Article

The Big Lie - Burnout and ways to deal with it...
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19960301/1586.html

What advice does the author have for entrepreneurs?

This author has advice for entrepreneurs that may be susceptible to burning out. All entrepreneurs must expect to potentially face the challenge. However this author believes that the most stress comes within the maturity phase of the business. At this point, an entrepreneur must learn to diversify their skills, teach, plan your succession, network, and to renew their passion to avoid burning out and avoid the 4 "A's": aloneness, arrogance, adventure seeking, and adultery.

How may you personally use this advice now or in the future?

I think this advice can be applied to my everyday life and schoolwork especially. I can use these five techniques to avoid burning out at school. At this point school can become very boring. We may lose sight of some of the challenge. One of those strategies is to diversify your knowledge - which we do at school everyday - however we can use some of the other techniques to avoid burning out, like teaching others, planning your future/graduation, networking, and renewing other passions.

What might you learn from gaps/flaws in the article? What does this article ignore?

The one flaw I believe this article has is it fails to address those that may burnout from all of the work that is involved in the start. Or possibly how to deal with all of the stresses involved with the startup. Maybe an article can be created to deal with any stresses you may face along the way - because the article does separate stress and burnout very nicely.

Innovation - Making Inspiration Routine
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/innovation-making-inspiration-routine.html

What advice does the author have for entrepreneurs?

This author offers advice on how to create inspiration that leads to innovation. In the article, the authors lays out a list of ways inspiration is triggered the smart way, including: selecting a strategy, connecting customers, generate ideas, selecting ideas, prototyping and testing, going to market, and adjusting for growth.

Selecting the strategy involves almost finding the right market to hit. No adjacent markets, but finding a good market to start in. Connecting customers includes finding the right mix of a social network that may approve of the idea and may be interested in some idea. At this point, you can start to create ideas or brainstorm, then select those ideas. Next, create some type of prototype and have your network try the prototype before going to market. One of the biggest parts is adjusting for growth and fostering the environment for inspiration and innovation in your company.

How may you personally use this advice now or in the future?
Simple enough, this process can be used when thinking of anything creative. You need to figure out some kind a need or market to target, get an approval, brainstorm, select ideas, create a model or prototype and test it, go to market or present the idea, then adjust for your future improvements. This process is so broad that it can be applied to almost anything!

What might you learn from gaps/flaws in the article? What does this article ignore?

Although this article lies our a base for how to encourage inspiration and innovation, sometime it may just be incredibly hard to spark that. For example, in the first step - select a strategy/market - how am I supposed to determine what would be a good market? What I would like from this article is some more guidance on how you can determine these kinds of things, but I guess that can be published in another article. Know what would be nice? Stories of how some of these hit products were inspired! I would enjoy reading that if you know where I can find that easily.