“The undisciplined mind is a constant assembly line that
painstakingly produces thousands of useless gadgets every hour, and only rarely
puts together something of value.”
Gavin deBecker, author of Just 2 Seconds
During my walk in the woods at Timucuan Preserve one morning, I had a useless gadget running through my mind. I was fantasizing about a conversation I’d like to have with a person who I may never see again. In the unlikely event that she and I do meet someday, I doubt that the conversation would go as I envisioned it. Running through that scenario was a useless gadget.
It would be so nice to simply tell my mind, “Shut up. Shut
up. Shut, the hell, up.”
I’ve tried that in the past, but my mind has replied, “I
never shut up. It’s simply not what I do. You really ought to know that by now.
I think, and I think, and I think. I never stop thinking. Even when you’re asleep,
I’m thinking. It’s so nice to be in the office when nobody else is here! I can
get so much done.”
So, there’s no way to get my mind to simply stop running a useless
gadget. The mind needs something else to run on. That morning in the woods, I
said to myself, “I would prefer not to be running this useless gadget. I would
prefer a useful gadget, preferably a business idea where I could use my skills
to serve a particular market and to do so in a way that would produce
substantial and ongoing revenues.”
I’ve had that in my programming since I finished the latest
eBook, The Smiling Stoic: How Fortune Favors the Funny. This morning, when I tried to shift away from the
useless gadget to something more useful, it happened. I got the best business
idea I’ve had in a long time. A blog targeted to a very defined and growing
group of people and one that advertisers would love to have access to.
