Today’s Bloganuary prompt is one of those that you can’t think too hard about, just go with whatever pops into your mind first. Which for me was nacho cheese Doritos. I could eat those every day.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I have any on hand, and I’ve made it a point to avoid buying them when I go grocery shopping. I could probably demolish an entire family size bag in one sitting of steady snacking for an hour, which is most definitely not healthy for a multitude of reasons.
I’ve also gotten good at avoiding them at my brother’s house. Maybe a handful of chips over the course of an entire visit (which ranges from four to eight hours). It also helps that usually, when I do discover an open bag over there, the bag is almost entirely demolished already by my nieces and nephews.
Great, now I really want some, and it’s a grocery day. Might have to get one of those big boxes of assorted snack size bags of chips, and I do need snacks for work. Guess I know what I’m adding to my grocery list!
Thinking back over the last 20 years or so, I’m trying to recall all the things that have come and gone for business ideas and products that seemed wild and unthinkable prior to their arrival. Things that were innovative.
Walkman/Discman into MP3 players, where physical media transformed into a digital and subsequently into streaming subscription services. Brick phones into smaller form factors and eventually into the touchscreen designs. Home console and portable video game advancements into the digital library of Steam and other services.
Granted, those are major technological advancements in the realm of consumer entertainment. There’s also the advancement of food services and transportation. Depending on where you lived a car was a necessity of life. Now you can pull up your phone and hit some on-screen buttons to summon a vehicle through apps like Uber and Lyft, or rent an electric scooter. Food delivery used to be limited to specific things like pizza. Now if a restaurant is set up for it you can use apps to order just about anything and have it be delivered to you at home or work.
So, bearing those kinds of things in mind, what can you even come up with these days that could be a feasible (if crazy) business idea?
Not that I want to get too serious and be realistic, I just want to think of something that makes sense. Not like combining skydiving with laser tag, because as cool as that sounds it just doesn’t sound like it would work the way we imagine. So, why not the next best thing?
Crazy business idea: combine snowboarding and paintball! You could have parallel courses down a variety of slopes, each offering different cover environments for different skill/experience levels. One game style could just be a race down to the bottom with as many survivors as possible. Another could be a race to the bottom while also leaving an object in a safe spot halfway down, tag in a teammate or group at the bottom that climbs up with their boards to that certain safe point to retrieve the object to bring back to the bottom. All while trying to hit the opposing team to knock them out of the game. Of course, it wouldn’t be normal paintball paint because that would freeze, but maybe a dry paint powder style paintball. Operations would be similar to regular paintball courses, offering rental gear and scheduling. Unfortunately, this would likely have a very small subset of interest for people who like both snowboarding and paintball, so a very limited number of people would be interested, meaning business wouldn’t be great.
Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?
This is a tough one to answer! I literally had to sit and stare at a wall trying to think back through my childhood and early teens to find something that I felt great attachment for, and I don’t think I had anything special like that that was solely mine.
Growing up I shared a room with my younger brother. We had a bunk bed, shared most toys and the television (when our parents finally let us have one) to play games or watch movies. We definitely had our own things based on individual interests, but they were still shared to some degree.
Except for the “LEGO Bin” that we shared.
We had a clear plastic tote with a white plastic lid, not small but definitely not large, and whenever we got new LEGO sets that was ultimately where they would end up. We would put the sets together by the instructions, play with them as designed for a bit, and then tear them apart to rebuild and customize. My brother and I shared that for a very long time.
Eventually, in about late middle school or early high school, I took over my older brother’s bedroom (which was right next to ours) when he moved out. I had a few things of my own that came with me and slowly replaced what I had left in my old room with my younger brother. Despite that, we still shared some things even if they had essentially become his by virtue of my moving rooms. The LEGO Bin being one of those things we continued to share.
Whenever we would hang out and play video games in my younger brother’s room, if it was a single player game, we would typically have the LEGO Bin out and be messing around with it while we took turns watching each other play.
Amazingly enough, roughly 18 years later, my brother still has our LEGO Bin. It survived the move from Colorado to South Dakota when we were in high school, and it has further survived since my brother got married and started his family. Whether or not it’s still the same plastic tote I don’t recall, and I don’t think it matters anymore because we’ve collected more and more sets to the point that it couldn’t hold them all anyway, but it’s still there and the nieces and nephews get to play with them now.
Some days I miss having all those LEGOs to play with, to flex the creative side of my mind and just snap together pieces to make something random. I would totally just buy my own sets at this point in my life, but my hobbies take up the bulk of my “fun money” and I wouldn’t have enough space to store everything I want, so for now I’m just going to have to be content with reminiscing. Maybe someday, though.
Have you ever gone to some kind of working professionals seminar? Project Management, Entrepreneurship, TEDx, any seminars that are similarly along those lines? If you have, then you probably had someone speak about mission, vision, and goals.
Depending on where you work you probably had some kind of orientation session that included those same kinds of topics. What is the company’s mission?
Those seminars, when they do talk about mission, try to get people thinking about how you as an individual should see and act out the mission of whatever your chosen career path is or for whatever company you are working for. It’s always business/work focused. The same obviously applies to new employee orientation sessions.
So, when I see a prompt like today’s, I’m going to take the “your” part more seriously as an individual OUTSIDE of work, because when I’m not on the clock I do not represent the company that signs my paychecks. Unfortunately, in today’s hyper connected social media landscape, people will throw you under the bus if you act like a jackass (at a minimum) and report you to your employer which likely ends with you getting fired. It is important I preface this because, again, I as an individual outside of work do not represent my company, however, my personal values and “mission” line up fairly closely with those of my company. I do my best to be a good person, so I have little to be concerned with in that regard.
With all of that out of the way, I can talk about MY mission. Which, honestly, I’ve never given too much thought! I just try to be a good person, helping my friends, family, and even strangers when they need it, passing along good vibes and just rolling through life. I’ve never stopped and thought to myself “Yes, this is my purpose in life. My mission. My calling.”
Reading today’s prompt actually did that, and I’m struggling to properly define my mission. It’s all well and good to say “My mission is to be a good person, yada yada yada.” But that doesn’t really count as a mission. I’m not actively seeking out things and working through life to consistently accomplish things for any sort of personal mission.
I think that needs to change.
What SHOULD my mission be? If I enjoy writing and hope to someday get published, then maybe I could say my mission is to write stories that other people will appreciate and enjoy. That they can relate to a character sometimes and be able to do some measure of introspection and help themselves become a better, happier person. My mission could be to write stories that have a positive impact on the lives of readers and the people they interact with every day.
Perhaps, through my blog, I can share my thoughts and make a positive impact in that space as well.
Sounds like I have a long road ahead of me, and I appreciate every encouraging comment I’ve received so far when talking about these kinds of goals, so maybe, just MAYBE, I’m on the right track. Just need to keep up the effort towards this “mission”.
What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?
The idea behind this question is something I’ve given thought to several times over the last 15-20 years. When someone thinks about “living a very long life” I often wonder how my idea differs.
One of the first times I gave any thought to the idea I didn’t fully comprehend the ramifications. I was much younger and fairly naive. I thought it would be awesome if I could be immortal and live forever, then I would be able to see and do so many cool things.
As I got older, “forever” changed to maybe a thousand years or so. Then it became a few hundred.
I’ve watched a lot of shows and movies with vampires and immortality or the like, and it didn’t dawn on me until much more recently that living exceedingly long lives could drastically change the development of humanity. What really influenced my change in mind was much more personal.
I forget where I heard it or read it, but someone talks about one of the saddest things of immortality is watching your loved ones grow old and eventually die. Partners and friends. Kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, and so on for the rest of forever. You would be so disconnected from everything. Now granted you could find the strength to move on, find a new partner and start another family lineage, but you would just be repeating the same thing each time. At some point there would likely be a mental breakdown.
This is why I started to cut back on the length of time I thought I would be comfortable with living. A few hundred years to see where the world goes, and to watch over the next few generations of my family. I want to see where technology ends up taking us, and if humanity finds a way to flourish beyond what we are today. A living connection to the past to offer some guidance and wisdom, so that I might still contribute to that hope of flourishing.
But really, I just want to see flying cars and Full-dive VRMMO technology like Sword Art Online. Maybe I could leave myself as a ghost in the machine…
Anyways, I don’t want to live forever but I think I could handle the mental and emotional strain of a few hundred years of extra life.
Where do I even start? There are so many things I could do differently. I could be doing things differently in good AND bad ways.
I could be doing a better job of prioritizing my health. Getting more steps in each day (hard to do freely in the winter) would be a start. Getting back to the gym more frequently, which I have slowly been reorganizing my time and I have gotten my gym bag ready, so I’m actually on the right track there. I could be eating better, making my meals instead of eating out or ordering delivery. I could be drinking more water every day, but plain water doesn’t have caffeine so I’ll just have to figure out an okay balance.
Another thing I could be doing differently is better focusing on my other non-health related goals. Better consistency at sitting down and writing outside of my blog posts. This means cutting time away from my gaming hobbies, but I think I’ll be okay with doing that since I’ve slowly come to terms with the fact that I just have too many to play. Same with reading books, actually.
I’m sure that I could be doing things differently to be a better friend. Reaching out more often, asking how things are going, trying to socialize more (but darn my naturally introverted personality, oh well). Similarly, I could be going out more and meeting new people. Kind of hard to find romance when you don’t go anywhere. Still, maybe someday. Getting to the gym could be the first step.
So many other things that could be different. I mentioned that I could be doing things differently in a bad way. Consider the fact that I used to smoke. I could go back to doing that, but I won’t. I could be drinking alcohol everyday, but I don’t because I just don’t find the appeal and can’t justify the expense. Which is silly considering the money wasted on games I’m not playing and overly priced fast food. Still, it could definitely be worse.
Well, these are just a few things that come to mind, which probably shows where my priorities are currently. Wish me luck!
With all of the prompts I’ve been answering the last few months, I can definitely say I had not been expecting this one. Not that it’s a wildly different or shocking prompt, comparatively, but just not something I was completely expecting at this point with the general trend of all the previous prompts.
Driving around my city, going to work, maybe going shopping or just getting something to eat, I’ve seen a wide variety of billboards. Some of them are the old style where it is one massive picture and it could be up there for months or even years, but I’ve seen more and more of the digital ones being put up or replacing the old ones. This is a big deal to me when thinking about today’s prompt because duration could play a part in what I would like to have plastered on a massive wall of pure advertisement for the world to see. Since the question is about a freeway billboard, I imagine the duration would be limited to months unless I had a special contract, so I’ll operate under that pretense. Just a couple months of ad space hanging where tens of thousands of people can see it regularly. But what to put on it?
So many choices! I could make it serious, or funny. I could try to just spread a good message to brighten someone’s day, or call out something important that I think the world should be know. Or I could just make it a shameless plug for my content, although that carries some risks. I could plug my Twitch channel (that I rarely use anymore but might return to someday), but then I have to be cautious of people recognizing my face in public or at work. HR might have a field day. The same could be said for if I were to get a novel published and I wanted to use billboard space as part of an ad campaign. I’d have to be ready for the potential consequences. Maybe I should just opt for something funny or inspiring. Oh! I had an idea. Something to really mess with people.
What if my billboard was one of those “Find X differences” images that I used to see on social media, but instead of putting up two nearly identical images with minor changes they’re just both the same image? I wonder how many people would get pissed off.
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
I’ve talked about this topic here on the blog a couple of different times in different ways over the last few months, and I don’t feel like rehashing the same information. So instead, I’ll keep today brief and invite you to read one of those previous posts
In particular, should you feel inclined to, please read my post Past Forward where I answer a prompt regarding what historical events I find fascinating. It’s a short read, I promise, but maybe it’ll help you understand even a little bit more of my perspective on things.
For those who would prefer I provide SOMETHING of substance in this post that isn’t a totally obvious plug for my own blog (I have to try, though), I’ll give the short answer.
The future is always my primary concern because time only goes one way. That doesn’t mean I completely ignore the past, because that’s where we came from and it can help inform us of many things that could still happen again in the future. I won’t spend a lot of time thinking about the past without some consideration of what the future will look like because I don’t like the feeling of dwelling there and possibly being miserable. I don’t want to get stuck there, never moving on or getting over things, constantly obsessing over “what if” scenarios. Being stuck in the past means we don’t improve ourselves because we often fail, or straight up refuse, to acknowledge our existence in the present or be concerned with how things will look tomorrow.
The future is always coming, whether we like it or not, and it’s better to face it and not be caught off guard by wallowing in the past.
I woke up early today, much earlier than I’m accustomed to, and I thought I would check today’s prompt before I fell back asleep. I had what I thought was a great idea to start my answer but I didn’t want to get started writing it out because it would only further wake up my brain. Now, my first thought is there are so many ways I could pick this question apart. Needs versus wants? Material or immaterial? Monetary? Time? Space? Flexibility?
I had to stop myself before I did the mental gymnastics down a rabbit hole on the philosophy of gift giving. When I spun up my thoughts again I told myself to consider what it is I’m missing in my life, what I feel I need most, and how that could be provided to me.
So, what COULD be the greatest gift someone could give to me? If I start by looking at the goals I’ve set for myself, what am I missing to achieve them? What have been my biggest struggles or challenges towards them? The more I looked and analyzed I came up with the same problems and similar solutions. To a certain extent I, myself, am my own problem. My struggles and challenges towards achieving my goals stem from my own inability to manage myself in various ways.
Sometimes the problem is my drive for success. I WANT to succeed, to achieve everything I set out as a goal for myself. I’ll start out strong and really get going but then the drive runs out or I get busy with other things that I (probably) could have just not engaged with in the first place. Sometimes that leaves me questioning if I ever really wanted to achieve that goal in the first place, then later on I’m reminded why I set it as a goal in the first place.
Other times the problem is caused by my own self-doubt. There could be no end to the drive or passion I want to put into something I really enjoy, but I hold myself back for some reason. I consume media left, right, and center all day every day and generate idea after idea. Then, when I feel like I’m on the cusp of DOING something with that drive or passion, a little voice in the back of my head says something along the lines of “don’t bother, they won’t like it anyway.”
Jumping off of the problems to the solutions leads to what I believe is my answer for today’s prompt. What I believe to be the greatest gift someone could give to me.
Support and companionship.
To be clear, I have amazing friends who are positive and supportive of my goals and dreams, but for me there is only so much it can do to bolster me when they live so far away and are busy living their own lives and chasing their own dreams. I can’t ask them to give me what I’m about to describe next.
The greatest gift would be that kind of person who not only can give me that push I might need, but can also pull when needed. To give of themself to walk through life alongside me, providing encouraging pushes and reassuring pulls to keep me moving towards the things I enjoy, and that I can reciprocate back to them the same encouragement and reassurance when they need me. To be each other’s greatest gift.
Sometimes things in life don’t go the way we expected. Certainly for myself, I didn’t expect to be blogging.
I love reading science fiction and fantasy, and creating my own worlds and stories. I enjoy writing to some degree, I say knowing that probably sounds weird WHILE blogging and talking about wanting to finish a novel (that hopefully gets published someday), but my education doesn’t exactly match up to what I’m saying. Sit down, strap in, and I’ll explain.
I failed my Freshman English class.
Not college Freshman English. High school Freshman English.
Wait, what?
Surprise! Yes, I failed my high school Freshman English class. Not because I was bad at English, but because I was just overall a bad student. Always have been, and probably always will be when it comes to regimented and structured education. Anyways, if this prompt is asking about college education why am I bringing up high school? Because this led to me taking an online class to try and make up the grade before I would be allowed to graduate high school, and oddly enough it was provided through BYU. So, closing in on 20 years ago, I was TECHNICALLY a college student, if you want to count it this way. Guess what happened next…
I didn’t finish that course!
So, how did I get out of it and why was I allowed to graduate at all and subsequently move on to ACTUAL college education? Well, this all happened right around the time of my Dad’s tenuous job situation that ultimately led to my family moving from the suburbs of Colorado to small town country living South Dakota. I finished my Junior year of high school taking roughly the same classes I had been in before the move, and I discovered that the curriculum out here was behind what I was learning in Colorado, so I was ahead of my classmates. Senior year of high school I had gotten out of gym/P.E. classes which left me open to take the last Freshman English credit I needed to graduate. I lucked out there, but I do feel a little bad that my Dad had to spend money on that online remedial class I never finished.
So, there’s part one, I was a BYU student for a couple months. Technically.
My ACTUAL college education was through CTU (Colorado Technical University) which weirdly had a campus out here in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
I was still a mediocre student at best. I tried in the beginning and then found ways to coast through some classes (no, I didn’t cheat or plagiarize anything) and other classes I did end up failing. A couple of them weren’t entirely my fault, though. Anyways, I did okay at my writing assignments for actual college level courses, and did even better when it came to business documentation. I ended up switching degrees at one point and landed more courses that were business focused, but I was still in an IT-related degree track so I was stuck in the IT Capstone course. I ended up capitalizing on my writing ability for my IT Capstone final, which was a group project, because my peers were more focused on IT/programming degrees and they hated writing out business documentation.
I’m not sure about anyone else, but for me writing this post and going down memory lane was more of a mild memory rollercoaster. I’m sure I could share more as well but this post would probably get way too long for some people’s patience. Anyways, here we are, with me going from “bad student failing English” to “still a bad student but college writing was fine” and finally “I write more documentation for a living, and want to write fantasy novels.”
The Dragon's Grove 