Unknown by Mike Lavia

Pyramid Stairs

Picture a 20-story building. Floor one is your goal, in the raw, untouched, ready to be processed and developed. Floor twenty is success. Each floor in between is a learning process to reaching your goal, with a lot of information on how to deal with the many roadblocks you will encounter and need to overcome to move forward.

Now, there are two ways to reach Floor 20. You can take the stairs, slow and strenuous, or you can take the elevator, the fast track to success. Which one do you pick? I would assume most of you would choose the elevator, and why not, it’s the quick and easy way to reaching success.

So, lets say the elevator is broken one day. What do you do? First, you need to find the stairs, and then you need to figure out how to get to floor 20. And, of course, you’re completely out of shape from taking the elevator everyday. Or maybe your new building (goal) has no elevator.

The point is, taking the stairs is always the best way to learn the in betweens and everything it takes to bring successful in reaching goals.

One of my favorite motivational blogs, Pick The Brain, has an article about, “How to Find and Develop Your Own Internal Motivation.” There are two types of motivation, positive and negative. Mike King, writer for Pick The Brain, calls them pleasure and pain. These are the two major emotions that drive internal motivation. I’m not going to reiterate the entire article, so you can just read it for yourself. However, one of the biggest and most important points, in my opinion, is to break out of the norm, or your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is just that, comfortable, and it is painful to break out of it. However, this is very important as you will learn, outside of your comfort zone, how to face new challenges as they are presented to you.

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

~Epictetus

Think for yourself. Others will challenge your way of thinking, only to try and make you think the way they want you to think. Instead, challenge them, make them understand your way of thinking. Your idea may be foolish or stupid to them, but that’s why it’s not their idea.

You’re better off getting along with those you may dislike or disagree with.

This is a picture of a mouse on a cat on a dog. Photo taken in San Francisco.

I’m halfway through a program called “The Thiry Day Challenge.” This was introduced to me by my friend, and co-founder of Cameesa, Kamil. Essentially, it is marketing training to program to essentially help you process through your ideas, introduce you to the tools that can help you filter and research those ideas, and setup your online business. They claim that, “The Thirty Day Challenge is about making your first $10 online.” The nice thing is that it’s completely free (no gimmicks), and I’m always interested in free training.

As I mentioned, I am just under half way through with the program, and already learning a lot. This is key to helping you process your ideas, which is step one of a long road to building any business and generating revenue.

Some key pieces of online software that are mentioned, and currently using are:
- Wordpress (my blog is running on this)
- Twitter (an easy way to keep people informed)
- Google Analytics (great way to drill through data on visitors to your site)
- SocialMarker (Great way to inform many social bookmark websites, such as Digg and Reddit)

Since this is completely free, I am highly recommending that you check it out. If you don’t like it, then stop, but if you want to learn how to take your ideas and act on them, then you need to check this out.

Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, crawl websites daily for new content. This new content is then searchable by the general public. To make sure all web pages of your site or blog are recognized by the search engines, you need to generate a Sitemap.

A Sitemap lets search engines know which webpages are available to crawl. “a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site” (from Sitemaps.org).

If you run your blog with Wordpress, there is a fantastic Google XML Sitemaps plugin. This plugin will automatically create a compliant xml file of your website. This is also submitted to Yahoo, Ask.com, and MSN Live Search. The best thing about it is that it will automatically keep the xml file up to date when you add new content.

Getting started is by far the hardest thing to do. This can apply for anything. Think about chores that need to be done around the house. How often do you keep saying, “oh, I’ll just do that tomorrow.” If you put things off, you’ll tend to never get around to it at all.

I started Vidello Media at the beginning of March 2008, and it lasted all until the end of March 2008. Here is the story:

Vidello Media was a project where I jumped in head first before testing the waters. Vidello Media was an unofficial business in building media centers for home theater systems. When I say unofficial, I mean I never registered as a business. The idea popped into my head to design and build a home media center that could be sold for cheap. Many on the market were over $2,000. I did a lot of reading on these systems and their main functionality. After putting together some specs, I priced out everything and decided to go for it and build a prototype. The name, by the way, was something I wanted to have a quality sound to it. Vidello Media was a combination of Video and Bello (Beautiful Video in Italian). The whole problem with this idea is that I did all my research on the product and nailed it, however, I didn’t do any market research, didn’t bother to see why types of people are buying media centers, nor did I even think to see what value people see in hardware. Hardware has absolutely no value these days. All of the value, when it comes to computers, is in the software. After spending about $1,500 on a prototype unit, I would have to take close to a 40% loss to sell it, something that obviously isn’t a good business model.

Routines are a killer of ideas. Having a routine is like reading the same book every day, nothing new comes into your life. Once you get into a routine, you tend to block out anything that will break the routine. My true belief is to let every day be different, allow your mind to wonder, experience new things, and don’t be bound to specific schedules.

A perfect example of a routine is the daily 9 to 5, which refers to a typical 8 hour work day with a 1 hour lunch. Wake up, go to work, go home, watch TV, sleep, and repeat. Falling into a routine can train your brain to only think in one way, following a set of scheduled times to perform certain actions. By having a dynamic schedule, your brain remains active, allowing you to think freely, and always thinking outside the box.

As sales manager for a high tech company, every day is completely different. My schedule is defined by the next minute. Constant interaction with people is a prime source for new ideas. Many people will voice their issues, which can instantly spark an idea in your mind.

By killing your routine, it doesn’t mean your life can no longer be structured. If you have kids or pets, you have certain responsibilities that need to be handled. Walking your dog in the mornings is a great way to wake your brain up and begin thinking new ideas. You can find a walking buddy, someone who will challenge your thinking. You may have to walk the dog at 7am every morning, but your conversations will be different everyday, changing things up.

Try This: During your work day, grab a colleague, someone you often converse with, and go for a walk outside. Make sure this isn’t during Lunch time or during your normal break times. Make sure it is a time when you are normally plopped in front of the computer screen. Spark up a conversation and see where it takes you, but this time, take a mental note of how many ideas the two of you come up with, just by talking.

Or Try This: Go to the gym in the morning. Yes, it’s not pleasent getting up in the mornings, however, give it a try and get that out of the way. After work, see how you feel knowing you don’t have to go to the gym. Think of the possibilities. You can go home and catch up on your recorded programs, go hang out with a friend, do some shopping, who knows. The only thing that’s for certain is that your possibilities are endless and you have broken out of your routine. How much do you accomplish after going to the gym? Not much? Too tired? Well, if you go to the gym in the morning, you still have to go to work. Problem solved.

Related Link:

Pick the Brain - A great site with ideas on how to think differently and help keep up productivity

People come up with great ideas everyday, however, there are very little that know what to do with that idea, or simply don’t have the ambition or know how to follow through and design a company around it. Sometime in your life, you have probably said, “Someone should invent that.” Well, there are over 6 billion people living on Earth, so chances are someone else has had the same idea as you. The only question is, will you be the one is acting on these great ideas?

Ideas typically derive from a problem, so an idea can be seen as a solution to a problem. Think of all of the issues that have been solved that we now take for granted. Little kitchen solutions such as a paper towel holder, jar opener,  plastic bag storage, and the banana hook. Think of how simple these solutions are, yet they are making a lot of money every year from the consumer market. Just think of all the infomercials on TV and how crazy some of the products are, however, they all solve a problem the general public is having.

The Banana Hook

The craziest, yet an ingenious idea, is the Bubble Calendar. This is simply bubble wrap with the calendar numbers printed on there. Everyday, you pop the bubble to mark it off the calendar. You will have a heart attack when you see the prices for these things. Although I think it is the most useless product, I like the idea because this person is making a lot of money for such a simple solution to someones problem (or bubble wrap fixation).

There is a very short, but interesting, post on Seth Godin’s blog today about the different types of people. I suggest you have a quick read (link). This goes hand in hand with what I mentioned earlier about types of people that will take their ideas and act on them, and others, the type that will just sit and let them pass by. This typically goes for anything in their life. If you want to develop on your ideas, you must take the proactive approach in life.

One thing I will be starting today is writing down every idea that comes into my mind, whether I think it is stupid or wonderful. The point of this is to generate a list in which I can do some research and find out if anyone has developed products or services to solve these “issues.” The most important thing is to not give up.

The title of the blog has officially been changed to “Unknown Blog by Mike Lavia.” There was a lot of thought put into this, friends were involved to help filter through different ideas and thought processes. It was the ultimate decision to make the title reflect the intended subject of the blog.

This blog is about my quest to start a business and all the things I read, write, do, think, learn, see, and feel. This journey will include generating ideas, developing a business plan, building interest in the idea, and ultimately starting the company. This blog will help me stay on track as I plan to update it everyday (maybe not weekends).

Many of the things being read are about staying motivated and personal development. Other things are on developing ideas and processing them. During my travels, there are a lot of things learned from clients, colleagues, and the many others I meet. A lot being learned is from actually doing something, making progress, and ultimately the mistakes being made along the way.

Getting started is by far the hardest thing to do for anything. Getting started can be a long process, whether you like it or not. You may think of an idea and jump right into it, but without the proper building blocks or the foundation, you’ll end up right back at square one.

Getting back to the title change: I ended up generating a list of catchy blog titles. The list must have been at least 20 or so long. Well, after narrowing down the list to about 3 really good blog titles, it came to me (with help from friends) that this was the wrong approach. The title should reflect the content of the blog. First, think about what you want to write about and the ultimate purpose of the blog. This made absolute sense, so I went back to square one to think about what exactly I wanted to write about, something that would be easy to update, with personal knowledge and experiences. Ah HA! Now, the title just hit me at this point. My blog is very unknown and it’s written by me, about getting started. Self explanatory really.

Until next time. Enjoy the weekend!

(The main blog picture is of downtown Ottawa, Canada, which is where I was born and raised)