So many people spend their entire life thinking that they know whats right, and that others should change their ways.  I was reading this interesting article from the Wall Street Journal today that was talking about an airline pilot who instead of trying to change the way the company he worked for operated, he just changed the way he operated.  Low-and-behold, the company noticed and now backs his crazy antics…  Read about it here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118826634834410559.html?mod=hpp_us_pageone

I am a major supporter for the One Laptop Per Child project (http://www.laptop.org) is doing. If you haven’t already heard about it, they are developing a very inexpensive laptop that can be used in developing countries to try and improve the learning experience of students that have a difficult life to begin with. But, stumbling upon the following article reminds me that when developing your product, you need to take careful consideration into what the product could potentially be used for.

http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL19821905.html

I have to link to this site… It would just be wrong not to. http://www.womma.org/

So my problem right now is that I have a tough time focusing on problems.  In other words, my brain is so tightly focused on finding solutions to problems that well, I never really focus my energy on finding out exactly what the problem is and the extent of the problem is that I am trying to solve.

I just figured out that I have this problem of not knowing my problem while working on my business plan.  As I may have mentioned earlier, I am bulleting the sections that I need to write for the plan before I hunker down and actually begin writing the sections in full detail.  Well, looking back at my bullets, I have about 2 pages worth of bullets under the “Solution” section but only a few simple bullets for the “Problem” section.  This inspired me to take action on figuring out exactly what the problem is that I am solving with my new business.   Here are the methods that I am going to try and utilize:

• Research on trade association and specific web forums, looking for clues that indicate an organization is facing the problem I seek to solve
• Meeting individuals in the industry to discuss the issues they have.
•  Find competitors that are supposedly trying to solve the same problem that we are solving, and figure out their description of the issue (marketing materials, etc..)

If you have any other ways that I might be able to find ways to describing the problem organizations face that I seek to solve, then please leave a comment and I will add them to my grand-old-list…