One of the challenges of blogging about anything is that it is very difficult to find the time to write about life when you are busy living it.

Enter Visual Thinking.

By drawing quick sketches of Awesomeness on index cards (the Visual Thinker’s best bud) and then scanning them, we can create an effective collection of concepts.

More cards at The Art of Living Awesome blog

Plus TEN Shirts!

For those that know me, I have been saying “Plus TEN!” a lot lately. What is PLUS TEN? Simple. Whenever you are doing anything, and it starts to suck, or you start to feel tension, STOP and think “How can I make _______ Plus Ten?” Stuck in Traffic? Turning on your favorite tunes is Plus TEN Senseo coffee makers are Plus TEN

Leaving a boring bar with cheap domestic beer to go see a guitar player sing at an authentic Irish pub is PLUS TEN

So, I created shirts with a Plus Ten logo on them
Buy them.

Recently I had the opportunity to apply Visual Thinking methods that I learned at VizThink to our sales team at Plexus.

The results were fantastic! After a brief explaination of the importance of Visual Thinking, everyone was on board, grabbing markers and sticky notes and knocking out some terrific concepts that we then wrapped up into a Sales Playbook.

This Playbook features common challenges and key tactics for selling.

Here are a few examples:

The Chutes and Ladders explaination of getting to the Board of Directors:

The Frankenstein Monster of a company with TOO MANY software solutions:

The First Sales Call Play:

A Golf hole is a great analogy for closing a deal:

Unique Rabbit Clothing!

First off, for those that have yet to read any of my writing, stop by doug.anchorwave.com/stories to get caught up.

Once you have done that (it’s a quick read), you’ll have a better idea of who this growing list of characters is.

I decided late one night, while trying to fall asleep, that it would be a cool idea to create shirts from the characters in my writing.

Pretty simple idea. But then I created a bunch of shirts with a character that only vaguely shows up and began it’s life as a character in a one-off t-shirt for a girlfriend. “How do you catch a Unique Rabbit?…U Nique up on it!”

Groan

Anywho, with the introduction of Cyrus and David, I now have a collection of shirts with a little more tangible reference to my stories.

Browse All Shirts

Coming soon, look for The Sad Mountain, the lead character in another children’s book I am working on, as well as Bruno and Macey, from The Odd Couple., and the cat/man and the monsters from Dream.