Universal books -- Claim The Earth -- Chapter 4: Under the Sun

Another woman business coach preached patience in business marketing. "A hunter went to Africa to hunt for the elephants. he waited for three days and did not see an elephant, so he went back home and told his folks, there was no elephant in Africa. Another hunter went to Africa and waited for elephants for a few weeks and didn't see any real elephants except he saw some elephant tracks. He went home and told his folks that elephants in Africa were very rare and hard to find. The third hunter went to Africa and he camped there. He waited and waited for months, learned the local languages and learned the local customs and stayed there waited and waited. First season changed. Along with the change of seasons and the environment changed. Without noticing it, the hunter himself changed.  Then herds of wild animals migrated into the area, and finally herds of elephants showed up. . . " Audiences reacted mildly, some drowsy, some excited.

Another business coach announced to the crowd in another coaching session to the eager would-be successful entrepreneurs: "In order to succeed in business, you really should not have a plan, because the environment changes, you should change, but if you have a set plan, then it will be hard for you to change. This situation is a sort of like when you are looking for a place that you want to go, not a place someone tell you to go, you need to have a compass not a map. . . How many times have we told our kids that 'you need to be this', 'you need to be that' when they grow up? How many times did they turned out to be different?" Audiences reacted puzzled. "Are you concerned about whether your kids were going to grow up to be a doctor, a lawyer, or is it more important that you are only concerned about whether your kids will grow up to be OK and trouble free?" Some in audiences nodded with a sigh of relief.

To David, everything that has been ever said to him by those business coaches sounded reasonable, but he could argue on the other hand, that everything said to him was merely hollow remarks and was not helping his business in any practical way. Those seminars did not help him develop any real action plans, and every one of those coaches in the end of his or her seminar always offered to help other business owners to develop customized action plans for beginner business owners at a moderate fee. David felt that he understood the words "action plans" well enough to realize the emphasis was on the "action" part. Many adages, ideas and concepts are understood by many, but sluggishly acted upon. But the irony of it all was, ideas such as "patience", "agility" or "flexibility" wouldn't help very much in everyday business if a poor guy was struggling for survival.

In his previous life, he had heard plenty from school professors or fortune tellers when they spoke. Good fortune tellers usually had the ability to answer inquiries with the right amount of to-the-point ambiguities no matter what the questions were posted. Is it true that successful people only needed to be good fortune tellers? The key to providing perfect answers is to provide answers that can be correct in multiple context simultaneously, a sort of like a person being present in multiple places at the same time.

David couldn't forget the funniest business networking event he attended with a full house of people chatting with each other for nicely monitored and segmented 3 minute intervals. Then upon the end of every 3 minutes there would be the sound of a loud drum beat. Then every attendee of the networking event would switch to another conversation partner sitting next to the one he or she had just conversed with. Then another 3 minute conversation will take place.  The "power networking" process continued on so business people can get to know maximum number of new business contacts in the shortest amount of time. David felt at the time, that it was a good idea for his mechanical-minded has always strived for mechanical efficiency all his life.  A few months later, he saw a movie called "Hitch", in which the identical method was used for men and women to sample a large amount of blind dates and hitch onto one another. It got him thinking, if the 3 minutes and then switching partner exercise was a mockery to dating and serious personal relationships, maybe it was a mockery to building serious business relationship too.

Certain lectures only worked for the right audiences and not for many others.  One entrepreneur talked about majority of the people in this world could have one or two out of the three premises for success: "skill", "passion" and "value", but very rarely do entrepreneurs have all three. Otherwise, they would be too many successful business people in this world. For instance, a starving artist would have "skill" and "passion", but lack of abilities to convert those assets into "value" for individuals and the society and that was why they were still starving. David felt that was why he was starving too, but this coach did not help him get his business to take off either.

He continued to fool around in between looking for new business contracts and attending networking events. In his mind, the real project he was interested in undertaking was something of his passion, but those projects were too far removed from his reach. He wondered whether he should put side everything else he was working on and just focus on this project that was quite risky, but quite innovative in nature and border the line between insanity and thinking-outside-the-box creativity. After all, there was another business coach talking about innovation is the only path to survival for start-up businesses. This coach mentioned that: since following other business people's tracks usually meant displacement of existing vendors or bad-mouthing of entrenched vendors, in order to win customers.  David had little intention of bad mouthing others or displacing other business people, because he respected every-body's journey towards making ends meet. He felt the easier way for his small business to acquire customers is to provide services that no other people were providing before. But with limited resources and funding, innovation or leaping ahead of other established businesses were easier said than done.

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