Whether you’re starting a business, or just planning new goals for the new year, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start, especially if you are a visual person.
Many folks recommend mindmapping as the way to get those goals or visions on paper.
Mind mapping is a technique popularized by Tony Buzan in the 1960s. Noticing that the humans respond better to images, keywords and direct associations, he developed many of the mind mapping techniques that we see today. And before Buzan formalized it, thousands had used the techniques including journals  Leonardo da Vinci, and Albert Einstein.
Here’s the basics:
1) Set your …read more

If you’re like me, you come up with a ton of ideas while doing other things.
But because I am doing other things, I used to forget them.
So just a few years ago, I created a special place to put these ideas down quickly.  It’s called my ’schemes and dreams’ notebook. And I have it everywhere I go.
Once a week, I book myself an hour on my schedule to review it and decide what ideas are still relevant and create a plan for each of them.
How about you?  What do you use to help you keep your ideas from escaping?

The long tail is a well-recognized term and concept. Chris Anderson’s blog is a great, insightful read and in many ways inspirational to the scrappy, little blogger that could.
I often think of how the long tail concept applies to ideas. What happens during the validation process to see if an idea is worthwhile, and beyond that, when you’re actively working on an idea is the realization of new ideas.
So one idea begets another, which begets another, and so on. Ideas are points on a chain (or graph) not points in space with no reference or connection to anything else.
The long …read more