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Recognizing Opportunities

Walle finds 100 Grand

Your big opportunity may be right where you are now.  – Napolean Hill 

Last week I celebrated my 31st birthday.  My lovely and loving wife bought me the Lego Walle set that I have had my eyes on since I learned of its existence.

I spent several fun hours with this build and am happy with the result.  I really do like the Pixar film Walle and I feel there is much to learn from it.  For example, Walle has awakened to a realization that life on his deserted planet is somewhat drab.  He continues to work hard going through the motions and striving to collect and crush garbage – but he has started to notice intricate and worthwhile finds while digging trash and junk.

He has quite the collection of intricate items that caught his eye and made him think.  He then finds the plant which is very different from all his other finds and because he collects it – his hobby – it soon opens wondrous doors of opportunity.

He takes action.  When Eva shows up Walle is terrified at first, but is curios and excited to see something that moves so gracefully.  He takes charge of fear and almost gets blown to smithereens.  I like the fact that he faces change head on and realizes he does not want to petal backwards to curbing junk anymore.  He moves forward by making a split second decision to grab on to the rocket and hold on for dear life!

At the moment it Walle was not thinking about how stupid it is to ride a rocket.  His goal was to see Eva again, and not be left alone.

Change has a tendency to happen quickly.  So does opportunity.

So how does one learn to recognize opportunity?  This has been a question at the forefront of my mind.  I love this quote by Henry David Thoreau – I think I have shared it recently,  but it’s worth sharing again;

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

The way to recognize opportunity is to start doing things.  I read a great book entitled The Power of Starting Something Stupid, by Richie Norton.  He goes into details about how opportunities start to abound when you start.  The power of starting is real.  If you feel like you are not going where you want to go, if you feel like you aren’t living the life you thought you would have, start something new.

Opportunities certainly do abound right where you are.  Just learn how to start doing and stop talking about doing.  There is power in taking action and making decisions quickly.  When you do decide to act, change can and will happen fast.  That is why opportunity can be so elusive at times – it is always changing. When you decide to act, then opportunities line up in front of you.

Think about the blessings you have, be grateful.  Gratitude is a key to recognizing opportunities.  When you are grateful you have a tendency to look at each situation differently – with an eye of optimism.  Optimism is the secret to recognizing opportunity.  Where others will miss it because of pessimism and disbelief, you can be optimistic and take the action steps required to make it happen.  Being optimistic dispels notions of fear.  You will still feel fear, but instead of being debilitating, this fear will lead you to action.

Action coupled with optimism leads to great opportunity.

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That Can Do Attitude

 

Ernie Sorts Wires
Ernie Sorts Wires

…it doesn’t make sense, it’s not logical, it is a gut feeling! I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. I only know what I can do. – Captain Kirk, Star Trek

Doing has a lot to do with attitude.  If you do something with a bad attitude it can get done but to what end?  Doing with a can do attitude is key to making things happen, and enjoying the time it takes to get there.  I have been thinking a lot lately about what I can do and the simple word “Do”.

This simple word – Do, has so much power in it.  There is also another simple word that goes along with Do and that is Be.

Do and Be both have a profound impact on the ability to be an effective leader.  Doing what is right and following your “gut” is important.  Doing means taking action and making decisions when no one else will.  It is stepping up to the plate during times of confusion and offering solutions.  It means keeping your ears open more and your mouth shut more often.  Leadership requires not only a listening ear but also charity.

I like to look at charity as the great law of potential.  Many of you have probably heard of the book The Secret.  It speaks of the Law of Attraction and how to attract positive things into your life.  I liken this law of attraction to faith.  A simple definition of faith can be found in the Book of Mormon.  It explains that when you have faith you hope for things which are not seen which are true.  As a leader you must act in faith and do many things where you do not know the end.  As a leader, look to others and recognize not what they are, but what they can become.  Everyone has the potential to be great.  It is up to a leader to recognize and bring out that potential.

Doing and being are separate but at the same time inseparable.  Separate as we are not what we do, but inseparable because what we repeatedly do we become.

Taking action is required for leadership.  Stepping outside our comfort zone is required for our growth and the growth of others.

This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.  There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.  Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.  Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job.  Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it.  It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

Be the anybody.  Anybody can lead if they will make up their minds quickly.  Fail quickly, succeed quickly.  Leaders act many times on instinct and make quick split second decisions.  If they make the wrong one then they correct course and keep plugging away forward.

As you look for others to lead find their potential.  Find their talents.  Delegate, not jobs you do not want, but delegate according to talent.  Find out what people would do without pay and get them excited to do just that and get paid for it.  This instills a desire to create and to excel towards ones potential.  That can do attitude will be ever present as you lead through applying people’s potential to doing and being and reaching it.

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Uncommon Common Sense

300 miles, no water - desert common sense
Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know of: abide by it; it will counsel you best.- Lord Chesterfield

What is common sense?

The official definition is native intelligence; Sound, practical intelligence that is independent of specialized knowledge or training.  Some people call it following your gut.  Some people call it just knowing and doing what is right.

It is uncommon.  Too few people today follow their gut.  They feel they should be doing something else with their life, but instead of changing they continue to go through the motions of habit.  Habit is an interesting part of life.  There are good habits and bad habits.  We really are somewhat like sheep when following a habit because we are used to it.

Let’s talk about some good habits that should be common sense.

1) Sleep.

With the advent of the modern world of technology and electricity it is easy to stay up late and sleep in.  It is easy to limit our needed sleep to only a few hours.  Our bodies need time to recharge and organize the experiences of the previous day.  I have recently changed my schedule.  I used to work on making Wowflutes in the evenings before bed.  I would generally start a batch around 8 or 9 pm.  I would finish after midnight and get up around 5:30am to get ready for my day job.  This took its toll.  I felt like I was putting my passion and what I loved on the backburner.  Leaving it till the last minute everyday made it seem unimportant, and it was easy to not want to do it.

I switched it up.  I now get to bed in the evenings around 9:30-10:30pm and get up at 4 am.  It has made a huge difference.  Now I feel I am working on my goals first thing instead of last.  I have several hours to think to myself with no interruptions.  It is wonderful!  I really did not know what I was missing.  The old adage by Benjamin Franklin goes “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”.  You would think this would be common sense, but it is uncommon.

2) Working on your talents

People love to work on their talents. They love to feel like they are good at something.  Many folks feel they don’t have any talents though…  Just because their talents may not be as visible as others.  It is common sense to work on your talents, but how many people do?  It is easy to say you do not have time to develop them, but your gut tells you differently.  I know folks who work a job they don’t like and go home and worry about their job and their boring life and go to sleep and go on to the job, day after day after day.  Why?  Because it is the sheep mentality of just following a habit.  Instead of worrying – set goals and time aside for working on something you enjoy, your talent.  Something that you would do for free.

I have found that this is a secret to managing employees and helping them enjoy their work.  For example, I was the general manager of a mining company – Alpine Gems, for a short time from 2013-2014.  It was my grandfathers company and he had built it from the ground up.  When he passed on in 2011 the company was split between his sons and daughters.  No one was actively participating in the business on a daily basis and it was faltering.  The company had never had employees and I was bent on changing this.

The first person I hired was a great guy named Kasey.  He was a hard worker and could easily manage working in stone.  I made him my warehouse manager and we spent a lot of time planning and discussing the goals for the business.  I found out that he had been a theater major and was interested in making movies.  He had a talent in production and directing.  So I decided to focus many hours of our days in producing marketing content to spread online.  Kasey was exuberant and went above and beyond what I asked for.  It was because it was his passion – something that he would do even if he didn’t get paid.  He worked extra hours on story boarding and editing in his spare time at home.  We created a lot of content that was helpful in securing new business and growing the company’s non-existent presence online.

Our sales in the first six months were double the previous year.  People knew we were having fun and working hard – especially our customers.  Unfortunately there were too many cooks in the kitchen that thought we were having too much fun and not working.  I resigned when we realized our hard work was in vain.

I still get to work with Kasey as he helps me create more great content for Wowflute!

If you want to change things up develop the habit of working and developing your talents.  An easy measuring stick is to find what you would be willing to do for free.

3) Elevate those around you.

This is a habit that has far reaching potential.  When you choose to elevate others you are also elevating yourself.  Elevating others is making them feel good about themselves.  When you speak to an old friend or a new acquaintance make sure to get them talking about themselves.  Learn about what they love and what makes them tick.  People love to talk about themselves – it is just human nature.  An excellent read that has inspired this habit is the book by Dale Carnegie, How to win friends and influence people.  A common theme throughout the book is simple common sense to treat others how you would want to be treated.

4) Smile.

The easiest way to help folks feel good is to smile more.  Smiling is contagious.  People look better when they smile. They look more healthy and attractive.  When you smile folks want to be around you more; they want to know what makes you happy and why you are smiling.  Make it a habit to smile wherever you go and be interested in others. This habit will make you good connections that will grow your network and improve every aspect of your life.  It is easy.  It is common sense, that unfortunately, is not that common.

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Why is choice so important?

custom swirl wowflute
Custom Swirl Wowflute

I have been thinking a lot about choices lately.  I always like to define a word to get a clear meaning.  Choice: the right, power, or opportunity to choose.

This definition is pretty straight forward.  But why is it sometimes such a difficult proposition? To choose?  Especially between two good things that we want.  So much goes into a choice.  Our background experiences, nuances, feeling, outward physical sense, desire, disgust.  Everyone is faced with thousands of choices everyday.  Mundane choices – complex choices.

Why is choice so important?

Let us imagine a world without choice.  What would it look like?  Who would be there? Why would they be there? Would you ever choose to be there? Then if you choose to be there, there’s a choice which would not exist… Wow, guess that’s kind of deep.

Let’s come back to the surface.  Choice is about you and choice is personal and choice effects others deeply.  If I make a wrong choice, it can have lasting ripples into many futures.  The same goes for making a right choice.  I’m sure nearly everyone has taken a flat stone and attempted to skip it on a lake.  One time I got hundreds of skips – it was a very flat, smooth stone.  Just like the ripples of those splashes go on sometimes imperceptively, they still move forward into the future with a momentum that we may not even recognize.

Even small choices ripple.  The splash may not be that noticeable but it still effects more than just the stone.  A big splash can generate large waves that come in contact with sides or shores and erodes and builds by depositing the sands.

red sunset swirl wowflutes
Red Sunset Swirl Wowflutes

Choice is the reason we are here on earth – to learn to make the correct choice and to learn from wrong choice. The whole reason of existence is to choose.

So choose carefully your color of wowflute – each color is more or less important to you. Each color for me is based on my photography and my love of color in general. I hope you find the right one to enjoy.

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New Turquoise Tritan Wowflute

I am thoroughly enjoying the new colors that the Tritan Wowflute is now made in. This transparent turquoise is a favorite.

I designed the Tritan Wowflute over the course of two years and it is nice to finally have a product that works well and is very durable.

The Tritan Wowflute is currently made down at a place called R & R Engineering in Leeds, Utah.  The folks there are down to earth and are great to work with.  They strive for quality.  I am grateful I found them in my backyard (quite literally)!

The Tritan Wowflute was designed with the outdoors in mind.  After I sat on and broke a few of my favorite Swirl Wowflutes I wanted something that would last.  This has been a goal for me to focus on quality rather than quantity.  A few years ago I had produced a bunch of my Wowflute mugs out of water based clay and had fired them and glazed them.  I had ten Wowflute mugs ready for market.  As I was hauling them to my vendor booth I tripped and dropped the box.  Even though they were wrapped and packed well, all but one were either chipped or shattered.   This experience led me to look for a stronger material that would still have the quality without being fragile.

When hiking I use a Nalgene water bottle.  These bottles were extremely tough and would take a beating.  I could drop it on sharp lava rocks and it would be fine.  That is what I wanted my products to do.  I did some research and after much deliberation I chose Tritan copolyesther by Eastman as the base material  for the Tritan Wowflute because it is virtually indestructible.  The Tritan Wowflute can even be driven over (not that you drive over musical instruments on a regular basis).

The name Tritan Wowflute sounds tough as well.  It is currently available in Turquoise, Tangerine, and Emerald.  Listen to a sample:

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Do More, Be More


This morning I have been thinking about the word become.  This word is wrapped around ones potential to do and be.  It is being and embracing who we are at our core.  That is, we are children of our Father in Heaven.  This is our huge potential that we all share in this life.

There is no fear when you think about what this means.  To really be a god in adolescence.  I think this is why there is such an innate desire to create within the human race.  To create makes us feel alive and like we are actually doing something to become better.  There are those words again, do and become.

Henry David Thoreau wanted to experience life.  He wanted to truly understand what it meant to live.  He spoke of this:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

This is a good measuring stick for what you should do and become – when I am old and soon to lay down to rest in the grave what will I have accomplished?  What has life offered me, and what have I done with it?  Life is a gift and should be enjoyed everyday.  If it is not enjoyable then  something must change.  People can become what and who they want to be through effort and hard work.  They become through not giving in or settling for something mediocre from life.  Life is to live each day, and make each day a little better than the last.

M.E.
by Joseph Cowlishaw

Masterfully
Equipped
to be me
Heavenly Father
He knows me more than
I know me
He has masterfully equipped
Talents that make up me
Gifts and righteous desires
Those gifts from Him
When not used then lost
At being me
Being me is tricky
I am the only one
There is no example to follow
When the spirit guides
Me works
Me is masterfully equipped
To be
Me.

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Ideas are Things

This Blog is devoted to awesomely designed toys.  I define toys rather loosely to include dual-functionality products that have a fun aspect to them and could be considered toys for the bigger kids (myself).

I absolutely love to inspect and admire well designed products.  I also really enjoy toys.  They make life fun for everyone.  Who does not have a toy that they played with and remember most from childhood?  My favorite toy growing up was Lego because of all the possibilities from just a simple set of snapping bricks.

Some folks think that when you grow up you should not play with toys anymore because they are for children…  Well, to be brutally honest, they can go be sad grownups who work their lives away hoping to save for some kind of retirement so they can enjoy toys again.

Toys do not just appear out of nowhere.  They are being designed and created and tested and manufactured using highly detailed engineering techniques and practices which include various high-tech technologies in manufacturing and design.  It never ceases to amaze me when I look at a clever toy such as an action figure or puzzle that has numerous joints and detailed parts.  Each one of those parts were thought of and sketched out then taken through the conceptual design phase.  Then being created individually inside an injection mold and assembled with skill to achieve the proper movements and quality.

Through my experiences as a product designer I have learned every aspect of this process.  My own cool toy – the Swirl Wowflute has been such an enjoyable experience to work on.  It has been in the research and development phase for nearly fifteen years and may not ever leave this phase – there are always ways to improve upon an existing design.  I find it rather interesting when I compare some of my year old handmade Swirl Wowflutes with newer ones I made last week.  They are completely different!?  I did not intentionally change the design, but it gradually morphed into what works better and better.

I finally decided to make a manufactured version of the Swirl Wowflute in 2012 as part of a University capstone project.  I spent many long hours attempting to use Autodesk Inventor to make a digital replica of my popular handmade flutes.  I look at the design process as a form of art – even when you are designing a manufactured product.  That product was a concept, an idea – that suddenly becomes tangible in the real world.  This is the purpose of art, is it not?  Producing some kind of physical product from an idea.

I got to use the $10,000 3D printer on my project to print out prototypes for testing.  In this capstone project I was not able to produce a working prototype that was tuned because the time was limited in class.  I did get a functional prototype that whistled though and played it as part of a presentation.  It was not enough for me to just make something that was just there.  I like interaction, and dual-functionality.  I wanted an end product that would build on someones creativity.

Onward and upward.  After I graduated college I had the desire to make this manufactured Wowflute a reality.  I could see the prototypes that were once just simple ideas in my hand – it gave me a sense of excitement and awe.  Ideas truly are things!  It was an ah-ha moment I will not easily forget and it’s worth repeating – Ideas are things.

During my final semester at Southern Utah University I had decided to throw out all my required classes and took what I wanted to learn about.  I took a marketing class from a talented Professor Ellen Treanor who knew how to make a subject interesting and exciting.  I always looked forward to her classes.  One class she introduced us to a website called Kickstarter.  The opportunites I saw almost made my head explode!  I saw the potential to make the manufactured Wowflute a reality in a simple project based platform.  After graduation I took a boring job to make ends meet all the while selling my handmade Swirl Wowflutes on the side.  I soon felt the urgency to quit my well paying salaried + commission job and pursue the dream of bring my Wowflutes to a much larger audience.

I acquired some investments from an awesome friend of mine and started on the process in making a quality manufactured version.  I spent the next five months finding a manufacturer and a product designer who knew how to design for injection molds.  I created a high resolution prototype using the SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) method and tried it out.  It worked well but was way out of tune.  I asked my designer to make the walls thicker and the holes 25% larger.  This would effectively reduce the chamber size and increase the change between holes.  I had another SLS prototype made and to my great astonishment – it sounded better than expected!  It was in tune perfectly.  The many years of making the handmade Wowflute (30,000 of them) had paid off.

I then took that prototype and ran with it on kickstarter.  My kickstarter project was a success and the Tritan Wowflute was brought to life.  This did not appease my appetite – for I had tasted it, Ideas are Things!

So as you pa-ruse my website, know that I am passionate about design in general and I beleive in making ideas reality.  Optimism is key in anything great.  You will always have the naysayers and the haters who are really just jealous.  You can feel sorry for them.  You can use their negative energy to instill what I call “the Oh Yeah Factor”.  The “You wanna make a bet?”  The “I’ll show him”, this is powerful stuff.  I use it all the time.

Thanks for taking the time to read to this point.  Now I will reward you with some pictures of awesomely designed toys that I like:

The Creepy Face Woody Doll:

woody - ebe whistle wide

The loveable, babylike Baymax:

Endurance is patience concentrated. – Thomas Carlyle 

A photo posted by Joseph Cowlishaw (@joecow) on

Pixar’s Carl Fredricksen from UP:  

Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind, the stronger the trees. – Thomas S. Monson A photo posted by Joseph Cowlishaw (@joecow) on