Playful Defiance is a “bring it on” mentality that leads you to take action when others close the door on opportunity. This mindset helps breed solutions and triggers actions toward what you want. With Playful Defiance, you compete for the love of the adventure.

In business, Playful Defiance calls for you to find strategies to generate greater results, defying the standards of your industry. Tony Hsieh’s Zappos playfully defies conventional wisdom about customer service for online businesses empowering their representatives to build relationships with their customers without a script. Herb Kelleher’s Southwest Airlines playfully defies how airline attendants are supposed to act and behave, bringing a feeling of heart to airline travel.

When someone says, “It can’t be done,” hear your Call to Adventure. Roll up your sleeves, put a big smile on your face and dive in.

Adults can’t be playful, right? That’s for kids. Adults are supposed to be serious. It’s just not proper to act otherwise, or is it? As we enter adolescence, we’re taught to “behave” and “act your age.” Who dictates how your age should act? And is this behavior always conducive to achieving fulfillment in your life and growing your business?

Perhaps it’s time to make a change: Stop acting your age and start having fun. Don’t just be playful on the weekends or once in a while; be playfully defiant in your work, in your relationships and in everything you do.

Anyone can learn to break the rules, but only a true master can laugh and play along the way.

Adopt the mindset of Playful Defiance and live an extraordinary adventure!

Related posts:

1. The Joy of Discovery
2. Your True Adventure
3. The Art and Skill of Effective Listening

Consciously or not, you are constantly asking yourself questions, and it is the quality of these questions that defines your ability to think and act creatively.

Your business is destined for mediocrity if your main question is What is my competitor doing today? or How can I cut costs or better manage inventory? These questions are important, but they are secondary to the bigger questions that drive your business forward such as:

• What do our customers want more from us than anything else?
• What is the primary problem we’re solving for our customers today? How can we totally eradicate that problem in the next generation of our products/services?
• What will our customers want tomorrow (even if they don’t know it today)?

Notice how all of these questions are customer-centric. Do you think Apple’s Steve Jobs or Proctor & Gamble’s A.G. Lafley try to innovate for the sake of innovation? Without a crystal ball (although Jobs does seem to have one), they create new products in anticipation of the customers’ needs.

With the power of superior questions, there are no boundaries to what you can create.

Think differently. Ask the questions others are afraid to ask.

What if you were one question away from a major breakthrough in your business? What might that question be?

Related posts:

1. The Value of Innovation
2. Is Your Business Killing Creativity?
3. Incremental Innovation