listening a lot.

• Be an Active Listener

Always listen with the hope of finding something you’ve never heard before. Don’t be analytical or critical and have an open mind.  You can finish listening to someone without accepting the facts laid out but you will also learn from it if you didn’t know it already.  Listening gives you the idea of how minds work.

• Read as much as you can

Good reading material will stimulate you to think or dwell on something taken from the reading material.  Reading may enable you to generate ideas or make discoveries or solve problems by putting you into contact with things that are not possible to experience in your current life or modern living.  Reading also allows you to think for yourself without the interference of other human beings or objects.

• Travel a lot

Travelling allows you to receive a cultural shock – to experience other cultures and enable you to view your culture differently upon your return.  It also gives you a chance to gather new ideas/technologies that can be adopted to become a new innovation in your own environment – because things rarely are new innovations.

• Record your ideas

Keeping a notebook is a very useful habit.  If you don’t jot down creative ideas immediately, you will forget them most of the time as fast as they appeared. Imagine that your notebook is like a kaleidoscope.  It allows you to play around with new combinations and inter-connections of ideas.  Record entries by date and title in the order that they happen.  Let your instinct or intuitive nature decide what’s worth recording and why  (what stimulates or interests you about the entry or what makes it worth remembering.)  If you record events by date and title, you are actually filing important information in such a way that it will be much easier to recall it again.

7. Suspending Judgment

v      Suspending judgement means erecting a temporary artificial barrier between the imaginary, synthesising and analysing faculties of your mind on the one hand and the valuing, evaluating, criticising and judging skills on the other hand.  Premature criticism from others or yourself can kill the seeds of creative thinking.  Some social climates in families, working groups or organisations encourage and stimulate creative thinking, while others repress it.  The latter tend to value analysis and criticism above originality and innovative thinking.

“Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” - Anonymous

THE SUB-CONSCIOUS MIND AND CREATIVITY (from the book Technology of Achievements by Andrew and Faulhner)

We have mentioned earlier that a lot of our creative activity takes place in the sub-conscious mind.  Intuition and dreams are activities of the sub-conscious mind you can use with great power to solve problems in a creative manner.  By this time, you should be aware of the fact that the sub-conscious mind works best for us when we are in a relaxed state.

All the creative exercises in this section are thus built on the foundation of relaxation.  It is only in a deep state of relaxation that you will be able to activate the brilliance of the sub-conscious mind.

Stimulating the Sub-Conscious Mind

You can reach the centre of a circle from any point on the compass.  Similarly, you can reach into your sub-conscious mind from a variety of different starting points.

One starting point is hypnogogic imagery.  This technique produces autonomous inner images that can be captured just before you fall asleep.  It’s a somewhat difficult technique to master, but when mastered it often provide string images.

The images produced by hypnogogic imagery either visual or auditory – it cannot be controlled or directed.  Some people are even able to envision fantastic surreal imagery in colours that appear deeper and plusher than seemingly possible.

The painter, Salvador Dali, used this technique to conjure up the extraordinary images in his paintings.  He would put a tin plate on the floor and then sit by a chair beside it, holding a spoon over the plate.  He would then totally relax his body; sometimes he would begin to fall asleep.  The moment that he began to doze, the spoon would slip from his fingers and clang on the plate, immediately waking him to capture the surreal images.

Hypnogogic images seem to appear from nowhere, but there is logic behind it.  The unconscious is a living, moving stream of energy from which thoughts gradually rise to the conscious level and take on a definite form.  Your unconscious is like a hydrant in the yard while your consciousness is like a faucet upstairs in the house.  Once you know how to turn on the hydrant, a constant supply of images can flow freely to the faucet.

These images give rise to new thoughts as you interpret the strange conjunctions and chance combinations.

The following steps will help you to tap into your creative sub-conscious mind:

Step 1:  Think about your challenge. Consider your progress, your obstacle, your alternatives, and so on.  Then push it away and relax.

Step 2:  Totally relax your body.  Try to achieve the deepest muscle relaxation you can.

Step 3:  Quiet your mind. Do not think of what went on during the day or your challenges and problems.  Clear your mind of chatter.

Step 4:  Quiet your eyes. You cannot look for these images.  Be passive.  You need to achieve a total absence of any kind of voluntary attention. Become helpless and involuntary and directionless.  If you fall asleep easily, hold a spoon loosely in one of your hands.  You can enter the hypnogogic state this way, and, should you begin to fall asleep, you will drop the spoon and awaken in time to capture the images.

Step 5:  Record your experiences immediately after they occur. The images will be mixed and unexpected and will recede rapidly.  They could be patterns, clouds of colours, or objects.

Step 6:  Look for the associative link. Write down the first things that occur to you after your experience.  Look for links and connections to your challenge.

Ask questions such as:

v      Is there any relationship to the challenge?

v      Any new insights?

v      What’s out of place?

v      What puzzles me?

v      What disturbs me?

v      What do the images remind me of?

v      What are the similarities?

v      What analogies can I make?

v      What associations can I make?

v      What do the images resemble?

A restaurant owner once used hypnogogic imaginary to inspire new promotional ideas.  During his exercises, he kept seeing giant neon images of different foods:  neon ice cream, neon pickles, neon chips, neon coffee, and so on.  The associative link he saw between the various foods and his challenge was to somehow use the food itself as a promotion.

The idea:  He offers various free food items according to the day of the week, the time of day, and the season.  For instance, he might offer free pickles on Monday, free ice cream between 2 and 4 p.m., free coffee on Wednesday nights, free sweet rolls in the spring, and so on.  He advertises the free food items with neon signs, but you never knew what food items were being offered free until you went there.  The sheer variety of free items and the intriguing way in which they are offered have made his restaurant a popular place to eat.

Another promotion he created as a result of seeing images of different foods is a frequent-eater program.  Anyone who hosts five meals in a calendar month gets R50 worth of free meals.  The minimum bill is R20 but he says the average is R30 a head.  These two promotions have made him a success.

NB. The images you summon up with this technique have an individual structure that may indicate an underlying idea or theme.  Your sub-conscious mind is probably trying to communicate something specific to you, though it may not be immediately comprehensible.  The images can be used as handles on which to hang new relationships and associations.

Treat the images as fact, but make no assumptions about them except that you experienced them, and that somehow they must make sense.

Creativity and Dreams (from the book; Dreams – Tonights answers for tomorrows questions by Mark Thurston)

Dreams are a rich source of ideas, as they often contain combinations and rearrangements of objects, challenges, and events that would be almost impossible to come up with while awake.

Many dreams are so bewildering, so crowded with bizarre details that they seem impossible to interpret at all, but often, ideas twinkle in dreams like bicycle lights in the mist.

On November 10, 1619, during a freezing winter in Germany, a young aristocrat dreamed throughout the night.  When he awoke, he recorded his dreams in a now-famous dream diary, which detailed a new system of thought.  His dreams that night changed the course of science and Western civilisation. Still today, much of the contemporary scientific method is based on the dream journals of that young aristocrat, Rene Descartes.

Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed his novels before he wrote them.  Physicist Niels Bohr conceived of a model of the atom in a dream.  James Watt revolutionised the ammunition industry with his dreams of falling lead.  Dmitri Mendeleyev dreamed the solution for the arrangement of the elements.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed the poem “Kubla Khan” before he wrote it.

Psychologists, working on the topic of sleep, claim that we have approximately six dreams each night, but we tend to forget most of them.  You can learn to initiate a productive dream state, choose the subjects of your dreams, and remember them clearly.

The following steps will help you to solve problems or create new ideas/concepts through your dreams:

Step 1:  Formulate a question about your challenge.  Write the question several times and then, before you drift off to sleep, repeat it to yourself several more times.  If necessary, do this several evenings in a row.  The mind must work consciously on a challenge before the sub-conscious becomes employed.

Step 2:  If you don’t remember your dreams, wake up thirty minutes earlier than normal.  This increases your chance of waking during a dreaming period rather than after one.  When you awake, lie still.  Prolong quiet as long as possible as you reflect on the dream.  Do not allow daytime interests to interrupt your ruminations.  Dreams vanish like boats sailing into a fog bank; so record the dream after you’ve thought it over.

Step 3:  Record the dream in a dream journal.  Keep the journal next to your bed, and record as many details as you remember.  Sketch the vivid portions of the dream.  If you can’t remember a dream, record whatever is on your mind – these thoughts often come from the dream and provide a first clue to retrieving it.

Step 4:  After the dream is recorded, ask yourself the following questions:

v      How were the people, places, and events in the dream related to my question?

v      Who were the key players in the dream?

v      How does this relate to my question?

v      Does the dream change the nature of the question?

v      What elements in this dream can help solve my problem?

v      What associations does the dream conjure up that might help with my problem?

v      What is the answer from the dream?

Step 5:  Take one or two dream images or ideas and free-associate from them.  Write down whatever comes to mind, and do it day after day.  Soon the next dream will come along and your interpretation will go further.

Step 6:  Keep the diary current.  Record your dreams daily.  After you begin recording dreams you will remember more dreams, in greater detail.  You will begin to see patterns and themes unfolding and repeating; your dreams will become richer and richer with metaphorical meanings.

You will find that your dreams are based on a body of experiences, both past and present that have some influence on you and your challenge.

Dreams reveal things you did not know you knew.  It is reported that Elias Howe, struggling with his design for a sewing machine, dreamed how savages, carrying spears with holes in their tips, captured him.  Upon awakening, Howe realised he should put the hole for the thread at the end of the needle, not the top or middle.  This minor modification made the sewing machine a reality.

- Compiled and written by Entrepreneurial Business School -

You want to become the best you can be, but somewhere along the way, you got something wrong.  Things just don’t work out as you planned!  You frequently ask yourself where you have gone wrong, but the answer evades you.

Fear not Brave Knight, for this is the quest for you.

Success Attitude – How your mind is programmed

We always earn our living in a manner consistent with our self-concept. We know that all of our performance is linked to our self-concept up to this moment.  Wonderfully enough is the fact that every human being is in a continual state of becoming, in fact, there is a sub branch of psychology called the psychology of becoming.

This simply says that nobody stays the same for any period. We are always changing in the direction of our dominant thoughts. If you believe you can be an entrepreneur and creative, you will become what you believe. Our job in this process is to keep very clearly in our minds who we would like to be and what we would like to accomplish.

“Our thoughts are a magic part of us and they can carry us to places that have no boundaries and no limitations”

-          Dr. W. W. Dyer -

With this quote in mind, let’s have a look at the Characteristics, directly linked to Attitude, common to entrepreneur and all Successful People all around the globe:

They are POSITIVE

They are CONFIDENT

They are NOT scared to TAKE CALCULATED RISKS

They are CREATIVE

Their Intuitive Powers, “Gut Feel”, are strongly developed.

They are persevering – “they never give up”.

The best news yet, is that you can acquire your Success Attitude, by developing the SIX above-mentioned Characteristics.  The information we provide in the text to follow, will surely help you in your quest to acquire that very much sought-after success attitude. What you are, and the way in which you react at this point in time, are a direct result of the instructions that are programmed into your sub-conscious mind.  Now you may ask, how did my sub-conscious mind become programmed the way it is?

The answer is simple.  There are three ways to engrave instructions into the sub-conscious mind. The first is by genetic instructions.  These instructions include the form of your physical body and the characteristics you are born with.  The second is by the environment and the third is via the dominant thought process of your conscious mind.

Re-Programming your Mind for your Success Attitude

To change your ATTITUDE and attain the Characteristics most common to Successful Business people, you’ll have to Re-Program your mind!!!

To Re-Program your mind, you have to know and understand the Mental Laws by which your Mind operates.  You will be able to effectively re-program your mind, by using two basic techniques, if you know how your mind works.

Now, let’s have an in depth look at THE SIX most important MENTAL LAWS to abide by when Re-Programming your mind for your Personal Success Attitude:

RELAXATION

The first Mental Law is the Law of Relaxation.  According to this Law, it is easier to program the sub-conscious mind when the conscious mind is less active.  If you are in a relaxed state, your conscious mind is also less active and less interfering.

To explain the working of this Law, you can simply observe what is happening when a person is under hypnosis.  In a hypnotic condition, the conscious mind is asleep and the hypnotist is in the process of directly communicating with the sub-conscious mind.  The conscious mind is completely blocked out (asleep) and the person simply reacts on the instructions of the hypnotist, communicating with subjects of the sub-conscious mind.

It is also important to notice that the sub-conscious mind does not ask questions, it instructs the physical body directly to perform on the instruction received from the hypnotist.

This first Mental Law, therefore, tells us that it is easier to re-program your sub-conscious mind for a success attitude if the conscious mind is less active and less critical.  This condition is then easier reached when you are in a state of deep relaxation!

CONCENTRATION

The second Mental Law is the Law of Concentration.  Concentration is extremely important.  It says that whatever you dwell upon in the conscious mind grows in your experience.

You know from experience that if you focus your conscious mind and really, concentrate on a problem, the chances of getting a solution are great.  Example:  you know that when you go to sleep, focussing and thinking about a specific problem, you often wake up the next morning and all of a sudden, you have the solution!  By concentrating on that problem, your dominant thoughts have effectively activated the brilliant sub-conscious mind to give you the answer.

These practical experiences that you have, supports the psychological principle; stating that concentration or focus is yet another effective tool in programming the sub-conscious mind.

PRACTICE AND REPETITION

The next Law is the Law of Practice or the Law of Repetition.  If you wish to see yourself and think about yourself as a positive constructive achievement-oriented, forward-looking individual, you have to think about yourself and dwell on yourself as being that type of person all the time.  By doing that repeatedly, that’s how you program your sub-conscious mind, until it becomes a habit.

Let me give you an example.  You know that if you wish to start biking, you have to first learn the skill and then practice it repeatedly, until it becomes automatic.  It becomes automatic when you do not consciously think about it any more.  At this point, the sub-conscious mind has taken over. The sub-conscious mind has now been programmed by repetition and controls your body and allows you to ride the bicycle without a worry or a conscious thought. Your body is now totally controlled by your sub-conscious mind.

SUBSTITUTION

The next Law is the Law of Substitution, which says that the conscious mind can only hold one thought at a time, either positive or negative. You know by now that the sub-conscious mind is programmed by your genetic make-up, environment (the people that you associate with, the things that you read and the things that you hear) and dominant thought patterns in the conscious mind.

The greatness of this Law lies in the fact that you have some direct control over what you think.  If you have negative thoughts, you can change your thinking and replace that negative thought with a positive one.

If you therefore wish to re-program your mind to have a success attitude, you will have to force yourself to replace all negative thoughts with positive ones.  In addition, luckily, the conscious mind can only hold one thought at a time…

EXPECTATION

This is the fifth Mental Law for programming your mind and shaping your success attitude.  According to this law: – whatever you expect with CONFIDENCE, becomes your own self-fulfilling prophecy.

This would mean that it is essential that you continually expect the BEST of yourself and every situation in which may you find yourself.  Successful Business people make a habit of positive Self-Expectation!

You must have ”Great Expectations” (My deepest apologies to Mr. Charles Dickens) Perhaps an apt example would do the trick of conveying the full meaning of the Law of Expectation.

Example:  I wanted to be my own boss!  Needless to say that I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what I was getting myself into!  I had lots of hurdles to overcome: Financing, Writing my own Business Plan, Setting up Business Accounts, Decide on an Apt name for my Company…

What kept me going was my “Great Expectations”.  I continually manufactured my fears into positive expectations.  When I signed off a job, I didn’t expect Praise from the People I was contracting for.  My expectations were most of all, to gain knowledge and expertise.  I can’t remember one contract or job situation from which I didn’t gain knowledge and expertise!

By having “Great Expectations” for gaining knowledge, I was in the process to engrave a new instruction into my sub-conscious mind.  My positive expectations were the gateway to my belief – (the last Mental Law).  Therefore, positive expectations are a powerful tool in creating the ultimate condition, namely Belief!  The Law of expectations therefore states that if you can have great expectations of creating the attitudes of successful business people, within yourself, you will activate all the other laws.  The law of positive expectations therefore acts as a catalyst for the other laws to be more effective.

Be positive in your Expectations!!

BELIEF

The Law of Belief, the final law, states: Whatever you believe in, if your belief is strong enough, this belief will become REALITY.  Wow!  That’s a mouthful!

Let me try that in another way: When you have Self-Limiting Beliefs, these beliefs will come true in your everyday living.  The law of belief is also a result of the effective implementation of the other 5 laws.

Okay, Okay!  I will rather use an example to reduce Confusion!

A specific observation done by psychologists on a patient with multiple personalities will help to explain the power of belief.  The one personality believed that he was a short sighted and needed spectacles.  The second personality of the same person believed that his eyes were normal.  Now the interesting part – when this person believed he was the personality with bad eyes, his eyes were physically tested and the results were that he is short sighted.  When the same person adopted the personality of the person with normal eyes, the test results on the same eyes were all of a sudden normal.  The power of his belief had a psychical effect on his ability to see – WHOW!  Therefore, when the law of belief kicked in, you will start to react accordingly.  In the next section we will focus on two techniques, which you can use to implement and activate the mental laws.  If you are disciplined enough to use these techniques on a regular basis, you will surely achieve your goals.  It is important to make sure what you want to achieve before using these techniques.  You must also make sure that the goals you set are aligned with your mission in life – in other words, the life purpose, statement or description, you are most comfortable with.

THE RE-PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES

Affirmation

Visualization

Now that you know and understand the Six Mental Laws, you can progress to the techniques of re-programming your sub-conscious mind.  These techniques are easy to understand and easy to use.  I know you cannot wait any longer, so here we go…

AFFIRMATION

By using affirmation, your potential is literally unlimited.  Affirmations are positive assertive statements that you make verbally or non-verbally.  You can create affirmations for everything you want to accomplish.

Say you want to be more confident, positive or creative. You must simply talk to yourself as though you have that characteristic already.  The more you repeat these positive assertive statements repeatedly, the better you will be able to program your sub-conscious mind. (Remember the Law of Repetition). Affirmations are easy to use and are indeed a very powerful tool. When using affirmations it is not necessary to believe the statements in the beginning.  Belief will come with repetition, as the sub-conscious mind re-programs itself over time – remembers the Law of Substitution.  By using affirmation, you can effectively replace negative thoughts by positive ones.  The “power of words” is a phrase we often use, but do we realise how powerful this really is?

If we hear the same thing over and over again (the sub-conscious mind), you will start believing it is true and will then act accordingly.  By the power of words, Hitler managed to program the entire German nation and eventually made them believe that his intended war crimes were noble and to the good of mankind.

For the sub-conscious, to accept affirmation, it has to be coached in the three P’s.  First of all, affirmations have to be personal.  It has to be “me”.  We cannot say “you”, or “somebody” else; we always have to talk in the first person singular.  “I like myself”.  Secondly, affirmations have to be positive.  If we wish to quit smoking, we will not say, “I will not smoke any more, I will not smoke any more”, because the sub-conscious cannot take in an instruction that includes a negative.  Therefore, what we would say instead is “I am a non-smoker, I am a non-smoker, I am a non-smoker”.  Lastly, affirmation has to be in the present tense.  You’ll have to instruct the sub-conscious mind in the present tense as if you are achieving already.  You have to say, “I am a non-smoker”.

VISUALIZATION

The second way, in which we program our mind, is by using what we call visualization. Visualization is the most powerful single capability a human being has.  It is the ability to form a clear precise vivid mental picture of what we want to achieve.  We must keep the picture crystal clear in our mind’s eye.  Whatever you can hold in your mind’s eye on a continuous basis, you will be able to achieve.

The goals, which you can picture in your imagination, you can accomplish.  Napoleon Hill remarked, “Whatever the mind of men can conceive and believe, it can achieve”.  Einstein was of the same opinion: “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”  The key to using visualization is to get a clear mental picture of yourself as though you already had the characteristics that you want and/or achieved the goals of your choice.

Prior to every situation of importance, take a couple of minutes to play a clear mental picture of the ideal you desire in an upcoming situation.  Say you are going into a sales interview.  Form a clear mental picture of yourself performing at your very best in that situation.  See a clear precise picture of the situation and the outcome exactly the way you want it to take place.

The best time to use visualization is when the conscious mind is in a deep state of relaxation. Remember the Mental Law of Relaxation and how it works? The best time for visualization is normally at night, before you go to sleep; the conscious mind is then in an alpha stage.  Get yourself a relaxation tape or CD.  This will help to relax the conscious mind and you will be able to re-program your sub-conscious rapidly!

The visualization techniques work better when you activate all your senses at the same time and focus on the goal you wish to achieve.  You must therefore try to feel, smell, hear and taste the ideal condition; you are trying to accomplish.  Remember, you need not believing what you are visualizing at the beginning.  The Law of Repetition, Concentration, Relaxation and eventually, Expectation will result in Belief, the final stage in the re-programming exercise.

Via the power of “words” (affirmations) and the power of “vision” (visualisation), it is possible for you to achieve your goals and to be a highly successful person.  Practice these techniques and activate the mental laws and become all you are capable of.  You will be surprised what you can achieve!!

God created us all, like brilliant computers.  What is, however, needed for these computers, are new software to make them function like they are suppose to.  The mental laws, as well as the programming techniques discussed in this article, are the tools we are provided with to create the new mental software needed.  The software we are using are clearly outdated and we need to reprogram ourselves in order to be able to solve the problems we are facing, but also, and more important, to be able to excel to the new heights we are capable of.