It’s been an interesting 2 weeks for me. I had a few talks, met some really cool people and was involved in some great conversations. I can’t stress enough how happy I am to hear the plans that some of our great minds are busy concocting. I’ve been contemplating a lot these days how much perspective really plays into the quality of our life. As much as I am seeing the changes and plans being executed, we still have many people who think that our obstacles are just too big to overcome. I am left asking myself this question, are you creative enough to succeed?

Every problem has a solution. You just have to be creative enough to find it.

Travis Kalanick

When I sit back and think about 2020, I get lost in the possibilities of what I can achieve right from the comfort of my home. I begin thinking about the skills I need to acquire to build my business & brand, but also how I can effectively tackle some of the problems in my niche.

Then I start Googling and come across new tools, new resources, new courses, new tips and tricks and slowly, I can start piecing together a bigger picture and then I start mentally road-mapping how I can begin achieving what I want.

Now, I know I am not the only one! As a matter of fact, I have been meeting more people who are so optimistic about the opportunities at present, that listening to them gets me fired up to go home and get back to work.

One of the biggest flaws we currently have is that we got far too many people preaching doom and gloom. People who have a Ph.D. in Problem Identification. We have too many people preaching from the highest mountains about why it can’t be done and quick to poke holes in your ideas and efforts, yet never actually offer up a solution to the problems or try to tackle it themselves.

Yes we know that here in T&T, things are not perfect, but we are not helpless and we also have many things in place for us to succeed. You have all the resources to learn new skills, we have the systems in place to participate in the global economy and there has never been a time where we could dive into doing exactly what we want, in whatever field we choose.

In 2020, your success is going to depend on 1 thing. How creative you can get with solving the problems in your space!

That’s it!

The industrial age and school have groomed us for a life of function. It has taught us how to become a cog in someone else’s system and now that the system has completely changed, most of us are displaced and have no idea where or how we fit in. Now is the time to take all of your knowledge acquired and figure out how to build your own system.

Instead of trying to be a functional dot, we need to shift our mindset into becoming the connector of dots. If we can create our own systems that allow us to solve the problems in our niche, we will no longer be reliant on employment but we can also create multiple streams of income, in a niche that we choose to serve.

Starting Droid Island, I knew that I wanted to blog about the issues in the space. I then seen a gap with respects to the lack of diversity of the smartphones being brought into the country. Blogging and selling the devices, allowed me to partner with companies like Huawei, Samsung, Bmobile and Digicel to create more content for my niche and then I was also brought in to host workshops on how to sell smartphones by Bmobile. That lead me to write my first e-book and posting it on Amazon.

Building Droid Island as an e-commerce business, growing my following and becoming a thought leader, has allowed me to morph into a teacher for entrepreneurs here in the Caribbean and showing them how they too can go about building their online businesses.

I would say 80% of my journey was intentional and along the way, I spotted gaps and other opportunities came my way because of the work I have been putting in.

If at any point I ever sat back and said, you know what, trying to educate people on technology is pointless, it doesn’t make money…Or people don’t have credit cards here in Trinidad & Tobago, creating an e-commerce business makes no sense. If I had any of those limiting beliefs at any point, I wouldn’t be here today.

I never let the lack of credit cards stop me from selling online, I went out and found all of the ways possible to get paid and integrated them into my solutions. I figured what are the types of content I could create for my niche that people would actually want to consume and set out creating out.

Nothing is perfect, yes we are behind most first world countries in a lot of aspects but that doesn’t mean we have nothing and we are here helpless and waiting to be saved.

Now is the time for the creative problem solvers to step up and figure shit out.

I was having a conversation with Aldwyn Wayne today and one thing he said that stuck out to me was that “I will never lose because I am always figuring out another way.”

It’s that mindset of always pushing the barriers and when you are backed into a corner, being able to figure out how to create your next move, is what is going to separate the real entrepreneurs from those who would rather just complain that things are too hard.

If you are someone who thinks that life in the Caribbean is way to hard and there are no opportunities or money, I challenge you to get creative in coming up with solutions to solve an issue in your chosen field.

After all, you did choose your field. If the field is too hard for you to break into, maybe you should do some real soul searching and find a space that you are passionate about enough to push yourself to become a problem solver in that space.