Imagineer Your Future

Welcome to LegalBiz Cafe! Digitally remastered with AI, in this podcast series, Attorney Shaune B. Arnold gives to frustrated professionals like YOU the tools and resources you need to make the LEAP to entrepreneurship so you can start, build or fix a business you will absolutely LOVE. 

In this idea-sparking episode, Shaune guides entrepreneurs to unlock creativity, form powerful mastermind teams, and mind-map their way to marketplace magic. Learn how to brainstorm like a visionary, disrupt your industry, and transform one elegant idea into a business breakthrough. It's time to imagineer your dream! 

Transcript

Hello friends! …and welcome …once again …to legal biz cafe. I am your host attorney, Shaune B Arnold and tonight, …We are going to Imagineer our future! But before we go gettin’ all extra dimensional, I want to chat for a moment about what we’re doing here on Legal Biz Café.

I am here to help you maximize your competence. There’s a couple of ways I help you do that. 

Here on legal biz cafe, you and I deal with your mindset as an entrepreneur. Working with entrepreneur clients, there are so many times when they have emotional issues that are stopping them dead in their tracks. We sometimes can't even get to the operations issues in their business because we're dealing with mindset issues. Legal, biz Cafe helps you deal with those mindset issues. We are going to set you solidly on your feet this year.

I also invite you to listen to my other podcast, Your Business, Accelerated! On that show, you get the benefit of my 30 years of practicing business law and 40 years of business consulting. We wrap all of this together and you get two sides of the entrepreneurial coin. You will be so strong and confident and competent that you're just going to blow right on past the competition. So, don't you worry about a thing! 

Tonight, ...we imagineer your future.

Let me ask you, what does your future look like? Do you know? What do you want it to look like? Are you clear on that? We're going to talk about this tonight.

Imagineering is a term that actually was coined in corporate America, by Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa). I find it really amazing, because creativity and corporate America are two concepts that you don't generally think of in the same thought pattern, much less speak about in the same breath. They are usually worlds apart, but we are finding that it's necessary for corporate America to actually get back to creativity.

Imagineering is also a far cry from our educational system, where children are constantly told, don't daydream and stay within the lines. Someone shoves a huge book at them and they're told to memorize THIS and THAT. The process can put a damper on a child’s creativity.

We are finding now that domestic and global competition for our jobs, knowledge and expertise, is forcing us to recognize the importance of being consciously creative in what we do, even in our business. 

See, when we are consciously creative in our business, then we are out there seeking to discover new facts, methodologies, connections, and combinations of connections as well as new applications of all of these things that will help us improve what we're doing in our business or how we are doing business and delivering it to the marketplace.

Now, we've all heard of one-hit wonders, right? Here’s something you need to know. …Whether it's in music or in a more mundane business, one hit is all you need. We all get great ideas, right? How many times have you been doing something, and you thought, boy, you know, this would be so much better if …fill in the blank. Why hasn't somebody thought up how to dot, dot, dot? When you get that awesome idea, write it down. Spend some time ruminating on that idea and flesh it out, resource it, and find a way to pour into it.

In the mega-successful book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill talked about getting an elegant idea, and then following through on it and bringing it to the marketplace. So how do you do that? How do you actually follow through on an idea?

Well, I think that brainstorming is absolutely vital to anybody who is in business and is seeking to really make an impact in the marketplace. Bringing together your brain trust to float ideas will do a lot of things. It will impart some hard core knowledge to your operations in the way that, if you've been following me for a while, you know that I'm really into.

Having your closest advisors to collectively brainstorm your business is very powerful. You CAN do it by yourself, but a collective of brilliant, hungry like-minded people will be the fuego under your cauldron.

This will catapult you right into another realm.

if you think that two heads are better than one, how about 5 heads, or more? All of those heads directed at solving issues in your business is going to put your business on steroids. I really recommend that you get yourself into a mastermind group this year. Let them help you figure out all the ways that you can put your business on steroids.

Let me give you some some tips on how you and your collective group can brainstorm. Try mind mapping to really trigger your primitive brain, your reticular activating system. This is your reptilian brain. It loves stream of consciousness stuff, and it loves pictures. 

Put together a stream of consciousness pictorial using bubbles or bullet points. Try to use just one descriptive word, and go into all of the ideas that you have for your business. Seriously, I mean …All of the ideas you can generate.

No idea is a bad idea. Don't worry about whether it's a silly idea, or whether you can make it happen, or whether you need THIS ...in order to do THAT. 

Just get it all out, all of it ...on a on a whiteboard or on a piece of paper, or in your computer, however it works best for you. Just make sure that you get all of those ideas down and go rapid fire, really, really fast, so that you don't have time to sit and ruminate and get stuck in the words.

When you come to a stop, here's what I want you to do. I want you to keep going. I encourage you to do this at least three times by blowing past two points where you stopped, feeling as though the task was complete. Come to a complete stop at least three times. That way you know you're really tapping into your unconscious mind, and you're really digging those ideas out of your subconscious mind.

If you don't already have a mastermind group and you don't have a board of directors, then you can create a focus group out of your local church or community group. You can place an ad in the newspaper and bring some people together in a hotel room, and you can give them surveys. You can give them taste tests (be careful about allergies!).

You can get their opinions on your product or service, and they can help you identify problems with either your product or service or the delivery of it.

So all of this is going to help you really flesh out all of your ideas and combine them and recombine them in the context of the experience that you already have.

I'd love it if you could also look to other industries that either manufacture or transport products, or that maybe deliver things uniquely or differently than your current industry does.

If you could tap into a new delivery system, for example, for your product or your service, you could blow right past the competition, just because it's so new.

Think of QR codes. They're basically bar codes, but they've been reconfigured to offer a lot more information, and people really, really enjoy using them. It’s a way to help a business be new and fresh and get people into the business that wouldn't normally be there. Research what you can do that's new and fresh. Create a new pattern, create new arrangements that solve a deep need in the marketplace. Find the hole and fill it.

Remember to keep the big picture in mind, but be flexible in your approach. Be aware when there's a problem. Be fluent in getting solutions and flexible in implementing those solutions. Ask yourself some very powerful questions to find very powerful solutions.

Make brainstorming a regular practice in your business and in your life. This will improve your skills. It will help you generate more ideas just by the sheer volume of time and effort that you spend in this exercise. Be curious about all of the various aspects of the problem. Most of all friends, persevere.

It is a necessity, no matter how good your idea is. If you don't stick to it and follow through, then it will all be for naught. Remember, harken back to Thomas Edison, who found 9,999 ways that didn't work, and just one elegant idea that did work, to create the lightbulb. That’s all you need. Just one elegant idea that will work.

Thank you, folks, …for joining me on this week's episode of legal biz cafe. I am your host, Attorney Shaune B Arnold, inviting you to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter X. My moniker in all of those places is Shaune dot Arnold. I am attorney Shaune Arnold, reminding you, …as always, …to MAXIMIZE your COMPETENCE, to get the CONFIDENCE YOU NEED …to succeed.

I'll see you right here next week on Legal Biz Cafe. ...Bye-bye, Friends.