Avoiding "Creative Myopia" 
from working in a bubble.

By Forrest Lee Horn

As anyone who has invested the time necessary to get a home-based business up and running knows, it’s easy to become an isolated. Especially if you’re a one-person operation primarily on the Internet, your face-to-face interaction with anyone besides family becomes increasingly rare.

There are a number of unpleasant consequences to allowing your “face time” to fade away, not all of them obvious:

1. Your world tends to contract to the dimensions of your office. In fact, the more successful your business is, the more your personal world contracts.

2. Your circle of friends and acquaintances becomes identical with your circle of business associates,

3. Lack of contact with those outside your business tends to give you what I call "creativity myopia:” all your ideas become basically a rehash of ideas within your business community.

There are others, but most of them have one thing in common: lack of outside contact and stimulation.

This problem, like others facing any business, must be managed. Time management is important here, as is viewing solutions to relationship problems as investments in your business.

Here are a few solutions others have utilized to great effect:

1. Join organizations, which have absolutely nothing to do with your business. If you offer a product for sale, join a bicycle club. If you provide a service, join a garden club. Try to find something in which you have a previously un-pursued interest.

2. Schedule a minimum amount of time to spend each week making new friends and acquaintances outside your usual business relationships. If you don’t actually schedule this time and mark it in your calendar, the tendency is to allow business-related activities to quickly overwhelm it.

3. Join a book club, actually read the books, then discuss them with other members. You would be surprised at how many business ideas you can generate from discussions totally unrelated to what your business is all about. A client of mine who marketed t-shirts with slogans printed on them discovered how to generate inspiration for new slogans by attending political rallies and rock concerts!

4. Don’t forget that you need exercise to be at your physical and mental peak. Most doctors and health consultants recommend at least 20 minutes of strenuous exercise every other day for maximum alertness and mental acuity.

Remember that the best investment you can make in your own business is to take care of yourself and the creativity you used to start your business in the first place. If you devote scheduled time to keeping your own physical and mental alertness high, your business will directly benefit.

Forrest Lee Horn, CPT, INF, USA
(Retired/Disabled ), is a Senior Associate at http://ParadigmAssociates.org

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