I am a big fan of good ol’ fashioned human ingenuity.
Figuring out a way to get what you need to get done done, using the resources you already have.
Bootstrapping.
Most people are in the habit of figuring out why they can’t (start a business, reinvent themselves, go meet the love of their lives).
A bootstrapping mentality is the opposite.
I just read an article on Lifehacker today. It’s about how one could go about building their own, DIY adjustable desk.
My favorite suggestion:
“Take the idea of height-adjustable and flip it on its head: Buy a tall table and high chair, then sit or stand without adjusting anything but yourself.”
Another one of my favorite examples of bootstrapping is from Canadian indie rock band Hollerado. Excerpt from Seth Godin’s Poke The Box:
“For our first American tour, no-one wanted to book us. So, instead of booking shows, we drove as far away from our homes in Canada as we could get.
We would then show up at venues where a show was going on and tell them we were 2,000 miles away from home, had a gig booked down the street but it somehow fell through. “Would you guys mind if we played a short set here tonight?”
IT WORKED! We played countless shows this way.
Since we rarely got paid more than a few drinks and sometimes pizza, we needed to make gas money. We had a laptop with the tracks to our demo CD. We would go to Best Buy, get a CD burner and a couple spindles of blank CDs. We would burn a hundred demos in the parking lot and then return the CD burner to Best Buy.
We would then put the demos in Ziploc bags. (Hence the name of our first record…record in a bag.)
Once we had a stash of demos, we would drive to the nearest mall and set up shop in front of Hot Topic (probably the most shameless thing we have done for our band).
We would stand there for hours, with discmen and demos, asking anyone who would stop to take a listen if they wanted to buy a demo in a bag. We could sell the discs for 5 bucks and still make $4.50 to put towards gas.”
Stories like that just make you smile, don’t they?
Start thinking about how YOU could start doing that thing you tell yourself you can’t do yet.
That’s how you’re going to get it done. Start now.
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