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How to Play Follow the Leader to Kick Start Your Brain

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Business, Blogs, Living

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Did you ever play that game — Follow the Leader — in school? The person in front has an idea, and everyone else does the same thing. You might think it’s a bunch of redundancy. Most times it is.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Here’s a recipe to use this game to kick start your brain.

How to Play Follow the Leader to Kick Start Your Brain

In my class, we made our own rules. The game was not only more interesting. It was a WHOLE LOT more fun! My secret is that I’ve used the premises of this silly game to kick start my brain in every job I’ve ever had.

  • Look around for the great leaders, the great thinkers, you admire.
  • Follow the leaders.
    • Follow the folks who have ideas.
    • Follow the folks who have confidence.
    • Follow the folks who are positive.
    • Follow the folks who are jazzed about what they do.

    Follow the folks who know where they are going.

  • Pick one idea from one of the leaders you follow.
    • Take it apart. Put it back together.
    • Look at the idea from every direction you can.
    • Find the parts that are only like the leader. Find the parts that are also like you.

    Get to know the idea at a cellular level.

  • Take one tiny bit of that idea and replace it.
    • If they’re on a tennis court, move to a movie theater.
    • Move the idea to somewhere you understand.

    In other words, make the idea your own.

  • Here’s the crucial part: Don’t try to write . . . play with the idea. While you do that also do something else that suits you:
    • Listen to music.
    • Go for walk.
    • Take a shower.
    • Dance in an elevator.
    • Clean the refrigerator.

    You know what works.

  • Follow your heart to make the idea your own.

Absolutely, positively do not go back to the source once you’ve started to play with the idea . . . until you’ve made the idea your own. Then all that’s left is to write, tell, or present your thoughts, and to remember to thank the leader who was your inspiration.

You get the idea. Actually with a little practice, my guess is that you’ll be getting more than one.

How do you usually kick start your brain?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Related
I Have an Idea — I Have Lots of Them!
Don’t Hunt IDEAS — Be an Idea Magnet

It’s about Blogging and Relationships

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Glad We Met . . .

I get to talk to people I like who live all over the world. We have important thoughts, and we share them in real time on my blog. We laugh a lot. We don’t comment. We talk.

What is cooler than that?

Read the whole feature in today’s Blog Herald by clicking the logo.

The Blog Herald

It’s about blogging and real life.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles
Liz Strauss at The Blog Herald, The Blogging Times, and Who’s One in a Million?

Change the World: Let People Out of the Boxes

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They Had made Up My Mind

Change the World!

I once worked in a highly political culture. It took a while to know that politica played a huge role there. I had moved to a new city and a new job. I had to sort what was the company and what was the culture in part of the country.

As any new employee, I got to know the folks in my department. They showed me the “ropes” of the company, how things worked, and who was who. I took what I was told on face value.

Time went by. I found feet and my way around. I got to know what worked for me. I got to know what didn’t work too. I figured out that some of those folks who showed me around in the early days had political reasons for telling me things they told me.

I didn’t take into account how my beliefs about the company had been affected by conversations with those political people. It was a while before I woke to realize something about me I didn’t like.


I had opinions about people — people I didn’t know. I had become part of a culture that put people in little boxes.

My mind had people organized by one or two traits and their political clout within the company. It was part of the cultural organizational chart, the oral history handed down to me when I arrived there. I had bought it, as fishers say, “hook, line and sinker.”

That morning I started over. I started talking to all of the folks at work with clear intent of getting to know them. The more I talked, the more I enjoyed the folks that I was getting to know. I found that I’d been missing out on some pretty cool, intelligent people.

The world changed that day, when I let the people out of the boxes.

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

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If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.

Change the World!.

Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.

Change the World: Share a Mini-Vacation at a Favorite Place

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Meet Me in Tuscany — the Restaurant

Change the World!

When I commuted to Massachusetts, I often spent the weekend there. Every Sunday I was there, a couple of friends would plan a drive to show me one of their favorite spots in Maine or New Hampshire. We called it “airing out our minds.”

Last Saturday, I got the chance to do the same with two incredible women and blogger friends, Wendy Piersall and Jessica Duquette. They drove into Chicago, and I got to share a favorite place — a restaurant called Tuscany.

The cool thing about inviting folks to a favorite place, especially if they help choose which one, is that I’m inviting them into a part of my life, and they’re saying they want to come. I get to discover my favorite place again, this time with them and through their eyes.

Jessica and Wendy brought a feeling of family and an anticipation of a night that would be enjoyed. That was perfect because I had done the same. The change of scenery, the fine company, the laughter, the conversation, the food, the wine turned a simple blogger dinner into a mini-vacation.

Three bloggers talked about our blogs, our goals, our lives. We asked questions. We challenged assumptions. We told silly stories and important ones too. I doubt that any one of us could describe the other people in the restaurant — except the lovely lady who was our server. She seemed to understand that something important was happening between close friends. That’s right, we skipped the showier, more surface, poking-around sort of talk that comes before the authentic and real part. Bloggers are good at doing that.

We shared food off common plates while we shared moments of each other’s lives. Jessica and Wendy touched my world and made it better in so many words and smiles that night.

WendyPiersall, Jessica Duquette, Liz Strauss, Chicago 01-20-07

It’s that easy to touch a life.

We can change the world today — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

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If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.

Change the World!.

Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.

Social Networking: How’s It Supposed to Work?

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You Have a Message Waiting From . . .

What was I thinking? When someone I don’t know from my Social Network sends me a message, saying “Hi! What are you doing?” that’s email small talk. Isn’t it?

Read the whole feature in today’s Blog Herald by clicking the logo.

The Blog Herald

It’s about blogging and real life.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles
Liz Strauss at The Blog Herald, The Blogging Times, and Who’s One in a Million?

Change the World: Personal Service Counts

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Hey, Scot, How Can We Change the World?

Scot Herrick has been a friend of so many in so many ways for so long. He has a natural sense of people and how they work together. Scot also pairs this sensibility with a business view that brings a well-rounded, real-world focus.

When Scot sent a post for adding his voice to this series, I knew that I would use it — even before I read it. I knew that Scot would offer a work of substance and value, a practical, personal way that we might change the world. I wasn’t wrong about that.

Change the World: Personal Service Counts

Guest Writer: Scot Herrick

Change the World!

Have you noticed the large increase in self-service options available to you? Sometimes the only option?

There’s a reason for that, you know. Self-service is the least cost option available for companies to provide you service. That’s because it is your time spent searching for answers and a small group of people pumping possible answers into a database to present to you when you check things out online.

Now, I like doing business online. Usually, the process around purchasing or servicing or finding out about stuff is pretty straight-forward and now almost standard between sites. For example, I’d much rather order online than go to a retail store and buy something or call someone up and order something.

Most of the time.

I’d contend that we live in a self-service planet – but we need to live in a service-rich world, one where self-service is merely an option to all different kinds of service levels.

After researching products on self service sites, for example, I walked into a retail PC store to buy a high-end laptop PC and spent an hour trying to get an answer or two from a salesperson, who was one in name only. I wanted to spend the money. I couldn’t because I couldn’t get a tiny bit of professional knowledge and service about what I was asking.

I contrast that with the same self-service information, moving up the service chain by calling a professional salesperson 1800 miles away the next day who supplemented an online ordering site, having a good 15-minute conversation about my computer needs and mutually determining what fit the best for those needs with the products they offered. I then confidently ordered a laptop that met them – for about $300 more than the one I was trying to buy in the retail store.

The entire service chain – from self-service, to personal service, to fulfillment of an order, to servicing the order – counts as part of your service experience. Have anything fail in the service chain and you are left with that bitter feeling of not getting what you needed.

It’s not hard to be of service to others: simply listen to the other person and think through the fit of your products and services based upon the other person’s point of view. Not having a service that meets the specific needs of a person is a legitimate answer. Referring another who can provide the service means your person will remember you — who referred well and received no gain. The person you referred to will remember you as well.

This is true whether you work for a large corporation, are a self-employed home worker, or helping your friends.

People looking for help remember professional, expert people who helped them – not systems, not databases, not knowledgebases, not tools, and not the Internet. People remember great people.

Self service can be the lowest cost service option. But lowest cost doesn’t figure in the price paid for not offering great, professional service.

Help others by providing personal service. We can change the world if we do.

Scot Herrick writes at Cube Rules: Career Management for Cubicle Warriors

Thank you, Scot, for showing us how.
We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

______________
If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.

Change the World!.

Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.