Creative Funding

In times of the crisis, some people become really creative in funding their project or company. As an example, Miro, a free HD video player, started just recently with an initiative to let users adopt lines of their source code for a monthly payment. A great idea and also nicely setup in their Miro Adoption Center.

And of course, the right idea to let people spread the word about it.

Is This the Time to Chase a Career Dream?

So why do so many of us perceive ourselves as being so terribly misaligned with our right work? Upbringing can have something to do with it. A client once confessed: “My father told me I had three career options. I could be a doctor, an engineer or a failure.”

I imagine that when the Grammy-winning singer John Legend broke the news that he wanted to quit his job as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group to pursue music full time, some of his relatives were concerned about his career stability.

Obviously, he made the right choice. Many stories don’t turn out that way.

I have received pained e-mail messages from grown offspring of aspiring entrepreneurs who chucked it all to follow one failed venture after another. A musician with a stable day job told me that after pursuing music seriously on the side, he wasn’t so sure that he could take the lifestyle full time.

What separates crazy dreams from viable business ideas? I don’t think that it has anything to do with the idea, or the profession, or the market itself. It has to do with the person.

via Preoccupations – Is This the Time to Chase a Career Dream? – NYTimes.com.

Dealing with impossible crises

Who haven’t had the situation that if you want to change something, everyone involved starts to argue about why something is not possible.

Read Daniel Tenners post on how to Deal with impossible crises for some good advice on how to cope with such situations:

To get around the brick walls which large corporations, bureaucracies and other social organisms put in our way, it is important to:

• Calm down, smile and remain polite to maintain any chance of success
• Become a human being rather than a faceless number
• Be persistent to grind away the brick wall
• Be prepared to lose to expand your freedom of thought and action
• Be clear about your objective so you can be flexible about how to achieve it
• Find who can, since often the first person you speak to cannot help
• Take an active part in making things happen more efficiently
• Make the other person feel good about helping you so that they are more likely to help you
• Don’t relax this stance until it’s over, it’s easy to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Sometimes it might also help to change the question.

Heres to the crazy ones

Did you ever see Apple’s commercial “Heres to the crazy ones”? Watch it and then go and change the world…

Change the question

Sometimes there is no good answer to the question someone asks.

It could be they aren’t asking the right question to start with.

You win nothing by being part of the group trying to answer the wrong question. So rather than trying to answer their question, change the question. Figure out what the issue, challenge, problem really is and answer that instead.

Your odds of winning just went up.

via SAMBA Blog: Change the question.

Also read the first comment to this post:
When you start asking the right questions, you must be ready when you hear, “But this is how we’ve always done it.”

That phrase, along with “I’m really busy,” are the bastions of those who don’t care about solving problems and doing remarkable things.