The African-American Guide to Getting Started Right Now at Innovating and Creating Solutions
Many brothas and sistas want betterment and progress but don’t know how to start. Keep in mind that we African-Americans were never taught how to start pursuing our goals and for a reason. Think about it – when have you brothas and sistas received a lesson on setting goals and achieving them back when you were in school? Did they teach you how to define your goals, learn from failure and keep moving? Now let’s look at black media like Black Enterprise magazine – is that blackfish wrap teaching you how to pursue your path or is Black Enterprise talking to you about someone else story and putting out uppity top 10 lists and all other stuff that has nothing to do with your personal betterment? In this article, Dream and Hustle is going to talk directly to you on how to get started at making progress towards betterment and self-empowerment.
The best way to establish your path to progress is to create a cultural ecosystem around you that support nothing but your path to progress and that is the solution we are going to discuss here in this article. Creating a cultural ecosystem has never been taught in our schools and never been discussed in black media that focus more on trying to show you “successful black people” which is nothing but bragging about others and hoping you admire them. You have to learn how to create a self-supporting system that works for your dreams and help turn your dreams into a reality and you do that through the creation of patterns, practices and cultures so let’s get into it.
Establish Culture of Innovation
The first thing you need to do is find a space in your home to create a culture of innovation. We written a blog article on creating an innovation center (http://dreamandhustle.com/2013/03/c...o-compete-in-the-21st-century-global-economy/) over a year ago and discuss how you should transform that “home office” into a place of innovation for you and your family to come up with additional revenue streams and projects.
Call this place the Center of Excellence and be proud that room in your home is where ideas are tested and if they fail, you put it to the side and if they work, they move out of your Center of Excellence into the real world. This is the place you learn to fail and understand why things fail and analyze if you can fix it or move on to more promising projects. Now there are two cheap things you can get right now to establish an innovation culture:
Yellow Sticky Pads. You can buy yellow sticky pads at the dollar store and these are the most powerful tool in your arsenal to transfer your thoughts to something you can read. Take a 45 minute timer and lock yourself in a room and just write down everything in your head one thought at a time and post it on your wall. You will notice that you took a lot of worry and other burdens off your mind and transferred it to a physical writing that you can look at and better analyze. Everybody should do this exercise and teach their children this also.
Freemind Mind Mapping. This software is open source and free to download and it allow you to organize your thoughts that you place on your yellow sticky pad. What you do after you post up all your yellow sticky pads is you enter them in Freemind as a node and then you will begin to see categories as your organize each nodes. What you will notice sometimes is you have way more personal nodes than business-orientated nodes meaning you got a lot of heavy personal stuff on your mind and need to put more attention on your business-orientated stuff. We have written an article on using Freemind at the following url (http://dreamandhustle.com/2012/11/a...ptual-and-execution-mind-maps-using-freemind/).
This is how you get started in your innovation and transfer from the stage of thinking about it and talking about it to writing out and organizing your thoughts into a structured format that allow you to look at what you think or thought and scrutinize what you can control, what you cannot control and begin to know the difference.
When you complete your brainstorming and organization session in your Center of Excellence, you need to create two types of documents. You need to create a conceptual architecture of the solution and a workflow scenario document. We discussed this briefly in a previous article at (http://dreamandhustle.com/2013/08/introducing-brothas-and-sistas-to-the-art-of-creating-solutions/) but let’s go over the two main concepts.
Conceptual Document. A conceptual architecture document list all of the elements in your solution. The first thing you create is all of the nouns such as Laundromat, owner, member, affiliates and then you list the adjective interactions such as conduct transactions, verify membership, register new members between the nouns in your document. This allow you to see the big picture of your hustle and know who all the players are and how they interact in your hustle. Most of these objects should be diagram shapes with arrows pointing to each other that you take out and print on a wall. I actually have a glass I write on with glass marker that I can erase, take a picture of it with my smart phone, print it out on photo paper and use it as a physical reference. A photo of your hustle on a piece of glass written by you is a lot more impressive to you than written out on paper, trust me.
Workflow Document. A workflow document is the steps each noun takes and you document this out. For example, the Laundromat owner sees an advertisement or an email or a postal mail letter to learn about your service. That lets you automatically know you got to create ads, emails and postal mail flyers or even hire sales affiliates to drop off a business care and brochure. When you say register users and the Laundromat scans a membership card at the door to let you know you need a scanning device like an USB barcode scanner you find on eBay imported from China and you need software/web site to look up the member information. As you work on your workflow with the nouns, you will begin to learn to see what it takes to get things done.
All of this brainstorming and documentation is what you do in your Center of Excellence to turn your dream into a hustle. Now you thought about something and now you put in additional work to make things make sense to you and you determine if the solution is workable. Let’s say you cannot afford it for example our EDM station for a while was not feasible because of BMI/ASCAP fees so we tabled it. But recently I do have the funding now raised by the 3rd Strategic Institute to get started and continue and all I have to do is pull up the old files. So don’t throw away your hustles, take your notes and stash them away but most important, you now have a Center of Excellence room in your house that is a dream catcher designed to turn you and your family thoughts into reality.
Do Only What You Need For the Mission
Once you learn to transfer your thoughts into reality, then you accomplished the first leg of making a difference and establishing the path towards progress and betterment in your life. Once you have these documents, you need to go through each step and create a solution document that discuss the feature and how you going to create the solution to that feature. This solution document list the feature in the left column and on the right column, you write in and discuss how you going to create the solution. If you look at our documentation on SistaSphere at (http://dreamandhustle.com/2013/08/the-sista-sphere-experience-a-geofenced-virtual-event/) you will see the documentation on the feature section.
The purpose of creating a solution document is to allow you to focus on doing only what you need to do for the mission. For example, I know many of you want to learn ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server but in reality, do you need to know everything or just the parts to get the job done? Maybe all you need to learn is how to copy and paste scripts to make it work or try to make something happen as an experiment. This is what you do instead of going away trying to learn something comprehensive taking time away from the hustle.
For example, if your feature is scan a membership card for the Laundromat service model, then you need to focus on how to create the PVC cards or allow people to use their phone. That means you learn how to copy/paste code that generate barcodes or QR codes and you learn how to use a text-based USB scanner to write out the membership number and read it with an onChange event in Javascript or if you doing a windows interface, an onchange event on the textbox control. Here is a secret, when you go through your solution document and line up the features and solutions, you will begin to see patterns that you can reuse over and over. For example, my firm Swagg-Scientific can use the upload photo feature over and over again because we realize we have to keep coding this out.
Even our hood solutions are based on reusable patterns and practices – the grocery pickup model where people order groceries and order food is the same thing I created for the kiosk that we got in downtown Atlanta for Dream and Hustle as a pop-up experiment years ago to look into micro-retailing. Ain’t it funny that this blog done so much but black people running around acting like we ain’t done nothing? That’s called jealously and envy when the master hustlers like us are out there embarrassing the mediocre out there trying to run game and BS on black folks when it comes to business and empowerment. I still got the code for that hustle and can scale up to something like a grocery pickup model in the hood thanks to reusable patterns and practices written 3 years ago.
Now once you identify the solution and what it takes to make the feature happen, you have to make a build versus buy decision. Now in terms of building, you could do a search online for code and if you find some code and instructions on how to build it out, then do it. But when you see complex stuff like write out a QR code or read a QR code, you have to buy these components to not waste time building out what someone else already put in hundreds of hours to make real. Then when it comes to coding, can you outsource to someone else to do the job?
For example, I’m not good at grammar so I outsourced Hustle Space magazine editing and content creation out to the Philippines. The micro-mall concept I used my Asian partners in the 3rd Strategic Institute to work with commercial resources on the development of the next generation cube stores and awaiting their findings before I go back to the sistas. So don’t think I’m sitting here coding and writing everything out, I got a team and I outsource stuff as necessary and cats are mad because they found out I even outsourced black empowerment movement outside the country and these cats frustrated because they know I’m going to deliver results while they stuck on talking ish and doing nothing.
Surround Yourself with Progressive People
There are too many nonsense-talking people in the black community who are not worth a cent. You as an African-American has to accept the fact you grew up around these worthless losers and you also have to acknowledge you as an African-American consume worthless black media designed to play with your emotions.
The hidden agenda behind all of this negativity in our community is to discourage you as an African-American from having a productive life. That is why they want to keep your children in a classroom around losers who bully your black child for wanting to be smart and getting good grades. And when you grow up, then you see these same loser black people talking some crap about they a black Muslim or black Hebrew even though they been in prison for doing something dumb but now this same dummy supposed to know all about ancient Kemetic Egypt and stuff like that. Then you see the urban radio stations playing anti-women songs and promoting thug culture or relationship drama and casual sex among black people and all of this is design to discourage you as an African-American to pursue entrepreneurship and doing for self and falling in black love and creating a strong black family as the backbone of a strong black community.
The first thing you can do right here and right now is immediately unsubscribe from negative black media. Cut off your cable and use on-demand video services and save that money for your startup – you can easily create several $5/month GoDaddy hosting startup businesses with that money you spent on cable watching negative black media and use that money to empower yourself and create solutions in the black community. Remove all incoming negative propaganda coming your way.
Then the next thing and this is not hard but necessary – get rid of the black negative family members, friends and associates around you that perpetuate negativity and non-progress. Here is the thing and let me give you a bit of advice – when you dump negative people, you create room for positive people to be in your life. I dumped so many worthless people and lame significant others just to open the door for more better quality people to step into my life and I learn to start dropping dead weight. Yes, black folks try to come at you with that “family” bullcrap but the truth is, you are on a solo destination with a sole purpose designed by God and you are not obligated to people who crawled out the same birth canal as you. There is only one litmus test and that is if they support your dreams and your work towards your dreams or they do not support your dreams and do not support your work towards your dreams.
Learn to be around people who share the same goals as you. For example, because I’m focusing on global solutions and internet technology, I have more Asian and Indian friends and find myself dating more Asian and Indian sistas and some Latino sistas and found the lovemaking to be more passionate and intimate while I take pride in no longer dating Scandal TV show watching, Michael Baisden following ghetto garbage sistas. Even though I’m West Side of Chicago, I come to realize my path should be travelled with those who know the route and destination I’m taking and that makes the journey comfortable. Many black people want to travel the journey around their black friends who don’t give a personal care about the journey or destination and throwing shade and trying to throw you off the path and keep you distracted. That is how many black people get caught up instead of reaching their goals and it happened to me for a while early on in life.
Look for channels and areas where your goal is at and get in there and start mingling with people who working on the same goal, even if they are different from you in terms of ethnicity and beliefs. What you will discover is you are in a diverse culture where everybody is focused on the same solution as you and you get ideas you like and you contribute ideas other like and you are now in a positive progressive environment for success. This is where you need to be at and what you can do right now.
Overall, you can right now stop staying loyal to lame friends, family members and social cliques and stop consuming negative black media. You can do that right now. I do not have cable and as a result, I only consume positive media and media that I personally like for my own reason and do not watch “black shows” because I’m a black person. I associate only with those who share my personal and professional goals and I watched my life develop not only meaning and purpose but I found myself in an environment I can contribute to others and receive good information that is helpful to me and my goals.
Re-invest the time and money you spent on worthless people and negative black media into your personal dreams and being around people you like. That is the biggest step you can do in terms of making things happen is surround yourself in a positive and supportive and validating environment.
Be Efficient and Effective
Efficient is all about getting things done fast and knocking it out. Being fast does not mean being sloppy and generic like I see all the time among our people. Also being effective is about having objectives and goals that are met or exceeded and many times, we got brothas and sistas who make up crap about they doing something but it is not effective or deliver results. These brothas and sistas do not even design their hustle in a way to effectively learn from failure and just walk away emotionally from setbacks. You have to learn to be efficient and effective and that is through strong discipline and sharp decision-making.
Efficiency. Learn to build out patterns and practices you can re-use over and over again. I spoke about the membership component that you can use in all of your business models to get customers to sign up and you establish communication with them to drive them to your business. Learn how to discipline yourself on identifying patterns and practices worldwide and also learn good time management. Time management is important and I do this with this blog with only a limited time, I crank out all this information but I also have an efficient process to develop these articles and make sure I stay on point. Many of the points I discussed earlier like the process of transferring thoughts to yellow sticky pads to organizing in Freemind can be efficient when you have a business model idea come up out of the blue.
Effectiveness. Focus on defining the success outcomes and the means to get there. The end justify the means is actually a good rule to live by. If you want to be rich and a millionaire, but you going to a job where they pay you every two weeks, then you are not likely to reach your success in an effective manner. But if you learn how to work money through transactions and investing and gaming and work with those who effectively became millionaires, then you are being effective as you are working the right channels and path to that goal. Use metrics, charts and spreadsheets and goals and timelines to measure your effectiveness.
If you notice in the black community, you don’t see black leaders doing anything with any form of efficiency or effectiveness. For example, the lobby groups are using ALEC to draft up state level legislation in an efficient manner to send to local state GOP representatives to propose to the state senate to pass as law in multiple GOP states. Everything from gun control to corporate interests and illegal immigrants and they have been effective in passing these laws where the same law passed in Arizona been passed in Alabama at the same time. But you see what our black leaders do? Our worthless black leaders and liberal black media complain about ALEC instead of being just as efficient and effective as proposing legislation and passing legislation at the state level to benefit our people.
Learn to find patterns and practices to be efficient and learn how to measure your results to know your effectiveness and make adjustments to be more effective or be less effective. Knowing how good you are is important and you can do this right now in your life.
Moving Forward
In this article, we have showed African-Americans how to get started and get in motion of doing for self, their people and their future and their community. We highlighted how our current African-American culture is full of negativity and designed to stop us from making progress in our personal lives as well as stunt the progress of our people. We also acknowledge that our people has not been taught to set goals and pursue them from the starting line and the reason why is because no one want to see us succeed or help us as a people succeed.
The 3rd Strategic Institute and Dream and Hustle have demonstrated with our history of articles and links that we been about helping brothas and sistas do for self while Black Enterprise magazine still write about other people and want you to admire those other people instead of uplift yourself. For example here is another blog article we want to share as an additional read on creating projects and solutions (http://dreamandhustle.com/2013/10/outlining-our-approach-to-delivering-projects-and-solutions/) and we can keep putting it up in people faces that Dream and Hustle is the only ones about black empowerment on the real level while others just running their damn mouth talking about nothing.
The way you get started on your goals right now is to create the environment to innovate, associate yourself with like-minded peers who are on the same path as you and focus on being efficient and effective through discipline and measurements. All of this you can do right now with no excuses and I hope as a result, you brothas and sistas cut off your cable bill, get rid of your worthless Facebook and Instagram friends and fake cats around you and start reading solutions around the world being implemented and learn to adopt them and measure your success to adjust your effectiveness to be the person you are destined to be.
http://dreamandhustle.com/2014/07/the-african-american-guide-to-getting-started-right-now-at-innovating-and-creating-solutions/
Many brothas and sistas want betterment and progress but don’t know how to start. Keep in mind that we African-Americans were never taught how to start pursuing our goals and for a reason. Think about it – when have you brothas and sistas received a lesson on setting goals and achieving them back when you were in school? Did they teach you how to define your goals, learn from failure and keep moving? Now let’s look at black media like Black Enterprise magazine – is that blackfish wrap teaching you how to pursue your path or is Black Enterprise talking to you about someone else story and putting out uppity top 10 lists and all other stuff that has nothing to do with your personal betterment? In this article, Dream and Hustle is going to talk directly to you on how to get started at making progress towards betterment and self-empowerment.
The best way to establish your path to progress is to create a cultural ecosystem around you that support nothing but your path to progress and that is the solution we are going to discuss here in this article. Creating a cultural ecosystem has never been taught in our schools and never been discussed in black media that focus more on trying to show you “successful black people” which is nothing but bragging about others and hoping you admire them. You have to learn how to create a self-supporting system that works for your dreams and help turn your dreams into a reality and you do that through the creation of patterns, practices and cultures so let’s get into it.
Establish Culture of Innovation
The first thing you need to do is find a space in your home to create a culture of innovation. We written a blog article on creating an innovation center (http://dreamandhustle.com/2013/03/c...o-compete-in-the-21st-century-global-economy/) over a year ago and discuss how you should transform that “home office” into a place of innovation for you and your family to come up with additional revenue streams and projects.
Call this place the Center of Excellence and be proud that room in your home is where ideas are tested and if they fail, you put it to the side and if they work, they move out of your Center of Excellence into the real world. This is the place you learn to fail and understand why things fail and analyze if you can fix it or move on to more promising projects. Now there are two cheap things you can get right now to establish an innovation culture:
Yellow Sticky Pads. You can buy yellow sticky pads at the dollar store and these are the most powerful tool in your arsenal to transfer your thoughts to something you can read. Take a 45 minute timer and lock yourself in a room and just write down everything in your head one thought at a time and post it on your wall. You will notice that you took a lot of worry and other burdens off your mind and transferred it to a physical writing that you can look at and better analyze. Everybody should do this exercise and teach their children this also.
Freemind Mind Mapping. This software is open source and free to download and it allow you to organize your thoughts that you place on your yellow sticky pad. What you do after you post up all your yellow sticky pads is you enter them in Freemind as a node and then you will begin to see categories as your organize each nodes. What you will notice sometimes is you have way more personal nodes than business-orientated nodes meaning you got a lot of heavy personal stuff on your mind and need to put more attention on your business-orientated stuff. We have written an article on using Freemind at the following url (http://dreamandhustle.com/2012/11/a...ptual-and-execution-mind-maps-using-freemind/).
This is how you get started in your innovation and transfer from the stage of thinking about it and talking about it to writing out and organizing your thoughts into a structured format that allow you to look at what you think or thought and scrutinize what you can control, what you cannot control and begin to know the difference.
When you complete your brainstorming and organization session in your Center of Excellence, you need to create two types of documents. You need to create a conceptual architecture of the solution and a workflow scenario document. We discussed this briefly in a previous article at (http://dreamandhustle.com/2013/08/introducing-brothas-and-sistas-to-the-art-of-creating-solutions/) but let’s go over the two main concepts.
Conceptual Document. A conceptual architecture document list all of the elements in your solution. The first thing you create is all of the nouns such as Laundromat, owner, member, affiliates and then you list the adjective interactions such as conduct transactions, verify membership, register new members between the nouns in your document. This allow you to see the big picture of your hustle and know who all the players are and how they interact in your hustle. Most of these objects should be diagram shapes with arrows pointing to each other that you take out and print on a wall. I actually have a glass I write on with glass marker that I can erase, take a picture of it with my smart phone, print it out on photo paper and use it as a physical reference. A photo of your hustle on a piece of glass written by you is a lot more impressive to you than written out on paper, trust me.
Workflow Document. A workflow document is the steps each noun takes and you document this out. For example, the Laundromat owner sees an advertisement or an email or a postal mail letter to learn about your service. That lets you automatically know you got to create ads, emails and postal mail flyers or even hire sales affiliates to drop off a business care and brochure. When you say register users and the Laundromat scans a membership card at the door to let you know you need a scanning device like an USB barcode scanner you find on eBay imported from China and you need software/web site to look up the member information. As you work on your workflow with the nouns, you will begin to learn to see what it takes to get things done.
All of this brainstorming and documentation is what you do in your Center of Excellence to turn your dream into a hustle. Now you thought about something and now you put in additional work to make things make sense to you and you determine if the solution is workable. Let’s say you cannot afford it for example our EDM station for a while was not feasible because of BMI/ASCAP fees so we tabled it. But recently I do have the funding now raised by the 3rd Strategic Institute to get started and continue and all I have to do is pull up the old files. So don’t throw away your hustles, take your notes and stash them away but most important, you now have a Center of Excellence room in your house that is a dream catcher designed to turn you and your family thoughts into reality.
Do Only What You Need For the Mission
Once you learn to transfer your thoughts into reality, then you accomplished the first leg of making a difference and establishing the path towards progress and betterment in your life. Once you have these documents, you need to go through each step and create a solution document that discuss the feature and how you going to create the solution to that feature. This solution document list the feature in the left column and on the right column, you write in and discuss how you going to create the solution. If you look at our documentation on SistaSphere at (http://dreamandhustle.com/2013/08/the-sista-sphere-experience-a-geofenced-virtual-event/) you will see the documentation on the feature section.
The purpose of creating a solution document is to allow you to focus on doing only what you need to do for the mission. For example, I know many of you want to learn ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server but in reality, do you need to know everything or just the parts to get the job done? Maybe all you need to learn is how to copy and paste scripts to make it work or try to make something happen as an experiment. This is what you do instead of going away trying to learn something comprehensive taking time away from the hustle.
For example, if your feature is scan a membership card for the Laundromat service model, then you need to focus on how to create the PVC cards or allow people to use their phone. That means you learn how to copy/paste code that generate barcodes or QR codes and you learn how to use a text-based USB scanner to write out the membership number and read it with an onChange event in Javascript or if you doing a windows interface, an onchange event on the textbox control. Here is a secret, when you go through your solution document and line up the features and solutions, you will begin to see patterns that you can reuse over and over. For example, my firm Swagg-Scientific can use the upload photo feature over and over again because we realize we have to keep coding this out.
Even our hood solutions are based on reusable patterns and practices – the grocery pickup model where people order groceries and order food is the same thing I created for the kiosk that we got in downtown Atlanta for Dream and Hustle as a pop-up experiment years ago to look into micro-retailing. Ain’t it funny that this blog done so much but black people running around acting like we ain’t done nothing? That’s called jealously and envy when the master hustlers like us are out there embarrassing the mediocre out there trying to run game and BS on black folks when it comes to business and empowerment. I still got the code for that hustle and can scale up to something like a grocery pickup model in the hood thanks to reusable patterns and practices written 3 years ago.
Now once you identify the solution and what it takes to make the feature happen, you have to make a build versus buy decision. Now in terms of building, you could do a search online for code and if you find some code and instructions on how to build it out, then do it. But when you see complex stuff like write out a QR code or read a QR code, you have to buy these components to not waste time building out what someone else already put in hundreds of hours to make real. Then when it comes to coding, can you outsource to someone else to do the job?
For example, I’m not good at grammar so I outsourced Hustle Space magazine editing and content creation out to the Philippines. The micro-mall concept I used my Asian partners in the 3rd Strategic Institute to work with commercial resources on the development of the next generation cube stores and awaiting their findings before I go back to the sistas. So don’t think I’m sitting here coding and writing everything out, I got a team and I outsource stuff as necessary and cats are mad because they found out I even outsourced black empowerment movement outside the country and these cats frustrated because they know I’m going to deliver results while they stuck on talking ish and doing nothing.
Surround Yourself with Progressive People
There are too many nonsense-talking people in the black community who are not worth a cent. You as an African-American has to accept the fact you grew up around these worthless losers and you also have to acknowledge you as an African-American consume worthless black media designed to play with your emotions.
The hidden agenda behind all of this negativity in our community is to discourage you as an African-American from having a productive life. That is why they want to keep your children in a classroom around losers who bully your black child for wanting to be smart and getting good grades. And when you grow up, then you see these same loser black people talking some crap about they a black Muslim or black Hebrew even though they been in prison for doing something dumb but now this same dummy supposed to know all about ancient Kemetic Egypt and stuff like that. Then you see the urban radio stations playing anti-women songs and promoting thug culture or relationship drama and casual sex among black people and all of this is design to discourage you as an African-American to pursue entrepreneurship and doing for self and falling in black love and creating a strong black family as the backbone of a strong black community.
The first thing you can do right here and right now is immediately unsubscribe from negative black media. Cut off your cable and use on-demand video services and save that money for your startup – you can easily create several $5/month GoDaddy hosting startup businesses with that money you spent on cable watching negative black media and use that money to empower yourself and create solutions in the black community. Remove all incoming negative propaganda coming your way.
Then the next thing and this is not hard but necessary – get rid of the black negative family members, friends and associates around you that perpetuate negativity and non-progress. Here is the thing and let me give you a bit of advice – when you dump negative people, you create room for positive people to be in your life. I dumped so many worthless people and lame significant others just to open the door for more better quality people to step into my life and I learn to start dropping dead weight. Yes, black folks try to come at you with that “family” bullcrap but the truth is, you are on a solo destination with a sole purpose designed by God and you are not obligated to people who crawled out the same birth canal as you. There is only one litmus test and that is if they support your dreams and your work towards your dreams or they do not support your dreams and do not support your work towards your dreams.
Learn to be around people who share the same goals as you. For example, because I’m focusing on global solutions and internet technology, I have more Asian and Indian friends and find myself dating more Asian and Indian sistas and some Latino sistas and found the lovemaking to be more passionate and intimate while I take pride in no longer dating Scandal TV show watching, Michael Baisden following ghetto garbage sistas. Even though I’m West Side of Chicago, I come to realize my path should be travelled with those who know the route and destination I’m taking and that makes the journey comfortable. Many black people want to travel the journey around their black friends who don’t give a personal care about the journey or destination and throwing shade and trying to throw you off the path and keep you distracted. That is how many black people get caught up instead of reaching their goals and it happened to me for a while early on in life.
Look for channels and areas where your goal is at and get in there and start mingling with people who working on the same goal, even if they are different from you in terms of ethnicity and beliefs. What you will discover is you are in a diverse culture where everybody is focused on the same solution as you and you get ideas you like and you contribute ideas other like and you are now in a positive progressive environment for success. This is where you need to be at and what you can do right now.
Overall, you can right now stop staying loyal to lame friends, family members and social cliques and stop consuming negative black media. You can do that right now. I do not have cable and as a result, I only consume positive media and media that I personally like for my own reason and do not watch “black shows” because I’m a black person. I associate only with those who share my personal and professional goals and I watched my life develop not only meaning and purpose but I found myself in an environment I can contribute to others and receive good information that is helpful to me and my goals.
Re-invest the time and money you spent on worthless people and negative black media into your personal dreams and being around people you like. That is the biggest step you can do in terms of making things happen is surround yourself in a positive and supportive and validating environment.
Be Efficient and Effective
Efficient is all about getting things done fast and knocking it out. Being fast does not mean being sloppy and generic like I see all the time among our people. Also being effective is about having objectives and goals that are met or exceeded and many times, we got brothas and sistas who make up crap about they doing something but it is not effective or deliver results. These brothas and sistas do not even design their hustle in a way to effectively learn from failure and just walk away emotionally from setbacks. You have to learn to be efficient and effective and that is through strong discipline and sharp decision-making.
Efficiency. Learn to build out patterns and practices you can re-use over and over again. I spoke about the membership component that you can use in all of your business models to get customers to sign up and you establish communication with them to drive them to your business. Learn how to discipline yourself on identifying patterns and practices worldwide and also learn good time management. Time management is important and I do this with this blog with only a limited time, I crank out all this information but I also have an efficient process to develop these articles and make sure I stay on point. Many of the points I discussed earlier like the process of transferring thoughts to yellow sticky pads to organizing in Freemind can be efficient when you have a business model idea come up out of the blue.
Effectiveness. Focus on defining the success outcomes and the means to get there. The end justify the means is actually a good rule to live by. If you want to be rich and a millionaire, but you going to a job where they pay you every two weeks, then you are not likely to reach your success in an effective manner. But if you learn how to work money through transactions and investing and gaming and work with those who effectively became millionaires, then you are being effective as you are working the right channels and path to that goal. Use metrics, charts and spreadsheets and goals and timelines to measure your effectiveness.
If you notice in the black community, you don’t see black leaders doing anything with any form of efficiency or effectiveness. For example, the lobby groups are using ALEC to draft up state level legislation in an efficient manner to send to local state GOP representatives to propose to the state senate to pass as law in multiple GOP states. Everything from gun control to corporate interests and illegal immigrants and they have been effective in passing these laws where the same law passed in Arizona been passed in Alabama at the same time. But you see what our black leaders do? Our worthless black leaders and liberal black media complain about ALEC instead of being just as efficient and effective as proposing legislation and passing legislation at the state level to benefit our people.
Learn to find patterns and practices to be efficient and learn how to measure your results to know your effectiveness and make adjustments to be more effective or be less effective. Knowing how good you are is important and you can do this right now in your life.
Moving Forward
In this article, we have showed African-Americans how to get started and get in motion of doing for self, their people and their future and their community. We highlighted how our current African-American culture is full of negativity and designed to stop us from making progress in our personal lives as well as stunt the progress of our people. We also acknowledge that our people has not been taught to set goals and pursue them from the starting line and the reason why is because no one want to see us succeed or help us as a people succeed.
The 3rd Strategic Institute and Dream and Hustle have demonstrated with our history of articles and links that we been about helping brothas and sistas do for self while Black Enterprise magazine still write about other people and want you to admire those other people instead of uplift yourself. For example here is another blog article we want to share as an additional read on creating projects and solutions (http://dreamandhustle.com/2013/10/outlining-our-approach-to-delivering-projects-and-solutions/) and we can keep putting it up in people faces that Dream and Hustle is the only ones about black empowerment on the real level while others just running their damn mouth talking about nothing.
The way you get started on your goals right now is to create the environment to innovate, associate yourself with like-minded peers who are on the same path as you and focus on being efficient and effective through discipline and measurements. All of this you can do right now with no excuses and I hope as a result, you brothas and sistas cut off your cable bill, get rid of your worthless Facebook and Instagram friends and fake cats around you and start reading solutions around the world being implemented and learn to adopt them and measure your success to adjust your effectiveness to be the person you are destined to be.
http://dreamandhustle.com/2014/07/the-african-american-guide-to-getting-started-right-now-at-innovating-and-creating-solutions/