I have always wanted to meet the person who one day sitting idle or super engaged, deciding that they wanted to take the flower of Crocus sativus, dry its crimson stigma and styles and proceed to use it to flavor food preparations. Saffron زعفران is the world's costliest spice by weight. This is some seriously out of the box thinking, but most food preparation and ingredients have literally come about due to things that would seem completely out of the ordinary, meaning complex steps to extract, produce, use or prepare some thing.

The quick and clear guide to making your life aligned with the folks who discover new ingredients or figure out new ways to prepare food or those who continue to redefine life for better outcomes:

1. Challenge assumptions and question the status quo.

2. Encourage divergent thinking and consider multiple ideas and perspectives.

3. Step out of your comfort zone and try new things.

4. Take risks, even if they seem unconventional or unlikely to succeed.

5. Learn from failure and use it as a learning opportunity.

6. Stay curious, keep learning, and explore different fields and disciplines.

7. Collaborate with others and brainstorm new ideas.

8. Keep an open mind and consider different perspectives.

9. Be flexible and adaptable to new situations.

10. Practice brainstorming and problem-solving techniques like SCAMPER, Mind Mapping, or lateral thinking.

11. Remember that thinking outside the box requires practice, patience, and a willingness to take risks.

12. Stay open-minded and persistent in your effort to think creatively.

In 1999, an English teacher in Mexico needed a bag to carry his books. He was so fed up of his outcomes (in ability to carry books and not ruin them) he decided to take matter in his own hands. Most journeys of success start with solving ones own problems and finding problems worth solving. Its always good be married to a problem but never to a solution. Solutions can evolve over time. Here is the most interesting story Ive read in how one person can change their outcomes and write a new chapter.

That the Woolworth Company (aka Woolworth's) did not go out of business but rather just changed their name to that of their most profitable division: Foot Locker

No more spreadsheets. That fact truly scales.

Some years ago, I was asked to do a day long bootcamp with university students and evaluate their business plans and help them work through their challenges. All of them eager and full of energy showed up to the session at 7am with their laptops. Every one was ready to go, 11 teams in total. 

I asked how every one was doing and if any one wanted to go first. Literally every one raised their hand. Followed on by a grim realization on my part, that none of these teams in the 6 weeks leading up to this day, had actually built any business besides building spread sheets. Models only was the theme of the morning.

I was numb for the first 30 seconds of that realization. 

I asked the audience, so every one has a model? No one has a business?

Every one said yes, when asked why just models, they said they wanted to perfect their outcomes before they launched and they were excited that I may be able to validate their outcomes.

We went through the business ideas one by one, I asked every one to give me an elevator pitch. They all did.

One of the business models revolved around a flavored tea business with 10 mix and go flavors targeting young folks in high foot traffic areas. The idea was to challenge the assumption that regular tea drinking was being replaced by newer cold brewed options for a changing demographic. The excel sheets that accompanied this was the most complex I had ever seen for a business in my life. It had cells for outside temperature changes affecting price, sales etc.

My instant reaction to every one present was “you kids are too smart for your own good. you need a booth and elbow grease vs number crunching and models"

I asked every one in class to take this idea, apply a version of their choice and setup at 8 am tomorrow morning with a table and their interpretation of flavored tea concoctions and do a pilot run of this business model. The catch that they could not spend more than 1500 PKR per team member to set this up. They could use any thing they could salvage on campus but their cost of materials could not exceed 1500xTeamMembers.

Most of the participants thought this was the dumbest idea to date, who would actually go do some thing physical in a class on entrepreneurship. This was supposed to be a discussion led exercise  ideally resulting in mind bending outcomes. 

No less 9 out of the 11 teams mustered the energy to show up the next day, The race was on from where to setup to how to setup to what time, what marketing needed to be done on campus, how to target sales, how cold does the brew need to be, how cold would it be kept, would cold mint tea vs cold iced mint and lemon tea do better? 

I could see the brain cells in action, real questions being asked, real answers/conclusions being drawn. At 4pm we had agreed to tally the only result that mattered. Sales.

The best performing team was a team that had zero interest in the tea biz, their original idea was to do with outsourced labour arbitrage. The worst performing team was the ones who had originally come up with the idea and over engineered their model to death. 

The difference between the winners and the losers. One had the ability to take an idea(any ones idea), make it their own, improvise and scale it. The other, was too married to the solution at hand without the ability to be flexible and talking them solves down with what could go wrong that they literally had 3 things for sales on their booth and spent the most time arguing about better taste profiles.

Moral of the story. Doing is 100x better than building models alone, doing right away is a 1000x better than models, doing without mental handcuffs is 10000X better than models.

Models can allow you to baseline your ideas but till you actually ditch the spreadsheets and act on your intent your outcomes will only be a never ending tab on a screen.

Amusing our selves to death by Neil Postman is as relevant today as it ever was. If you can't invest the time to read the book or its updated foreward, you must see Stuart McMillen's interpretation of media theorist Niel Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), subtitled “Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”.

By learning some thing new. or guessing some thing familiar, or taking a brand spanking new generative AI experience for a test whilst increasing your synaptic pathways. Some times it is great to de clutter your brain and focus on art, culture, history and literature. As a segue from the mundane, the daily, the ritualistic here is some thing to re-train and re-connect your brain for better outcomes. 

https://touringtest.net/

Guess the city based on art and literary clues.

If you have thought about it, some ones already built. Or perhaps you should go out and build it if it matters enough. We all have dreams, thats why; likely most if not all of you are investing time each week to read this newsletter. Right?

Some where some how some one thought, that dreams matter to them. Matter hard enough or strongly enough for them to create a tool to record, store, visualize and manifest dreams using AI. This week I came across 

https://thedreamkeeper.co/

It is worth a shot to check it out and far more important recognize the fact, if you have a dream go build it, act on it, else some one else will either pay you to build theirs whilst you wait to take your own shots or get comfortable collecting paychecks. 

Every thing that is new was once old. Nothing is stopping us from taking whats old and innovating on top of it. Where most people fail is context, both historical and current. To build some thing new, using some thing old make sure you know and learn historical context. Most days, context matters more than opinions.

Heres a 500 year old lesson.