Week 2 (ish) - To Dream

To Dream..... well if you are anything like me you have spent the last few years doing just this. I am a dreamer.

Dreaming is really important, this is when you come up with new ideas and solutions to problems that you are encountering starting a new business. When my life gets really busy, like it has in the last few weeks, i just forget to dream. But this is when i am at my most creative and as my business will involve huge amounts of creativity, this is defiantly an issue i really need to address. 

So this is the second chapter in the book Start Your Business Week by Week. Its all about dreaming. I am not sure that taking a week just to dream is really that important, though. I think that dreaming is an ongoing process and if it was not for dreaming then most people would not be picking up a book called week by week to starting your own business. But that said, you never know. So basically this chapter was getting you to define your dream and goals of where you want to be in the future. As i am already a dreamer in real life any way this chapter did not take much thought.

The author also recommends using a pin-board or pinterest.com to picture your dreams. I already use pinterest to picture the future and catalog my achievements in these dreams. Though none go as far forward as 10-20 years. http://www.pinterest.com/knottedrose/boards/

This is  is where i see myself in 10 years:

I see myself owning a small house in the UK, either in Central London or somewhere remote, beautiful yet well connected. Apart from the bedrooms, the house has two main rooms a craft room where i can make my own cloths and work on my ideas and a comfortable living space.

My second home is in North Queensland, Australia. Where i have a sea front bungalow, surrounded by jungle, with a swimming pool over looking the sea. My third house is a small easy to maintain apartment in the Alps (French or Swiss), where i can go skiing at the weekend.

As far as work goes, i want to still be working, but taking a more creative roll in the business and have managers to run the day to day stuff. I also see my self taking more time out to do more traveling, sometimes just weekends but often for months at a time. In 10-20 years time i will still be fit enough to trek through the Andes.

An Update of Where I am Now

Apart from reading this book and trying to implement its steps, the most productive thing that i have been doing is attending a 4 week training course in Clapham (South London). I was sent there by the Job Centre and so far it has been amazing. We have been covering things such as all the financial stuff such as cash flow, Profit/loss and how much money your business need to make before its making money. Stuff which i had not even looked at before, let alone tried to work out. It has also pushed me to think about things that i would have never thought about before, and i can now see a way forward to actually making my business happen. 

The place where i am really failing to make progress is finding suitable accommodation. London is just so ridiculously expensive and finding a room in a shared house, that is big enough for me and my hobbies/business is proving difficult. The main problem being is that homeowners and agents wont rent out spare rooms to low paid and unemployed people, even if they have savings enough to cover the rent. So i might have to find a way to make living in a hostel work.