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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2712 How To Find Your Best Business Ideas
00:13:14
Chasing business ideas that don’t click can feel frustrating, and those true “aha moments” rarely show up when you’re glued to your computer. So how do you cut through the noise and tap into your most authentic ideas before the new year begins? This episode has the clarity you’ve been looking for.
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- [00:00]
A
Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree. Zoe, this thing weighs a ton. Drew Ski, live with your legs, man. Santa. Santa, did you get my letter? He's talking to you britches. I'm not. Of course he did. Right, Santa, you know my elf Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list. And elf. I'm six' three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T Mobile you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus? I'm Mrs. Claus Claus much younger sister. And AT T Mobile, there's no trade in needed when you switch. So you can keep your old phone or give it as a gift. And the best part, you can make the switch to T Mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes. Nice. My side of the tree is slipping. Kimber, the holidays are better. AT T Mobile switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade in needed. And now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores with 3, 4 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 vice connection charge credit sentinel balance due to payout earlier. Cancel Finance agreement. 256 gigs $830 eligible Ford in a new line, $100 plus a month plan with auto check out 15 minutes or less per line. Visit t mobile.com Listen. I found that the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. So when you want to reach the right professionals, I Recommend you use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers. That's people that have the ability to say yes to your offer. That's why LinkedIn has the highest B2B ROAs of all online ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com MBA that's LinkedIn.com MBA Terms and Conditions apply. Your best business ideas, they don't show up at your desk. They show up when you finally get quiet enough to hear yourself think. And the holidays are actually a pretty good time to do that. Today I want to show you how to tap into your deepest, best ideas ever. I'm going to give you a step by step plan so you can walk into the new year with clarity, with inspiration and actually business ideas that you can use. Practical ones, ones that are going to change the game for you. Let's get into it.
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Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your Host Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, to help you start, grow and scale your business.
- [02:31]
If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much.
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Let's start with the truth. The truth is, if you want great ideas, you need space. You need to step away from the screens, including your phone. No noise, no inputs, just you and your mind and the world around you. I'm serious. And if this sounds intimidating, understand this is what it takes for you to have clarity and to come up with brilliant ideas. So let's start with step one, remove inputs. Okay? Ideas don't come from consumption. They don't come from you just consum. They come from reflection. You have everything you need already. It's all inside. You need to start excavating that idea, pulling it out. I'm saying shut off all media, right? Nothing. No podcast, no music, no scrolling, no laptop, no nothing. Okay? You can't hear your own thoughts if someone else's louder, right? If someone's thoughts, ideas, inputs are louder than your own head. Now, if this idea of having no input gives you a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of worry gets you nervous, good. That's where the magic happens. When you're feeling a little bit uncomfortable and you're forced to just face up with yourself, to just be nothing else, that is between you and yourself, right? It's just you and your ideas, you and your creativity, you and your intuition. Everything will come from there, not somewhere external. Step two, go somewhere your brain doesn't expect to work. Ideas is not work. Ideas doesn't come from a work environment. It comes from a creative environment. Nature, in my opinion, is the best environment. Go for a walk, go to the park, go for a hike, go to the beach, go skiing, whatever it might be. Okay? The goal is to disarm your brain so ideas flow instead of being forced. What I found is that often through the process I'm gonna walk you through right now, you're gonna start working on understanding what you want, what you need, what ideas will work, what won't. But the surrounding helps you because what happens is the idea gets cultivated in your subconsc. This is a fact. You could look this up, you could chatgpt this, that the Best ideas, the best innovations come when you're not thinking about it. It's sort of like you work on it and you try to stimulate that muscle and then you kind of step away from a little bit. And when you step away from it, your brain is still working in the subconscious mind. Number three, ask the right questions. I found that the right questions make all the difference. Here are some questions I want you to ask yourself, what do I want to achieve? And then ask yourself, why do you want to achieve it? What's the whole point? How do I want to make my mark? This is a good question to ask. If you are driven by impact, what kind of impact do you want to make? How do I want to show up every day? How do I want to feel when I get up in the morning? What excites me? What are the things that make me excited to get up in the morning and get going? What makes me uncomfortable or unhappy right now? What is the thing that I avoid? Is there a certain meeting that kind of puts me in a bad mood? Or why is that? What do I secretly want to change that I don't tell anybody about? But it's inside my heart. I wish I can change this. What am I avoiding? What have I been ignoring inside myself? Who do you admire and why do you admire them? What about them or their work do you admire? Your best ideas come from your desires, from your frustrations and your honesty with yourself, not from the trends out in the world. Okay? If you want to be a game changer, you can't be doing something trendy. You got to be doing something that is coming from within you, that's unique. Every year, my biggest breakthroughs come when I'm off the grid, when I'm not checking in with the team, when I don't look at my phone, right when I'm in nature, when I'm taking real time away from the business, when I'm snowboarding, when I'm going for nature walks, when I go visit my buddies. Anand Jose up in Noosa in the beautiful beach location. These are the moments where I really get a chance to check back into myself and figure out, am I going in the right way? Am I going the right path? Am I going towards the right things in my life? Am I actually on the right trajectory? Am I doing the things that are going to lead me to the things I want? And what are those things I want? Do I still want them? You know how the holidays usually go. You promise yourself you're going to be thoughtful this year, then suddenly it's last minute and you're panicking and you buy a gift card at the checkout line. This year, skip the panic and give an Aura Frame. Aura makes it unbelievably easy to share memories, which of course are priceless. You get unlimited free photo and video uploads and it's super simple to set up. Just download the Aura app, connect to WI Fi and start adding photos in seconds. And I love this part. Every frame can be personalized with a custom message that appears the first time it's turned on. It's such a thoughtful touch and honestly, it's one of the reasons that these make incredible gifts. I personally always find it hard to get personal gifts for the people that are closest to me. So this year I'm giving an Aura frame to my sister Mona. Mona lives far away and Nicole and I don't get to see her and her family as often as we'd like. We see each other about once every year. They're going to love seeing shots from our trips together over the years. It's the perfect blend of thoughtful and genuinely useful for a limited time. Save on the perfect gift by visiting or frames.com to get $35 off or as best selling Carver Mat frames named number one by Wirecutter by using promo code MBA at checkout. That's a U R A frames.com promo code MBA. This deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Running a business is complicated. There's dozens of software programs that you need and they're all so expensive. And since they come from different companies, they don't always play nice with one another. But what can you do, right? Odoo? That's what Odoo has all the software business owners need. We're talking sales, CRM, manufacturing websites, literally every kind of software, and it's an all in one platform. So it all works together and it's quality software, so you're not sacrificing. It's simply a better experience than a hodgepodge of programs trying to fit together. You'd expect to pay a premium for it, right? But that's the most amazing part about Odoo. This interconnected suite of business software costs less than the mismatch of disconnected programs you're currently using. So the question is, why spend more on software programs that are less efficient when Odoo's simple software program can handle everything for a fraction of the price. Discover how Odoo can take your business to the next level by visiting odoo.com that's o d o o.com.
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Some of my best ideas I've ever had, from launching this podcast $100 MBA show, to redesigning our business model, to building new products. It happened when I wasn't trying, when I was away from the computer, when I was away from work. In fact, the idea of this podcast came where Nicole and I were on a road trip from San Diego to New York. We were driving on the road. We couldn't be on our phones. We were just on the open road, looking out in the middle of Oklahoma. There's nothing to see. We're just in our thoughts. We're having discussions, we're just brainstorming, we're asking hard questions, we're getting real about why we were not seeing success with our previous podcast. And that's how the show was born. And by the way, those discussions stimulated some things. And then we got quiet and we sat down and thought and we went to bed and we went the next day and hit the road again. And eventually, like I said, the subconscious mind comes up with a solution, comes up with some clarity. Most entrepreneurs make the same mistake I found, right? They try to think their way into great ideas. But you can't think clearly in noise. Inspiration comes after stillness, not during the hustle. When things calm down, the important things come to the surface. The important thoughts, feelings, ideas, they come to the surface. It's like you're trying to see your reflection in water that's constantly shaking. You need the surface to get still. Only then you see what's really there, right? You start to see your reflection. It starts to look like glass. But it's in that stillness you get clarity. Your next big idea isn't hiding from you. It's hidden behind all the noise that you have turned on constantly. Now it's time to turn it off so that you can start re tapping into that intuition, re tapping into the ideas that are buried in your brain, buried into your soul, right? Silence is not emptiness. Right? Silence is information. Because you're left with your thoughts. Your thoughts are. Are important, okay? You're left with what's in there inside you. Those things need to stop being ignored. And that's why you need to just shut everything off so that you can hear them. So I want to give you a game plan. Here is a simple three session plan that you can do during the holidays. Each session is just two hours. You're going to Be alone. No devices, no inputs. If you have a co founder or partners in business, you may want to do this together if you like. But if you all want to do this individually alone, that's also great. Session number one, the release. This is two hours. Remember, a location could be a walk, it could be a park bench, it could be a beach, it could be a mountain, it could be anywhere in nature. You're going to focus on a few questions and these questions are, what have I been carrying mentally? What's the thing that I've been worrying about and just kind of dragging me down? What's frustrating me right now? What feels heavy or a little bit off? Your goal here is to empty your mind. Don't solve anything yet, don't go into fixing mode yet. Just empty. And see this as a worry list. You can write down in a notebook. The outcome is just to get some clarity about what the state of the situation is, what you're feeling, what's going on in your head, what's frustrating you, what are some things that you're just not happy with. Session two, the discovery. Two hours. Again, same style, but maybe a different spot, you know, a different part in nature, maybe a different park, maybe a different place that you love to visit, you know, a bench at a beach. You're going to ask these questions now. These are going to be the focus of this session. What do I really want next year? What do I really want? What is the thing that, ah, you kind of ignore because you think maybe it's too ambitious or maybe it's too risky? What do you really want next year? What do I wish existed in the world that doesn't what excites me? And when I think about it, it really gets me energized. Where do I feel pulled? The goal here is to let the idea bubble up naturally, let those ideas kind of come to the surface. And the outcome is you're going to have a list of desires, a list of possibilities, some ideas. They're not going to be fleshed out, they're not going to be perfect, but you're getting somewhere. You're starting the process. You're starting to sculpt this idea. You're chipping away a little bit. Session three, the selection. Okay, this is going to be another two hours. And this doesn't have to be in nature. This could be in a cafe, it could be in a quiet workspace, it could be maybe in a corner of your home you don't normally work in. Here are the questions you're going to Answer for yourself. Which ideas energize me the most that I listed down from the previous session? Which solve real problems for real people? Which one can I make progress on in 90 days where I can see? Maybe there's legs to this idea. The goal here is to start refining some ideas and you can pick one and explore further. This is the beauty of life and business, is that you could just choose something, take a few steps forward and see, hey, maybe people are responding to this. Maybe there is some legs. Maybe I got a couple sales. Maybe I'm feeling good about this. The outcome of this session is you're going to get some clarity, some direction, and your next steps. If you commit to these three sessions before the end of the year, you won't just end the year refreshed. You're going to start 2026 with a whole new lease on life, with a sense purpose, with a list of ideas that you shaped by yourself, with who you are, who you really are. Because the best ideas come when you reconnect with who you are yourself. When you finally stop listening to the world and the latest trend in real and TikTok and story and all that other stuff, you start listening to you. This holiday. Give yourself permission. Give yourself the gift to be quiet, to have some clarity, to just allow yourself to ask some important questions you've been ignoring. Ideas don't show up when you push, they show up when you pause. Give yourself the space and your next big idea will reveal itself. Just allow yourself to create the environment that allows it to happen. If this episode has sparked something for you, share it with somebody else, with another builder, with another person that's trying to do something in their life. Share with a friend, whether it's on WhatsApp or share the link to this episode, on whatever app you're using in a message. Maybe even just share with them in person when you see them or on a phone call. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. This is hard at first, you know, when you go through these sessions. But it gets easier with every minute. Every minute you do this, the more you feel comfortable, the more you feel like, wow, this is really helpful. Wow, I should have done this a long time ago, man, I can't wait to the next session and the next session. It's just that initial start, okay, that first, first 5, 10, 20 minutes is a little bit rough. And then you start to really enjoy it. You start to realize you needed this.
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If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business. The best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast, hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. Whether it's Apple or Spotify or ever, you listen to podcasts by hitting subscribe. You get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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