Survival Skills in the Business World

For entrepreneurs, creativity is not simply a luxury,  it’s an essential survival skill. Common entrepreneurial pitfalls include:

• Trying to do everything on your own
• Difficulty developing strategies or deciding where to focus your energy
• Neglecting to invest in yourself
• Falling in love with a venture and pursuing it without proper development

The key to avoiding these traps is understanding how you approach a challenge. The latest creativity research finds we all use our creativity in different ways, but follow a common problem-solving process. Once you understand the creative process, you can intentionally apply it, boosting your creativity and efficiency while strengthening your initiatives. It boils down to these four stages:

• Clarify the situation: We explore the issue at hand, find all relevant data that will help us make sense of it and figure out the most effective path to take to resolve it.
• Generate ideas: We come up with and select the best new ideas for making a change that best addresses the situation.
• Develop solutions: We tinker with those ideas until they are perfect, then break and rebuild them, and then polish them until they shine.
• Implement the solution: We put ideas into action by: gaining acceptance of the solution, helping people manage change and adapting solutions as needed.
• Find more information at www.entrepreneur.com

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