Come on, give me the chills

Thoughts about changing, life, and whatever comes to mind.

Category: Blog

  • never forget the family

    I was taking a look at some old photos today and I realized I’m missing photos of my family.

    many of them.

    Over time your family may change, or may not.
    But if inside your heart it stays the same and you find photos missing, then it’s time to change something, to regain that time together and build some new memory together.

  • 7 questions to discover and understand your niche

    It happened some weeks ago when I was talking to my fiancè and she wasn’t sure about her skills in finding a niche.

    “How do I find where to sell a product to them?” she told me.
    Then I decided to do a small test with her, to see if this was something a total newbie in any area could do.

    We were talking (as an example) about a new kind of wine (or something related to it), and we wanted to discover where the possible clients were.

    I asked these questions and we got a LOT of examples

    1. Is your product high-priced or low priced?
      useful to targeting group of people and their interest
    2. Your ideal client, what’s his/her name, where does he live, what he wears usually and what does he do for a living?
      we discussed a random guy named John who is a bit of a rich man, has eyeglasses and so on.
      The point here is to be very specific about our guy or our girl.
    3. Where you can usually find wines?
      this is where the interesting thing start. We are looking for places.
      You should stop 2 or 3 answers later the “I can’t find any more of that” affirmation 
    4. What are the things (selleable, like objects) related to wines?
      – 4bis: where you can find them?
      here we are tackling side-related places that still have a context that’s relevant to wines. The first questions helps you understand what other topics exists and then you search out for places.
      Move on, as usual, 2 or 3 answers later the “I can’t find any more”
    5. Where do people like John who like wines hang out in real life?
      Now we’re moving onto discovery places related in other ways to the wines.
    6. where do John hangout in the internet?
      Here we think about the places online we might find John and his network of wine related friends
    7. What kind of movies/book our dear John likes?
      Now we’re getting somewhere different, our goal is to find a topic that’s related to wine to include wine as part of the offering.
      Our John was a fan of Lars Von Trier, a famous film director.
      We imagined how nice would it be to create an event that included rare movies and good wine as a possible idea.

    If you have any product, you can dive into this 7 questions to find more about your users.
    The key elements are

    1. You are allowed to ran out of ideas only  3 ideas after your first “I can’t find any more…” (this will ensure that you are trying hard)
    2. To think about new questions, try to be as much unrelated and rambling as possible.
      If you stick between the frame you can’t get out of it, and our point is to find new things. So wherever you are truly stuck, use a question that seem foolish.

  • getting to a conclusion

    I wonder if everyone has as many doubts as me when I get to any kind of conclusion.

    This is mostly derived from the fact that once you cristallize your tought into something that has a meaning, you give to it an enormous power, mostly because you want so deeply to be right that you would prefer dying than be proved wrong.

    So everytime I get to a conclusion I’m hesitant, a bit fearful because I don’t know how much of what I thought was correct.
    I investigate further, to understand, I doubt myself, that’s the only way you could find if you were correct or not.

    We can assume that many information we have is not correct.
    Memory is faulted by default, therefore we don’t really have a solid ground there.

    Also it’s common to refer to anecdotal information as if it were true, therefore improving a single thought might require some time before it is well established.

    One thing that helped me are questions.
    If you continue doing questions to dig deep you’ll eventually undestand if the information presented is solid or not.

    To learn, and adapt.

  • if you have a cold, what will you do?

    If you encounter a roadblock what will you do?
    Will you stop or move forward?

    Today, since I feel a bit sick, I wondered what are the choices we see when we encounter a roadblock, like a cold, for example.
    The first 2 ones are easy: Stop, or ignore it.

    But are these the only ones? Obviously not.
    There are infinite possibilities you might one to consider, like going at a slow pace, taking it easy, stop to enjoy life, take your time, study the issue, learn how to solve it.

    These are just a few example of the things you can do while you find a roadblock.
    Life is never white or black, and so are life problems.
    You can always find a new way to handle it, to learn from it and so on.

  • unprecedented fear

    When you’re stuck in between the possibility to make a big change, you will experience fear.

    Fear of failure, of not being able to produce results, fear to not accomplish the result.

    Pure simple striking fear.

    But what’s the alternative?
    The alternative might be to not live the way you want, to accept something that will rob your time and won’t give that time back.

    In his book “On the brevity of life”, Seneca teaches us why it’s important to live our days to the fullest, so why are we waiting?

    We are waiting because we fear, because we are created like this.
    It’s a way to protect our species, but not a way to save ourselves and live a fullfilled life.