skills and competencies have my educational background, job exposure and training courses given me?
4.What do I easily learn and what gives me a hard time learning?
5.What kind of a person am I? Do I like working or dealing with people or do I prefer being alone? Am I the big thinker type or do I prefer working on the nitty gritty details? Do I usually follow a logical, rational way of arriving at decisions or do I go put more emphasis on the people or relationship aspects of the decision? Do I tend to explore many possibilities before I decide or do I tend to focus on the few things I can decide and make a judgment on?
6.What are my innate intelligences? Am I good at numbers and logic? Do I have good language skills? How are my musical-rhythmic abilities? Do I function well in physical pursuits like sports, hiking and climbing? How are my visual and spatial, navigational and directional aptitudes? Do I possess interpersonal skills? How about intrapersonal skills? Do I have a fondness for the natural environment?
7.What things make me happy and feel alive? What energizes me? What personal pursuits drive me to work very hard?
Opportunities from the Unexpected
Unexpected occurrences in both the external and internal environment of the enterprise indicate that significant changes are happening and opportunities are sprouting. This should be cause for joy or alarm depending on one’s analysis of the unexpected occurrence.
When a new craze or sensation hits the marketplace by storm, that means that somebody has uncovered a latent market demand that no one has filled before. The pertinent question to ask is why the occurrence has happened and what motivated the market to embrace it. In contrast, a once favored product may suddenly be losing market share. Again, ask why and what are the shifting preferences of customers that have forsaken the once favored product.
Inside an enterprise, the entrepreneur may experience unexpected successes or failures. A variant of a product, a promo gimmick, a consigned item, or an allied service may suddenly be experiencing success. Behind this unexpected success is a secret that needs to be unlocked. Why was it not expected? What is driving the success? What attributes, features, characteristics or chance events are responsible for the success? Unexpected failures tell the opposite story. Something has gone wrong in the assumptions of the entrepreneur? What were those erroneous assumptions? How can the failures be turned around to achieve success?
Opportunities from the Future
Megatrending allows the entrepreneur to take a leap of faith into the future in order to exploit opportunities today. A systematic way of megatrending is to scan newspapers, books and journals for new rhetoric that seems to be uttered more and more often. Another way is to watch “futuristic” shows or read magazines on new technologies and innovations that are being experimented on. Still another way is to observe the behavior of teenagers because they will be the major customer group five to ten years into the future.
Blue-skying, daydreaming and imagineering are creative methods of conjuring opportunities. The entrepreneur should put himself or herself in some future time period and imagine the way people live, behave and function in that futuristic world. Some weird ideas may pop out. No matter how absurd the idea is, try to extract a “grain of truth” from it. There is always a rational strain even in the most illogical idea because all ideas are founded on the totality of our real-life experiences and our highly functional environment. Surely, something cannot come out from purely nothing.
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