TRANSLATE THIS WEBSITE

Post to Twitter

What’s it like to be in the PebbleStorm community? What’s my ‘perfect world’ vision?  Here’s how I’ve painted & sketched it…

I did the above painting while at a cool walk-in painting studio in Santa Monica called PaintLab, at an event my friend Elliot Lemberger put together.

Sketched Version

More PebbleStorm Art

You can see that many of the individual components of the painting (like the rainbow, treasure chest, tree, sun…) started as individual sketches.  You can see ’em in the “Art Of PebbleStorm/CEOFlow” past blog post.

What’s Your Dream World/Work/Life?

Your dream work gets more real the more specific you describe it to yourself and others, and the more you declare it to the world. You can do this through writing, drawing, video or any other number of ways.

Here’s my original “Small Pebble, Big Wave” Self-Manifesto that remapped my mind and was the beginning of the vision for PebbleStorm. I did it before the sketches started coming to me.

Want to make your vision more concrete? Leave a comment below about 1-3 things that describe your dream business (or life)…declare it to yourself, me and the world!

Subscribe For Free To PebbleStorm Updates By Email

Post to Twitter

In July I spoke at a Meeting Of The Minds event in Southern California. MOTMs was started by Kurt Daradics of FreedomSpeaks and Baron Miller, and is a great group of entrepreneurial people that meets monthly.  I had fun sharing with them last night!  The format was casual (more of an interview) and not a presentation, and so rather than a slide deck, I put together a collection of sketches I’ve done over the past year, and at different times during the talk I’d call one up to share with people.

Here is the collection…enjoy!

View more presentations from Aaron Ross.

==========

  1. Subscribe to the PebbleStorm Blog by Email
  2. Follow me on Twitter

Post to Twitter

img_3249-smallMy mind can’t process classic “business plans” (you know, the 20 page Word documents with marketing and sales plans, financing plans, planning the plan plans…)   About a year ago, I sketched out a Visual/Circular Business Plan.  Now, since I’m introducing the idea to my PebbleStorm “Come Play With Me” group, and now I’ve updated it…

One of the biggest differences in this plan, compared to a classic plan, is that there is no specific time line. You could add some rough time estimates in as rings (like tree rings). There is, more importantly, a logical progression of small projects and goals that lead to larger ones, like stepping stones.

Consider that you, today, are in the middle. The innermost ring is your first or next babystep.  The outermost rings are your vision.  It’s not meant to be perfect, accurate or a ‘project plan’ – it’s a simple way to have fun giving your vision a shape and substance that is easily explained both to yourself and others!

Oh – and if you do one, you have to share it with me 🙂   And most importantly: have fun with it!

visual-business-plan-b

And some video…

An Example By A Reader

From Todd Clark, of www.FireUnderEveryButt.com

I recently stumbled onto your site and loved the creative business plan you developed.

I just sat down tonight to do the same because tomorrow, at my group mastermind session, we are to present our business plans for 2012. I’m gonna hav a good time with this one!   I am sharing it with you ’cause you said to do so on your planning page.

It’s not a great photo of it…butt (not a typo), you get the gist.
T H A N K   Y O U.
What a great approach!
.
Here’s Todd’s art… (click to enlarge).  By the way he’s clearly great at art (much better than I in his way)…you do not need to be ‘good’ at art to do a fun version for yourself!

Subscribe to the PebbleStorm Blog by Email

Post to Twitter

1) Imagine: Sometimes an image comes to me while I’m trying to think of a visual way to represent an idea.  Sometimes it just comes, like the sun one 🙂  When an image comes to me, I jot it down in pen in my notebook:

img_1750

2) Prototype: I usually let the image sit for a few weeks or even months.  I might sketch it out in pen several times, before I redo it in colored pencil…

ps-sun

3) Finish: Again, the image sits for awhile, days, weeks or months…before I resketch the image in black ink, and use the pastels for bright color:

pebblestorm-pastels

And here is the final product!

pebblestorm-sun

4) Capture: I find some decent light, and just take a picture of the sketch with a digital camera (my Canon 870is takes great quality pictures).  I then do some basic editing/cropping with Adobe Photoshop Elements, upload here or into a presentation, and voila!

One I’m cultivating now: a “PebbleStorm Tree” image

‘Cultivating’, get it?  Ha, sometimes I crack myself up 🙂

In the Vipassana meditation retreat I just attended, this image came to me, outlining four different types of happiness (fleeting, enduring, lifetime, universal/mindset). Most people spend all their time focused on happiness at the leaves/fleeting (get a promotion/bonus) and branches/enduring (job/career/salary) stages, without applying themselves to determine their trunk (lifetime work purpose) or retrain their roots (mindset/awareness/attitude).

PebbleStorm’s strength is helping people with their “trunk” (building a business around a life purpose), which in turn creates healthier branches and leaves (more money, better career), and an easier connection to ways to enhance fundamental awareness/happiness at the mind level.

I’m only in the prototyping stage now, and don’t know when the final sketch will crystallize…

img_1753-1

img_1752-11

UPDATE Dec 23/08…here’s the tree I sketched while at a cafe in Buenos Aires (text and labels to follow…)

pebblestorm-tree-2

Subscribe to the PebbleStorm blog by email

Post to Twitter

Sketched yesterday while hanging out at the Manhattan Beach Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf…

Click to expand…

pebblestorm-sun

Your Unique Genius powers your dream business, creating the outcomes you desire. I just put some examples in 🙂

Subscribe to PebbleStorm by email

Post to Twitter

I put together and uploaded a bunch of new sketches this week for CEOFlow.  Preview them at:
www.flickr.com/photos/aaronross

Full set (includes some PebbleStorm sketches too):
http://flickr.com/photos/aaronross/sets/72157605840085105/

CEOFlow Original Post

Post to Twitter

Freshly painted in Kauai this morning, an image based off of an idea of Jose Caballer’s of www.thegroop.net:

Subscribe to PebbleStorm by email