Alright. Do you want to start a business maybe or you're full of enterprise? But  you're not sure what exactly you should do. Where do ideas come from? Where  do you get ideas to do a business? 

1. Ideas come from creativity 

Where does creativity come from? I read this book entitled Inventology, and it  was a study of how people invent things. He went over several people who  invented things and how they come up with these kinds of things. In that book,  he writes, "We tend to believe that great ideas arrive like angels, in a flash of  light. This assumption has been handed down to us from the ancient Greeks  who have regarded creativity as a gift from the Muses. As the ancients saw it,  people don't invent so much as wait for a deity to deliver an illumination." 

In the Middle Ages, the word inspiration meant "God's hand breathed the truth  straight into a person's mind". So do ideas just come from God? Well, ultimately, of course, ideas come from God. Genesis 1:27-28. "So God created mankind in  his own image. In the image of God, he created them. Male and female, he  created them. God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in  number. Fill the earth and subdue it.” 

Now, that word subdues, sometimes we think it means to conquer. But it also  means to mess with it as God did. God started with something that was void and shapeless, and God formed it. He took what was there and he made it into  something, and we are made in his image. So we do the same thing. We take  what we see and we combine things that were not combined before, and we  create something new out of those materials. So you start with creativity. What  gets creativity going? 

2. Problems 

Generally, people get creative when they are faced with problems. James 1:2-4,  it's one of my favorite couple of verses. "Dear Brothers and Sisters, when  troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy." Do  you have problems in your life? Consider those problems a joy. For you know  that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it  grow. For when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and  complete needing nothing." The Old Living Bible translation ended with, "and  you will be ready for anything". 

What problems do you have in your life? I have an example of Mr. Strap and the ball hopper. He was a tennis player, and he coached people in tennis. He would  bring out 50 tennis balls and they would hit them around. Then after 15 minutes, 

they had to go pick them up and put them in a box. By the end of that 15  minutes, their backs were killing them. So because his back was killing him, he  made this thing with wire and it was a grid. It was just a little bit smaller than the  width of a tennis ball. You could just press it down on a ball, and it would go in,  and it wouldn’t come out. So without bending down, he could do that. And he  started manufacturing them. He sold thousands and thousands of them. His  invention came out of his own pain, came out of his own need. 

3. Lead user problems 

Inventology, again this book, said: "Lead users are familiar with conditions which lie in the future for most others so they can serve as a need-forecasting  laboratory." Some people are ahead of the curve. I know when Henry and I first  started planting churches back in the late 80s, we were sort of the new breed of  church planters in our denomination, and we started with gusto and enthusiasm. I mentioned this sort of vision before, we had the "build it and they will come"  mentality. We had great services, great music. We would attract people to our  service and ultimately, they would end up paying our salary. 

Well, we got into that. We developed it. We did it as best we could. But after four or five years of that, we started discovering the problems. The problem was we  were getting spectators and not players, people sitting on the bench, people  relying on Sunday morning but not doing anything Monday through Saturday. So we saw those problems and we started shifting away from the "build it and they  will come" mentality to The Seven Connections. We have to build people in their  own lives. Well, by the time we were shifting to The Seven Connections, the rest of the denomination was finally catching up to this whole thing about "build it and they will come". So we were on to the next thing and the vast majority was doing the thing that we'd already done for three years. That's the way most things go.  By the time people catch up to something, it's already old. 

It's so funny to me that when people name their children, they think long and  hard about a special name just for their child. And it's going to be a unique  name, not a name that they grew up with. So they center on this name for their  child. They think it's unique, and they think no one else is going to be named  this. But when that kid goes to school, you'll discover that there might be two or  three with that exact same name. You thought it was unique, but the only reason why you thought it was unique is because other people were already using it  and you weren't even aware that other people were using it. By the time you  caught on, it had become a common thing. 

You can just Google it. You can just go and Google the name of your child and  you'll probably discover the name you uniquely picked out is in the top 30.  People will do this, and they'll be surprised that the name that they chose is just  a common one that everyone else chose as well.

My point is, if you want to be ahead of the curve, you have to identify those  people who have been doing something a long time. They've discovered some  things that don't work. They're on to the next thing. And that's the next paradigm. The next paradigm comes when everyone's jumping on the bandwagon of the  old paradigm. So you want to follow a lead user. Talk to them about what  problems they see. 

4. Needs 

What are your needs? I talked to you about this personal bible cover thing that I  have going in my garage. I inherited it from The Bible League, and I was  sending out New Testaments. I was sending out King James New Testaments. A lot of ministries wanted to use the King James Bible. And they would use them  for evangelism. They'd put their cover on it and use them for evangelism. To me, I just felt bad about doing it because here's the new person. They're going to get this New Testament from somebody from some ministry and they'll open it up,  and they won't understand some of the words that are in there because it's King  James. It's English words from 500 years ago. 

That so frustrated me that people were using the King James for evangelism.  They had reasons for choosing the King James that I wouldn't dispute with, but  so I wanted to help them out. So I spent two months, I sat down and I took the  1611 King James and I decided I'm going to add some things to it that will help a new person get something out of it. I added three things. I added chapter  headings. The King James was a wall of words. A chapter heading, this is what's in this chapter. Jesus Walks on the Water. So you can kind of see where you're  at. I added quotation marks when people speak because the original King  James didn't have quotation marks. And I added, in parentheses, the  explanation of words that we no longer use so that someone could read it and  actually get something out of it. I called it the King James Plus. It's the King  James plus some of these help. 

Now I spent two months doing that because I was frustrated with a problem that  existed for years. I got frustrated with not having something good to hand to a  visitor that came to our church, and that's why I did the Jesus Bible, and the  Sampler Bible, and the 30 Second Bible. I wanted to give somebody something  significant that tied them to my church but also something that could be used to  help them grow in their faith. 

So what are some of the needs that you're struggling with or some of the  churches around you, what are they struggling with? So your needs, the needs  of people you know, the needs of your customers, what is the problem that  people are struggling with, and what product or service can you figure out from  that?

5. Frustration 

When you get frustrated with something, it often leads to some creativity and  some kind of invention, some product or service that you can sell. 

1. Frustration over a long period of time 

Things that you've been frustrated continually. I was frustrated with our  church sanctuary. It was set up the wrong way, so a year ago, I decided,  "Let's transform this place." We took the ceiling tiles out, we spray painted  it all black, we put in lights, we put in our sound system was no good. I  really went to town on this, and I became an expert in lighting. The lighting  today is so easy to do. LED lighting, you don't need the power anymore.  The control is amazing. You can use color. It's a lot cheaper. 

And I didn't know any of these things. Now, I know these things. I just had  a church meeting at my church. It was a church meeting of several local  churches in my denomination, about 16 different churches. The leaders  came to our building for the meeting, and they saw our lights. They were  like, "Wow! How did you do this?" Not one of them, none of these 16  churches has lighting like this. They have the old-fashioned kind of  lighting, poor lighting, often the minister standing in the darkest place,  which makes it hard to listen to him. 

So with very little effort, I have become an expert in church lighting. I could probably start a business in church lighting - just go to churches that have  poor lighting and say, "For this price, I could dramatically transform your  whole church sanctuary." 

The same thing about sound. Because our sound was horrible. I learned  how to do it. I learned how to do it on our own - hook it up, put it up, where  to get the deals, all that kind of stuff. Churches will spend $50,000,  $60,000, $80,000 on a sound system, and they don't have to. Because I  was frustrated for many years and finally did something about it, now I  know about this stuff. I know where to go, I know what to do, and if I really  wanted to, I could start a business in that arena. 

2. Frustration that reveals hidden problems that are difficult to detect 

There's a lot of problems in life, but the real problems you figure out after a long period of frustration. What is the real problem here? What is the real  problem with having people come and visit your church and returning  again? What do we really have to do to get them to come back again?  Where are we dropping the ball? That could be a business. 

3. Frustration that forecasts a problem that will affect thousands if not  millions of people

If you go deep enough into a problem, you could actually figure out a  solution that could affect millions of people. 

6. Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from a desire to find a better way. 

Colossians 3:23 "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for  the Lord, not for human masters since you know that you will receive an  inheritance from the Lord as a reward. In the Lord Christ, you are serving." A  desire to find a better way. 

As I mentioned way at the beginning of this course, my father was an  entrepreneur. He started many different businesses. He died this past August  and we had taped his thoughts on several things that he had to say about his  life. He told several stories. One of the stories he told was how he got interested in business. When he was 12 years old, he worked on, what we call in Michigan, a muck farm. It's a flat piece of ground, it's very fertile, and you grow a lot of  vegetables on this muck farm. And it's a lot of backbreaking work. You're bent  over the whole time, and young people are hired. They go out and they work  from sunup to sundown. They're bending over. Their backs are killing them, and  they get paid very little. 

So my dad went out and did that with all of his friends, and he lasted three days. After three days, he quit. He quit with this thought, "There's got to be a better  way to make a living than working on the muck farm." So he quit and so then  what was he going to do? Well, he went by some of these factories and at noon  they'd all come outside. They'd have their lunch and so on. So he had an idea.  He bought a bike, and he put a sidecar on the bike, and he put a box. He made  an insulated box, and bought dry ice and he put it in the box. Then he went to an ice cream place, and he bought - at wholesale - a bunch of ice cream bars. Then he would go to these factories at lunchtime or at the break time, and he'd open it up and say, "Who wants an ice cream?" And he'd make people flip for it. You  and your friend, someone flips a coin and if it lands on heads, he buys. And the  next day, the other guy buys. 

So he had a route, and he went around and he discovered that he could make  four times as much money just riding his bike, talking to people, selling ice  cream bars rather than sitting in the hot sun in the muck farm. 

So at a very young age, he realized that there's a way that people do things.  That then there's a better way. There's always a better way, and that's how I  knew him. He was always trying to find a better way to do something. He started like 20 different businesses. And each one, he was trying to, "How can we do  this better?" 

I remember we were just driving down the road, and he saw a farmer on his  tractor. He stops the vehicle, and he gets out of the car, and he flags the guy 

down. He's in a field plowing, or disking, or something, and he flags him down.  The guy stops, gets off his tractor, shuts it down, and says, "What do you want?" 

He says, "I want to ask you what you're doing." Now, my dad had no idea what it was or what the business was or what the potential was, but he wanted to know  what he was planting and why he was planting what he was planting, what kind  of yield it was, how does this pay? 

Then we got back into the car, and I said, "Why did you stop him?" 

He said, "Well, there might be a business here. I don't know." Then he gave me  this lecture that you should always be curious. Be curious about how everything  goes. When you're with someone, find out what they do and find out the details  

of what they do and how it works, because there might be a business in there  for you. Or someday, somehow, you'll be doing something and this knowledge  will come back to you, and you'll have this connection to this person. Take an  

interest with everyone around you so that you become knowledgeable about  everything. There's a business lurking behind everything. 

On the way here, I was driving down the freeway, and I was trying to think of this class and what I might say and so on, then I started looking at the highway,  thinking, "What kind of business is on this road?" And I started looking at the  cars. The backs of me were license plates, license plates, license plates, license plates. That's it. Then somebody had a bumper sticker, something about some  sports team, and that was it. There were hardly any bumper stickers. Well, if I  was looking for a business and I'm a Christian entrepreneur, I would get really  cool bumper stickers or not bumper stickers but window clings that people can  put in the back of their window. But make them really cool about Christianity. Not "Do you know Christ or you're going to hell kind of thing". We have bumper  stickers now, Christian bumper stickers now, but no one puts them on their car  because they're too crass. They're not subtle enough. So I would come up with  really cool things that people would really want to put on their car. 

In the United States, we have 80 million, or 100 million, or 150 million Christians  and we drive everywhere. But our cars don't communicate anything of our faith. I could go to churches and I could maybe sell these things if I could come up  with-- my point is there's a business everywhere. If you just have your eyes  open - your clothes, the belts. I thought about my belt. How come my belt  doesn't say anything about my faith? My clothes, my clothes advertise some  manufacturer that makes clothes or some brand. What do I care about that  brand? I want to advertise the thing that's important to me. Maybe I should come up with a Christian brand. I don't know. 

You have to be curious about how everything works. Think about the  possibilities everywhere you look. Start with the kitchen. What could you do in 

the kitchen? What can you do in the family room? What is there to invent in the  garage? Keep your eyes open. The desire to find a better way. 

7. Personal Experience 

Jobs that you've had, your education, your interests, all these things. When I  look at the things that I've started, it came out of my own experience. I have this  sort of "can do" attitude about everything. With our church, we're going to  renovate things and people say, "Oh, that'll be too expensive." 

I said, "We can do it on our own." I wanted to dig a big hole at our church. Our  church has a really low ceiling. I said, "Why can't we just dig a big hole and go  down?"People said, "That's impossible. You can't get a big crane or a steam  shovel thing or a hoe thing through the doors." 

I said, "What if we had shovels?" "How are we going to dig a big, huge hole with  shovels?" "I don't know. If we had 200 people with 200 shovels, how much could you dig?" 

I'm just so surprised how people think you can't do anything. Part of why I think  you can do anything is when I was 15 years old, we moved onto a farm. My dad  wanted to build a barn, and he wanted to do the cement of the barn. It was 100- foot x 50-foot barn. I had a brother who was 14 years old. What my dad did, he  

bought a big pile of gravel. Then he bought a big pile of sand, and then he  bought a big skid of Portland cement and a cement mixer and a wheelbarrow.  And he said, "This is how you do it, guys. You take a couple of shovels of this,  couple shovels of that, a couple of shovels of the sand, you throw it in the mixer, add a little water, you mix it, you dump it into the wheelbarrow, you bring it into  the barn and you drop it. You do that about 10,000 times, and you've got a barn.  You've got the floor of a barn." 

That's what we did. We did the whole barn floor by hand, one shovel at a time.  And you know what? It got done. You keep doing it, it gets done. Things can be  done. That's my past experience. Because it was my past experience, I take that with me. I worked on the farm, I worked in a warehouse, I went to school for  eight years, I've done a lot of bible studies and a lot of sermons over the last 30  years. So when I go to write a bible study, it's fairly simple. When I write a book,  it's fairly simple because I've been doing this kind of same sort of thing for 30  years. All my past comes to play into my present right now. 

Right now, I'm working with someone to make a children's book for Christmas.  But it's going to be a unique book because each book will be unique to that  person. We're going to put their name into the story. We're going to put their  picture into the story. We're trying to figure out the software to do that. I've been  writing stories all my life. I know I can do this. I know it because of my past  experiences.

So what jobs have you had in your past? Write them all down. What did you  learn from them? What is education? What area? You might start something in  an area that you already know something about. What are your interests? Start  there. 

10. The experience of people you know 

Your parents. Again, I mentioned my father. My father started many different  things, and he talked about them incessantly. I know almost all the things that he knows because he talked about them constantly. 

Your siblings, your brothers, your sisters. What they're into. Again, be inquisitive  as to what people are doing. You can learn from them. 

Your schoolmates. Your friends, your former employees, all these different  people have all this vast experience. Mine it, go through it. What is in all of that  that you might do? 

The experience of people that you admire, successful people you know,  successful people connected to your network, successful people you know  about. Successful people I know: Henry Reyenga, the president of CLI, he's a  successful person that I know. I'm good friends with him, and we constantly talk.  I learn from him. He can learn from me. Successful people connected in your  network. Rich DeVos was someone that was connected to our network, our  Dutch network. Because of that, we could connect with him. I learned a lot of  things from him. 

Successful people, you know about. I know about Rick Warren. I've met him a  couple of times. We're not like good friends or anything, but I did have a chat  with him. I read some of his books. I can learn from a successful person that I  know about. 

Find out what people want. How do you find out what people want? If you're  going to start a business or a service, what do people really want? How do you  find out what people want? Talk to them. You have to talk to them. Go out, meet  them. 

What do people want in you family? Talk to your family, talk to your spouse.  "What do you want?" 

Talk to your friends. What do your friends want? Just broad, general questions.  "Really what do you want in life?" They may say something that may relate to  something that you know about that you can provide a product or a service.  What is the culture, what is the city, the village that you happen to live in? What  do they need? Talk to people. Talk to the mayor. Talk the people running the  thing. What do people want? Is it education? Is it some kind of a product? Or  don't people know what they want? You have to get out and talk to people.

12. Figure out what people might want. You can ask people what they want, and they can tell you. A lot of people are just going to say the same old thing.  Sometimes you have to come up with something that they might want that they  don't even know that they want it. There's a famous quote by Henry Ford. "If I  ask my customers what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse. They  wouldn't have said a car." 

Steve Jobs had that same idea about the iPhone and all the things, the Apple  computer and all those kinds of things. People didn't know they wanted a  personal computer until it was invented. 

13. Be a curious, observant person. From the book, Inventology again. "In the  1990s, the British psychology professor, Richard Wiseman, began to suspect  that people who feel lucky tend to be especially observant and that their ability  

to scan their surroundings makes it easier for them to notice useful clues in their environment. And he did a little test with this. He got a bunch of people into a  room and he gave them a newspaper, and he said, "I want you to go through  this newspaper and find out how many times the word football or some word is  used in this newspaper. Just count how many times. At the end, put the paper  down and you're done." There was like 15 times that the word was there. So  some people scanned the thing and looked and looked and looked and looked  and finally came up with the number 15 after 15 minutes. Some people got it  within a minute. The people that got it within a minute scanned it and they saw  on page two - there was a little thing that said, "The answer is 15." They saw  that. They didn't have to go through the whole thing to get the answer of 15.  They saw it there in a little box. So half of them never saw the box. They were  so intent on finding the word that that's all they were doing. They missed that  little, They weren't that observant. 

So he concluded that people that we say, "Wow, they're lucky. They fell into this.  They started this business, and it succeeded." This author's point is observant  people tend to succeed. Lucky things tend to happen to those who are paying  attention - paying attention to people, paying attention to what they say, paying  attention to the connections. 

14. Have a strong desire to really help people. From Inventology again. Some of the most gifted inventors listen to constituents and develop a kinship with  sufferers. They see the problem through other eyes. Perhaps most important,  they feel the urgency to help others, a kind of second-hand pain that cracks  open the mind. If you have a strong desire to really help people II Corinthians  9:8. "And God is able to bless you abundantly so that in all things at all times,  having all that you need, you will abound in every good work." 

Ultimately, if you are going to start a business, if you are going to have a product or a service that makes a difference, that people are willing to pay for, that may 

help compensate you so that you can do ministry, ultimately, you have to be a  blessing to people. 

Your product or your service has to be a blessing to people, and you have to  genuinely care about people. If all you care about is you making money,  ultimately, your product and service will not meet the needs of the people around you. You have to meet the needs of those that are around you. 

15. Fail forward. Starting anything is a matter of trial and error. You're not going  to hit it out of the park first time up to bat. You've got to keep going. You didn't  learn how to walk right away. You fell many times. Every time you fall, it's just an opportunity to get up and try something different. 

Testing ideas.You have to test your ideas. It sounds brilliant to you, it sounds  brilliant to someone else, but will anyone buy it?  

Let the marketplace teach you. You don't have to figure everything out. That's  what's cool about the marketplace. The marketplace will teach you what you  could never figure out on your own. So you go out, and you try to make things  happen. You try to sell things, and no one buys it. Well, you have to fix it. Maybe  it's too expensive. Maybe it's not the right thing. Your market will tell you exactly  what you need to do. But you have to be willing to fail to learn a new thing. 

Ecclesiastes 9:11 "Again I saw that under the sun, the race is not to the swift,  nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent,  nor favor to those with knowledge. But time and chance happen to them all." It's  keep going, it's trying, it's learning from your failures. That's where the success  is. 

16. Find a partner. Again, nothing can be done alone. You need the help of other people. Ecclesiastes 4:9, 10 "Two people are better off than one for they can  help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help.  But someone who falls alone is in real trouble." When you have a partner,  everything is doubled - double the effort, double the time, double the eyes,  double the past experience. Everything is doubled. 

15. Perseverance. You cannot start anything without hanging in there. There's a  lot of failures, there's a lot of trouble, there's a lot of obstacles, and those who  win are those who keep going. I give the example of Christian Leaders Institute.  I remember when Henry first started it. He was in Chicago. I was in Michigan. I  remember that first year, we had six students. They had to come to Chicago for  two days at the end of a class. So I had to drive all the way to Chicago to teach  six people something. Three of them were people that shouldn't have been in  that class. The next year, there was like 16, and the next year, there was like 30. All that effort, all that putting into, putting courses online, all that stuff and there  was hardly anything there. Now, there are thousands, and thousands, and 

thousands, and thousands. But you have to hang in there long enough to get  there. 

16. Keep your eye on the prize. Philippians 3. This is one of my favorite verses.  "Not that I've already obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal,"-- this  is Paul talking-- "but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took  hold of me. Brothers and Sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do is forgetting the past." Yeah. "I've failed, I've tried this,  I've done this. I'm forgetting the past, forgetting what is behind, and straining  toward what is ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God  has called me, having been born in Christ Jesus." 

Remember, the goal is the kingdom of God. The goal isn't business. The goal  isn't money. The goal isn't product or services. The goal is the kingdom of God.  We do all this product and services. We make money to take care of our  families. We do it so that we can influence people, be in people's lives, make a  difference in people's lives, ultimately for the kingdom so that we can share  Christ. That's why you're doing this. See, you have to have that in the  background - that, "I am doing this, not ultimately for some glory business that I  create with my name on it. This is for God's kingdom. I'm doing it, I'm here for a  short period of time, and we've got this stuff to do. God gave us this thing called  enterprise. But it's here to make a difference." 

If I have that in the background, then I'm just exploring God's wonderful creation  with all the variety and all the things going on. What part of his creation could I  do? I don't know, so I'm going to try this. I could fail. Okay, fine. I'll try this or try  that. I'm going to keep going. I'm going to persevere because I have my eye on  the prize - the ultimate prize. So keep thinking, keep dreaming, keep looking to  God. Pray about it. Put it before him. "Lord, what is it that you want me to do?  What could I do?"



Last modified: Monday, April 14, 2025, 11:43 AM