SCANNERS NIGHT

Ever had a great idea for a website, book, product or business come to you in the bath or while you’re doing the washing up? What did you do with it?

Did you put it on the back burner, thinking something like…

“I’m sure someone else has already thought of it”

“Someone else is better placed than me to do that”

“I wish I could do something with that idea but I haven’t got the money / skill / staff / premises / time / energy to do it”

I know I have.

Once or twice I’ve then seen other people a couple of years later go ahead with the same idea and create a hit record or a best selling book or a thriving business. That stings!

We all have good ideas from time to time. But it’s too easy to allow the myths of creativity stop us following through.

“What you actually do within 24 hours of having a creative idea
will spell the difference between success and failure”
— Buckminster Fuller

Bring your idea to my idea “hotshop”

Discover how you can start to make something of your good ideas – join me at 7pm on Wednesday 1st April

I’m running an Idea Hotshop over the phone and I’ll be telling you the top ten myths of follow through and how to break through them.

And I’ll show you how to get started right now with…

• no money
• no staff
• no premises
• no time
• no energy
• no flippin’ business plan
• …and how you don’t even need your own original idea to go do something interesting

I’ll show you how to tell if an idea is worth pursuing and how to make money out of it if that’s what you want. And if you have more ideas than you know what to do with, I’ll show you how to choose which one to do first.

Whether you want to create a business, an income stream on the side, an event, an art project or a global movement, many of the principles are the same. I’ll tell you what they are and how I used them to make my own ideas a reality including:

• escaping full-time work to become an independent consultant who only worked 3 months of the year
• getting my own extended-length article published in the Guardian newspaper with no previous writing experience
• getting my experimental sound-art played on radio stations around the world
• becoming recognised as the UK expert on Scanners with a packed event every month in Central London

But this isn’t a lecture, it’s a “Hotshop”

It’s an interactive workshop where you have a chance for us to work on your idea if you are willing to share it. There’ll be a group of no more than 20 of us on a telephone conference line together.

Once you’ve booked, if you tell me in advance what your sticking point is on making your idea a reality, I’ll address it during the course of the call.

Please note I will be recording the Idea Hotshop call for others to listen to.

Date: Wednesday 1st April
Time: 7pm (finishing by 8pm)
Price: Tickets are just £10

Book a ticket now to be sure of a place. You’ll receive full details of how to take part once you book.

Please note that I can’t give refunds once you’ve booked but you will be to listen to the recording if you have to miss the call.

I’ve now got so many things I am doing online, I can’t even remember them myself!

So I decided to create this mindmap with the rather cool Mindmeister.com site.

Clear on the little arrows to open the links in new windows

You can open it a bit bigger here: www.mindmeister.com/12591420

Is the economic doom & gloom in the media wearing you down?

If so, there is a way to get a lot more business (or visitors to your web site, or people at your gig, or eyeballs on your art project) which costs next to nowt.

Think about this. What proportion of people in London (or even the world) currently have ever heard of you? A tiny fraction. And yet all your customers/clients/buyers/fans come from this.

So what would happen if you tripled or quadrupled the number of people who had heard of you?

And all without spending a penny on advertising.

You too would be saying “Pants to the recession!”

This is what Media guru Joanne Mallon will be teaching us in 12 days’ time at Scanners Night.

(Aside from all this she will also tell us her quick guide to give good interviews on radio and TV should you finally land your well-deserved 15 minutes of fame)

Plus we’ll be giving you a way to tell other Scanners what your current project is and get what you need to make it work.

Please bear in mind the last Scanners Night sold out so book in advance if you want to be sure of a ticket (and save £5 too). We will have seating for everyone this time – hurray!

Book a ticket now

What a great night January Scanners Night was!

Over 70 of us were packed in there to hear Suzy Greaves tell us “How to have your best year yet – without planning, goals or God forbid, new year resolutions”.

Suzy really hit the nail on the head when she said that it wasn’t achieving some goal in the future that’s going to make us happy. So what will?

Click HERE to listen to the recording of her talk.

To get more of Suzy’s insights into life, work and the whole shebang with her free 90 day Big Peace coaching program. (It’s good!)

Would you believe you can now launch your own TV Channel on the net for free? My friend Jay has been shooting great broadcast-quality time lapse footage of clouds and has launched a 24 hour TV channel called Cloud TV. It features some very nice chillout music as the soundtrack.

You can watch it below or go to his site Cloud-TV.com.

If you have plenty of content, launch your own TV channel at mogulus.com.

Barbara Sher writes: What if you don’t know if you (or someone you love) are a Scanner?

You can spot them easily: Scanners are some of the nicest, most interesting (and interested) people in the world; eclectic experts, delightful dilettantes, and totally under-rated geniuses who have the fascinating trait of losing interest in something once the learning part is over: good people who are tired of trying to change themselves and ready to find the life that suits them as they are.

With those measures, look around and see if you can find some Scanners in your life. Or in the mirror.

(From Barbara’s newsletter about her Scanners Retreat in Southern France, 19-24 April 2009)

Here’s a widget packed with data from Sprint in the US.
Click here to see the full page of data from around the world.

Going self-employed or starting your own business takes a lot of work in the early stages.

You can start to feel like a hamster on a wheel running faster and faster and not going anywhere.

Before you know it, you’re working all the hours available to you (and a few more) and still not seeing much return.

Part of this is inevitable when first launching something. Ask NASA; the Apollo rockets used the vast majority of their fuel just to lift off and travel the first 20 miles. The rest of the 240,000 miles were a breeze in comparison.

The problem is that it’s easy to get used to working hard and being very very busy – and not checking whether what we’re busy with will actually produce the results we want.

Unfortunately, the way we assume business works when we first try it for ourselves is not always correct. I know I invested considerable effort into projects early on that didn’t pan out the way I expected. That’s why it’s great to get tips from people who have been there before us, because it’s like taking a sneaky shortcut.

On Wednesday November 19th you can come and learn from 3 experts who have tried all the stuff that doesn’t work in launching a business and have then found the stuff that does. Mike, Judith and John of the Creative Entrepreneurs Club will be boiling down all those years of experience into 3 critical things that will help you make twice the money in half the time (and have some fun while you’re doing it).

Come to November Scanners Night and find out how to step off your own hamster wheel.

Book your place for November Scanners Night now.

Brevity is not just the soul of wit but the soul of entrepreneurship too.

We scanners have too many ideas to struggle alone implementing everything we think of. We need to take the fast track – and the best fast track is to collaborate with other people. If you want to engage other people to collaborate, you’d better be able to explain what it is you’re creating, what you need and why they should help you quickly.

At Scanners Night, you have a chance to get some advice from our guest experts on the spot. But you’ll only have 2 minutes to explain your project and what you need. Whether you’re coming to the next Scanners Night or not, start practising your “elevator pitch” now. And although this is a kind of selling, it’s not the old fashioned cheesy kind, it’s a statement that excites people about what you’re trying to achieve and makes it clear how they can help you.

You never know when you might run into a life-changing business contact – wherever it’s Richard Branson, Steve Jobs or the head of commissioning for the BBC. Can you engage their help in the 2 minutes you have with them in the elevator, on the tube, or in the loo? Start practising now.

NEW 2009 DATE: 19-24 April in Southern France. Read more here.

Would you like to spend a week with the world expert on Scanners in a nice spot in Italy along with 15 other Scanners?

Barbara Sher coined the term “Scanner” back in 1994 and recently wrote the book “What do I do when I want to do everything?“. If you’d like to spend a week with her in Puglia, Italy book for her Scanner Retreat now. It’s September 26 to October 1.

I attended her retreat in Autumn 2006 and thoroughly recommend it as a great mix of workshop and holiday.

Listen to Barbara talking about Scanners and the Retreat on this widgetabob:

Read more about Barbara’s Scanners Retreat here.