Journaling to create cool ideas!

Hey, this is Brian. How are you? We've got our goddess cameo for the day. So I am sitting here journaling and I've had a lot of requests to share more about my journals and what I do and how I approach journaling in general and specifically. And I just did some really cool creative brainstorming about our in theos business and what we're going to do over the course of the year. And I thought I would just turn on the flip and share with you some of the stuff that I'm doing lately in my journal, in addition to a process I just went through that you might dig. But basically this is the journal I started, I don't know, just not even a week ago. And I just love, love, love using journals to capture my thoughts. I like to use the first page kind of to capture major themes in my life. I just love the idea of baby steps, baby steps, baby steps, baby steps, baby steps. And now it needs to be done. I always talk about this whole of dynamic tension between your ideal in your current reality. Like a rubber band between your two fingers. There's tension. Well, the way that you relieve that tension in the way that you go from your current reality to an ideal is you take baby steps. So that's a huge theme of my life. It has been for a while now. I just love to remind myself of that. Anyway, this is just started this journal on the 8th of January. You can see how much journaling I do. So when I'm reading a book, today's like January 12th. This is four days worth of journaling. When I'm reading a book, I take the time to bust open my journal and go through the process of answering the questions that are asked and stuff like that. For example, I was reading a book on building a great business and they had an exercise in there about the five questions of Peter Drucker, one of the leading management experts out there. He suggests five questions that you ask about your business you just need to be able to answer if you want to run an effective business. What is your mission? Who is your customer? What is your customer value? What results are you trying to accomplish? And the fifth question is, what's your plan? So I went through this and took some time and simple questions you could spend hours on. Really spent some time journaling it. And then I had a conversation with Alexandra. We kind of shared our ideas on it. Then I talked to John, who's heading up our Customer Happiness, and we got on the same page of what our mission is, who are our customers and how are we going to serve them? What do they value? And how do we really give ourselves to them? And just to let you know, our mission for Entheos Enterprises is to inspire and empower peeps to live their most authentically awesome lives. To be the change so we can change the world. That's also our mission. We want to demonstrate how inspired individuals and businesses can be a force for good, integrating spirituality and capitalism and really bringing our authentic selves into the world. You know, in terms of what our customers value, well, they value a lot of things we think honesty and excellence and authenticity and hard work and impeccability. Enthusiasm, hope and optimism. Goodness, making a difference in the world. Love, truth, beauty, kindness, In a word, virtue, more wisdom and less time. These are all the things that we believe. People who interact with us and with our business value, we want to really align ourselves with those values. Then we get into what we're trying to accomplish. And that ranges from creating a really successful, profitable, sustainable and scalable business in the mundane to the big picture of we want to inspire and empower millions of people to be the change and to change the world. I mean, that's why we're doing what we're doing and we're really excited about it. What's our plan? Well, I'm actually going to share that with you right now with the journaling exercise I just did. So with that context, this is my journal that I literally just finished working on. Mind mapping. I talk about it all the time. I nearly always mind map when I have a question. So right now it's the Entheos engine. And I've been playing around a lot with what are we going to do this year? How are we going to hit our goals to create a really successful, profitable, sustainable, scalable business? Moving into 2012? What are we going to do in 2011? In my video I did on New Year's Day, I talked about my creative production goal. Well, I'm part philosopher and part CEO and kind of integrating my identity as a philosopher in the context of being an entrepreneur as well. So I kind of split my time thinking about reading and writing and stuff like that and creating really cool structures for our business and doing things that hopefully demonstrate the right way to do business. But anyway, we've got this kind of year map. Okay, I'm thinking about that. And then I've got my mind map here. And we've got nuts and bolts stuff that we're working on right now. We've got some PPC stuff, advertising we want to do an affiliate program. We want to get back up. We don't have simple things in our business that need to be in place. So nuts and bolts. We've got a full time developer named Ryan who's starting next week, who helped us build ZODs, helped me build ZODs, and I'm really excited to have him on board full time. We, we've been a little understaffed in the technology side of things, so that's awesome. He's going to be focused on nuts and bolts then. I'm really excited about newsletters and what we can do with newsletters. And we're going to create a bunch of different newsletters for the book, which I'm going to tell you about in a second, and for Philosopher's Notes Volume one and for Philosopher's Notes Volume two. And also if you just want an inspirational quote, you'll be able to sign up for these different newsletters and get them on a daily or Monday, Wednesday, Friday or weekly basis. And I literally just came up with this idea while I was mind mapping. So it's tough to walk you through the exact process that I went through, but I was kind of wondering, how are we going to do it? We have over 25,000 people who have signed up for a daily newsletter that hasn't gone out in a while and we're going to reinstitute that. And I was wondering, we had so much content we want to share. How are we going to do it? And in the process of mind mapping, I came up with this idea that we can do multiple newsletters. Now that may not sound like a big deal, but it is. It's really, really cool. And it only came about because I took the time to not go online and to actually journal my thoughts. Then we've got the next big thing we've got for the Infios engine is what we call this Nuts and Bolts newsletter is one of the spokes. The next one is the book launch. So I'm really excited about this and we're going to be. We're printing the new book right now. Here's the book. We did a small run first off, just because I wanted to check it out and make sure that it was all cool. And now we're printing the next bigger run, which is going to be ready at the end of the month. So then I'm going to start actually marketing the book and doing a lot more than just occasional references. And what I'm going to do is really, really cool. In the process again of doing this journaling, I'VE been thinking about the fact that I'm going to do videos for every one of the chapters in here. This book is 100 mini chapters, as I've mentioned before. But I'm basically going to read each of these mini chapters and then go off on what it means to me. So a two to five, maybe ten minute video. But then in the process of mind mapping, I realized, God, it would be really cool. How can I give extraordinary value and do something really cool and different? And what we're going to do is we're actually going to create a newsletter which is going to be starting at chapter one and go all the way through over 100 days. The hundred chapters in this book, with me taking the time to kind of almost like a virtual book tour where instead of reading one or two chapters from a book and then talking about it, I'm going to do all 100 and I'm going to do them over the span of 100 days. And I can do it virtually where anyone around the world can come check it out. So I'm really, really excited about that. And then I come back over here and I look at it and say, okay, well what do I need to do? When I had that idea? What do I need to do to make that happen? Well, it's January and if you looked through my journal, you'd see a bunch of little mini calendars I always love looking at. What am I going to do this month? Like, what's my number one top priority that I'm going to hit? So long story a little shorter. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do this. And then what's funny started playing with it, just showing a little more of my creativity. I was timing how long it took me to read a chapter. Well, one of the middle sized chapters, which is a couple pages long, took me a minute and a half. Cool. That will be awesome. And as I was reading it, I realized, gosh, I haven't even thought about the fact that I've got to do an audio version of this book. So I'll go ahead and do that and that's what I'm going to work on this month. I'm going to do the audio version of that book. So we'll have the hardcover, the Kindle and the audio version ready by the end of the month and. And I'm going to get to work on recording all those videos so we can queue up the newsletter and launch that on February 1st. So I just said a lot and that might not mean a whole lot to you, but I wanted to show you the process through which I just came up with something that I think is a pretty cool idea. And I didn't have that really well formed before I sat down and started journaling. So my strong encouragement is spend more time with your journal. Really take the time to understand what you're thinking, where you're headed, and how you're going to create your extraordinary life. I really don't think you can create an extraordinary life without investing the time in journaling and taking the time to reflect and to plan and to envision and then to go rock it. So that is a meandering look at my journal. Obviously I went hyperspeed to get it in under 10 minutes. Hope you dug it. Let me know if there's anything else you want to see. And as always, have an awesome day. Cannot wait to share some more goodness from the book. Thanks for all your support to those of you who have already bought it. And here's to an awesome 2011 see ya.