By 
The children of today….
I remember when I was nine years old. On weekdays, I would get out of bed and go to school, and when I got home, I would do my homework, eat, and go back to bed. On the weekends, if he wasn’t outside playing, he would watch cartoons most of the day. No Lim Ding Wen, nine years old. He looks like he’s a nine-year-old whiz kid from Singapore who’s fluent in six programming languages. Did you hear enough to make you feel almost worthless? There is more.
Young Mr. Wen has created an iPhone drawing game called Doodle Kids which, as of this writing, has amassed over 4,000 downloads in just two weeks. How do you feel now? He’s probably not as bad as me, he reads on.
Lim originally wrote the show for her younger sisters who like to draw. It works like an engraved sketch. You draw on the iPhone screen with your fingers, and to erase the drawing, you simply shake the iPhone.
All my life I have said that all it takes is a trick for someone to become successful and rich. Not a gimmick of the kind that rips people off, but a gimmick as something simple, small and seemingly insignificant that millions of people will buy and can make you rich enough to live comfortably.
True story: When my son was young, around 6 or 7 I think, he came to me with an idea. He wanted me to put a set of roller skate wheels on his shoes. He annoyed me for weeks. I gave the idea some thought, and while I’m pretty handy and innovative, I couldn’t for the life of me visualize how to retract the wheels and keep them retracted. Also, being the safety conscious fool that I am, I could imagine kids rolling, falling and breaking arms, legs and heads. In today’s society, that means lawsuits, something you could do without. So I told him it was a stupid idea and just scrapped it.
Then, as we were walking through the local mall one day about four or five years later, a little boy just “flyed” past us. He flew, which means rolled. What the hell! How is he doing that? He has slippers on! YEAH! He had a pair of sneakers that had skate wheels built into them. We have just seen our first pair of Heelys. I looked at my son and he looked at me with what I can only describe as anger and disappointment. Every time we’d see a kid in heelys, and I mean EVERYONE, he’d look at me like that. Now I’ve seen that look thousands of times, and I still feel it every time we see them. My son is now an adult, and to this day he won’t let me forget that we missed out on one of the biggest fads of the late 20th century.
What does that story have to do with young lord Wen? Well, I’m not sure, but I hope he found the trick for him. Everyone deserves to find theirs. I just hope my son can find a new one, and he can bet his bottom dollar, this time I won’t ignore another “stupid” idea.
I’m sure many successful businessmen (or women) have had unconventional ideas. I’m sure some may have even scrapped some great ideas like I scrapped my son’s “roller skate in a sneaker” idea. But, the difference between a businessman who gets by and a truly successful businessman is that successful business owners follow their instincts and take chances. They don’t care what others think of the idea. They just knew it would work and they did whatever it took to make it work.
If you come across a “hack” that you think may be the next big thing, jump on the chance! Yours could be the next big thing everyone needs to be a part of! I’m not sure yet? Think rock farts!