Baréz-Brown - How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas: Shake Up Your Business, Shake Up Your Life

Monsieur Jagger got it right when he penned this tune, as did the Soup Dragons when they sang it so finely. We are free to do what we want, any old time. Only we make the patterns of our lives, nobody else. Every day, we are the ones who make choices. And it is those choices that determine who we are and what we do. Its those choices that create our lives.

As human beings our opportunities are virtually endless. Never before has the world offered such a wide variety of experience. We can now really live our lives how we want not how we are told to. It is now possible to be the worlds leading software engineer, yet base yourself on a small island in Polynesia. You can write your first piece of music and publish it to a potential audience of hundreds of millions, all from the comfort of your home. You can decide to live on a macrobiotic diet, learn Mandarin and never miss an episode of your favorite soap. We are becoming global. The world is getting smaller and life will never be the same again! More than ever, freedom is all around us.

Freedom, however, is meaningless unless we realize that we have it, and then use it to get the very best out of our lives. And to use our freedom, we need to be aware that we have choices in our lives and also have the ability to choose constructively.

Freedom without choice would be like owning the most beautiful sailing boat, with teak decks and sleek lines, able to take you clean around the world but without you being able to sail her. After a while, the boat would lose its appeal; it would stop looking so beautiful, and soon it would be forgotten. An opportunity wasted, as life carried on in its usual predictable direction.

We all have freedom, but it is up to us to create our own choices, our opportunities. If we dont, all too soon life will have passed us by. Just think of all the fun we may have missed!

Making a choice and exploiting an opportunity means writing change into your life. Life can present us with so many reasons to change. There can be an issue or a problem in your life; something that you obviously need to solve. A friend of mine spent so much time away from home on business that there were warning signs in his marriage. It was apparent something needed to change. At other times you may just feel its time to do something new. You feel the need for change but are not sure what that change should be or how to go about it. Maybe it feels that your life is just not as good as it could be. Sometimes the choices to be made are painful, sometimes exciting; sometimes confusing and sometimes clear as day.

Regardless of the choices to be made, they represent opportunities. Now, I dont mean that in a pretentious self-help guru style, but in a pragmatic way if you have to change something it might as well be to your benefit. So from now on in this book, all issues, problems, potential pickles and poohs, may be regarded as positive challenges and opportunities for life-enhancing change. To view them as any less is to disregard the freedom that surrounds us all.

Opportunities can come to us in two ways:

1. We can create them for ourselves and make them happen.
2. They come to us from the outside world. But in order for this to happen successfully, first we need to be clear about where we are in our lives and what we want so that when the opportunities are presented to us, we recognize them and take advantage of them.

Either route involves creativity, thinking differently and seeing the world in new ways. And that is what this book is about.

IF YOU kICK-START YOUR CREATIVITY YOULL OPEN YOURSELF UP TO INSPIRING POSSIBILITIES

IF YOU RECOGNIZE YOUR INSPIRING POSSIBILITIES YOULL UNLOCK YOUR FREEDOM TO CHOOSE AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE

You have some pretty amazing capabilities! As a human being you are naturally creative. And although our creative instincts tend to become suppressed, we have all the resources to change that around.

As time goes on, we are taught that there is a right and a wrong way of doing things. As a result, as adults our creativity often comes out more through luck than application. The ice-cream cone is a case in point. It was created by Ernest Hamwi in 1904 at the St Louis Worlds Fair. He was selling waffles and next door to him was an ice-cream vendor who ran out of dishes. He rolled a waffle to put the ice cream in and the rest is history. Unfortunately, these lucky instances are few and far between.