Elephants at a Buddhist Temple in China
When opportunity knocks where will you be? I imagine I’ll be at my son’s soccer game, making sure my kid’s take baths, cooking, or I’ll be doing their laundry. How do we recognize when opportunity knocks? Entrepreneurs are supposed to create opportunities, right? But really, I think we see an opportunity and we try to take advantage of it. Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who can validate the idea are rare but those who can execute against those ideas to profitability are even rarer. It’s not easy to execute against most ideas or take advantage of most opportunities.
One day I want to write a novel. I want to write a fiction novel and I’d like to write a novel about business. But right now I’m working full time, making sure my kids take their baths, watching their soccer games, going to swim classes, making sure they do their homework, doing dishes, and folding laundry. It’s certainly all great material for that novel I’m going to write one day which may or may not ever see the light of day. I recall my grandfather wanted to write a book. I think he started writing something, but he was too busy doing great entrepreneurial things, helping kids, hanging out with grand kids, dealing with a sick wife (my grandmother), and helping other people so he never finished putting down in words the wisdom that was in his head. He died of leukemia at the age of 82. I bet if he could have blogged, he would have tried it out. He was a brilliant, yet flawed man like most of us humans are.
Opportunity knocked and I went to China. Opportunity knocked and I found a guy who I used to work with, Brian Hurdle, to redesign my blog who just redesigned my twitter page. While flying to China, I read Little Bee: A Novel
(about a refugee girl who escaped from Nigeria to England) and The Secret Life of Bees
(about a White girl who runs away from her abusive father to live with a bunch of Negro women in the southern US in the 1960s). The first was written by a man, the latter by a woman. The overarching theme of both books from my perspective was “men suck!” Interestingly, little boys did not suck and they too needed protection from men, who ironically were at one point in their lives little boys themselves. What happens between cute, sweet little boyhood and manhood? I don’t know, but I hope my boy stays sweet, thoughtful, and caring. Of course both fiction novels were written for the female audience, which is kind of distressing. But as I was reading them, I thought these are well written novels. Not as superbly written as others I’ve read but well written overall. So after doing some calculations, I figured I need to be a millionaire by the age of 45 to even think of having the time, resources, and health insurance to write such a novel. I’m not too far away from 45….
Any benefactors out there?
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: book review,
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Tags: benefator,
brian hurdle,
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opportunity knocks,
secret life of bees,
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It’s finally here! I have a new blog design and it’s really cool. It’s simple, it’s clean, it’s pretty, it’s fabulous and it was designed by Brian Hurdle, IT/network guy by day, wedding photographer extraordinaire by night/weekends. I’ve changed the subtitle from “babbling about business, babies, and parenthood” to “babbling about business, parenting, and music.” My kids aren’t babies anymore. I realized it’s been closer to 4 years since I started blogging (thanks to Connie Reece) and a blog redesign was way overdue! And my current entrepreneurial endeavor is music related.
The design incorporates musical notes, buildings, paisley type designs, and of course elephants! Elephants are my favorite animals, and I have a collection of various elephant figurines. My songwriting partner and I have been making progress on music creation, and we have 5 songs in various stages of completion. We even have a band name, a facebook page (if you are really curious to know the name, you’ll just have to click that link), and a YouTube channel.
We haven’t done much promotion of any of these because our songs aren’t ready to publish, but we may begin promoting at least the facebook page so we can get support from folks to help us make sure we do complete what we set out to do. This will be no easy task given both of our busy schedules and different worlds. He’s a professional musician and I’m a professional “wondering what to do with my life next while wreaking havoc in some small business” type of person.
Thanks Brian for exercising your creative muscles to come up with a design that makes me happy! Next he’ll be updating my twitter page (which I rarely use but may one day be worth something since I was a fairly early adopter) to match the blog design.
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: blogging,
entrepreneurship,
FYI,
marketing,
twitter |
Tags: band name,
blog design,
brian hurdle,
connie reece,
elephants,
facebook page,
twitter,
youtube channel |
2 Comments »
I hired someone recently to update (way overdue) my blog design. His name is Brian Hurdle (photographer extraordinaire), and I think it’s going to look very nice, clean, and professional…oh and cool. He’s going to add a musical element to it since my current entrepreneurial endeavor is songwriting related. He’s going to remove the clip art girl on the phone, change the font, put a nice graphic, move it to a 2 column theme, etc. I can’t wait for it to be ready as I’m hoping it will inspire a new wave and direction of blog writing for me.
Speaking of songwriting, I forwarded a quote from Jeffrey Fry’s quotables to my songwriting partner, Brett Jason Wintermeyer that said:
“A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” –Chinese Proverb
To me it meant that a bird sings because she is born to…because the bird cannot be herself without singing her song. Or maybe it’s boy birds that sing…well, it doesn’t matter. He replied by saying “Reminds me of someone I know who has a song to sing 🙂” I was not expecting that response as I had not connected that saying to one of the songs we are working on based on my lyrics. The title of the song is called “I Have A Song To Sing.” I don’t know why I didn’t connect the two, but the second line in the song after “I have a song to sing” is “But you won’t let me sing it.” That lyric is (c) copyright 2010-2011 Aruni S. Gunasegaram by the way!
I guess that’s why it’s important to have a songwriting partner or talented people in your life…to help you connect the dots…
Author: Aruni |
Filed under: entrepreneurship,
music,
singing |
Tags: blog update,
brett jason wintermeyer,
brian hurdle,
jeffrey fry,
songwriting |
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