Neil Simpson

I was re-reading David Parrish’s excellent book “T Shirts and Suits – A guide to the business of creativity” and he made a very interesting statement (in fact he makes many in the book, but this one captured my thinking…)

“Success often comes from modest beginnings”

This struck a chord with me as it is something that I have been thinking about for a little while now….how to find the right conditions to start a new project?

I have found it very easy in the past to put off starting new things until I have the right funding, or team or equipment in place.

Looking back, it seems that this approach hasn’t been the most useful or effective way for me to go about things as, sadly, perfect days seldom rear their lovely heads and many great ideas haven,t been acted upon.

In reality, we simply have to do the best with what we have in front of us right this moment

And this revelation got me to thinking about what might be a more useful, or fun way of starting a project or getting leverage to deal with specific challenges?

The answer I came up with was to see it as a test of my creativity.

….I pride myself on my creativity, surely no problem is unsolvable, I only need to think of it as a creative challenge…

• If I have no funding, where can I beg steal or borrow what I need?
• If conditions aren’t exactly perfect, what can I change to make best use of whatever it is that I do have or what is around me?
• If I cant afford a “Dream Team”, can I convince the people I want to volunteer of skill swap me for what I need?

“Doing The Right Things” is one of the results of this new thinking.  I still need some design done, some killer products to sell and a clear idea of what to write about next.  However, for a change, I decided to just start and have faith that these things will just show up an in the mean time take baby steps until I can work out how to put it all together

You know what?

I am having much more fun actually working on something than wishing for it to come true…

Neil x