What is the difference between creativity and innovation?
by Zeeshan
(Peshawar)
Martin Gilliard
About Martin Gilliard
Posts by Martin Gilliard:
June 1963…
Indoor golf with outdoor view. A giant color picture of a fairway flashes on the backstop net as in the picture above.
The golfer does a full swing and slams the ball into the net. Next a microphone picks up the sound and starts a computer, which works out where the shot would have gone. This in turn tells a Kodak projector which of eighty scenes to project next.
These early golf simulators were named Golf-O-Tron and were made by S & M Products.
With todays advanced computer technology, much more advanced simulators exist such as this one listed on Amazon.
In some cases, an imitation strategy can almost be as effective as an innovation strategy. Copying someone else’s idea by building your own version of it is quite often good business.
Research shows that approximately seventy percent of innovations are in fact copied and this number is increasing over time.
If you’re adopting a strategy of imitation then the trick is not to wait for the right idea to come along instead you should be actively looking for the right idea to copy. Preferably an idea with which you have great understanding and familiarity with but this doesn’t have to be the case.
IMPROVE WHAT YOU ARE COPYING
When you copy someone else’s idea you need to be thinking about more than just a straight forward copy. Think instead about how you can make it bigger or smaller or faster or with more functionality than that which you are copying. Are you able to create the product cheaper or can you add many more features and sell it at a premium? Good imitators often make copies that are both cheaper and better.
LEGAL ISSUES?
When copying some other idea be aware of the legal issues but don’t let that completely put you off. Patents provide only limited protection – they are costly and almost impossible to enforce. Patents often give a lot of information away for the imitator. Information that can be modified so that you are able to produce a similar product that doesn’t violate the patent itself.
TO BE GOOD AT IMITATION STRATEGY…
You need to first drop the stigma. Most of us are brought up in a society where we are told that copying is bad. It’ something that is frowned upon and seen as not the right thing to do.
You also need to not focus too hard on the item that you are copying. An exact replica is not good and is highly likely to fail. Add something new and unique to the idea where ever possible.
If you’re copying an idea used in one geographic location to a completely different one then make sure you do your due diligence. Do a bit of market research to determine if the idea will work just as well in a new location.
SUCCESSFUL IMITATION EXAMPLES
- Visa, Mastercard and American Express which were copies of Diners Club.
- Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome browsers all came after Netscape Navigator.
- Google search came after Yahoo.
- Microsoft excel which was originally a copy of Visicalc
- Microsoft MS-DOS which was basically a copy of CPM
by Max Gunther
How to boost your idea generation.
Every year companies shell out millions for employees’ suggestions. That’s just one small part of the payoff for getting bright ideas on the job. YOU’RE riding home from work, or cleaning the garage, or shaving.
~ Suddenly it hits you: “Hey! Why don’t I . . . “
You’ve got a bright idea. It came from nowhere. You weren’t hunting for it. But here it is, a diamond dropped in your pocket by nobody, for nothing. It’s an idea for making extra money, or solving a problem, or simplifying your job, or face-lifting your house. Or maybe it’s an idea for a gadget or a part-time business.
When will you get another idea like that? No telling. Bright ideas- really bright ones don’t come often. They don’t, that is, unless you know how to make them. And you can learn how.
History is full of men who had that incalculably valuable knack. Edison, who started with little education, ended with 1,200 patents and a tidy fortune. On a smaller scale, there’s the guy at Remington Rand who collected 300 times on ideas he dropped into the suggestion box These are the men who move ahead Says General Electric: “We’re always hunting for idea men. No big company can stay alive long without them.” One indication of the value of ideas: the $20, 000,000 given away by U.S. companies every year for employees’ suggestions.
You can cut in on the bright-ideas benefits yourself, whether it’s to impress the boss, get a better job, hit the suggestion system jackpot or just make things run more smoothly at home.
For today, the art of idea generation is close to a precise science. Psychologists have analyzed it. Big companies that live on new ideas have spent millions refining it. Their conclusions:
- You get bright ideas by combining old ideas in new ways.
- You can improve your idea generation ability by doing this without much effort.
You may find a course on ideas being offered by your company or a local college. If not, ask your librarian for Alex Osborn’s book, Applied imagination, or Charles Whiting’s Creative Thinking in Management. Both are written with businessmen in mind, but anyone can use their teachings in any area of life.
Or YOU can train Yourself. There are only two closely related things you need to understand:
- how to make your idea generation equipment turn over faster, and
- how to shove aside mental blocks so that your ideas can come out.
IDEA GENERATION
Natural-born idea men, tests at the University of Chicago showed, are likely to be people who have trouble making friends, who show a “need to retreat” from the human world into the world of ideas machines and things. But everybody has the mental equipment for idea generation and can speed up the process.
To do that, you must consciously push “Like a machine, the creative part of the mind suffers from inertia,” says Willarc Pleuthner, vice-president of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, big New York ad agency that has done much of the thinking about idea generation.
“The first step for any individual or group in need of ideas,” he says, “is to define precisely the kind of ideas wanted Then set a definite quota and time limit— so many ideas in so much time. Without this deadline, we’ve found, the mind just doesn’t function at top efficiency.”
Suppose you want extra cash for your vacation. You need ideas on how to get it. Pick a quiet time of day and a comfortable chair, or tackle some easy job around the house that doesn’t take much thought. Put a pad and pencil nearby. Tell yourself: “I want 10 ideas by noon.” Probably to your own surprise, ideas will chatter out of your head like machine-gun bullets. “You’ll get more ideas this way,” says Pleuthner, “than in a week of moping around, waiting for ideas to come.”
THE BLOCKS
Once the ideas start flowing, you have to keep them alive at least until you know whether they’re any good. Most people don’t. They kill them off the instant they’re born with what psychologists call inhibitory mechanisms mental blocks. You can get around the blocks (and save good ideas) if you watch out for them. Among the commonest idea killers:
TIMIDITY
Your mind usually allows too big a margin for error. Walter Brzoza, a creative-thinking expert at General Electric, illustrates this block with a closed, empty box the size of a shoebox. Almost always, says Brzoza, people asked to guess its contents list things so small that they’d fit into a box a tenth that size. Anything bigger than a pack of cigarettes seems risky and the mind blocks it. To hurdle this block, force yourself to take rash, even wild chances—mentally, that is.
TRADITION
Your mind rejects ideas if they reverse the way things are usually done or trample on cherished feelings. In a classic demonstration of this block, a group of MIT students was shown an iron pipe bolted upright to a wooden base. Down inside the pipe was a Ping-pong ball. Nearby on a table were an assortment of tools and a rusty, beat-up pail of water. Problem: Get the ball out of the pipe. The students figured it out fast: They poured the water into the pipe.
Then a second group was given the same problem. This time, in place of the rusty bucket there was a sparkling-clean pitcher of ice water with a drinking tumbler. The students tried everything but water. Seeing it in the pitcher, they also elated it so strongly with drinking that they couldn’t think of its other uses.
This mental block often disappears, if you purposely “turn things upside down.”
VISUAL BLOCK
Once you’ve seen a thing one way, you have a hard time imagining it any other way. To illustrate this, GE’s Brzoza takes one group of men and shows them arty drawings of flower vases. He shows second group drawings of faces. Later, he brings the two groups together and shows them a single vague picture. One group says it’s a vase; the other says it’s a face. Again the cure is the conscious search for something different.
FALSE REQUIREMENT
Your mind fences off whole areas of ideas by assuming requirements that don’t really exist.
This block almost upset a good-will gesture a few years back. Connecticut children had been presented a baby elephant by children in India. Problem: How to raise $1,000 to bring over the elephant.
Adults and kids stewed over the problem until someone broke through the mental block and pointed out that the true requirement was not money but transportation. Sure enough, an airline agreed to deliver the elephant for nothing.
IDEA GENERATION TECHNIQUES
The experts have worked out new idea generation techniques that remove blocks at the same time they speed up your creative mind. Most famous is “brainstorming,” formulated in 1939 by Alex Osborn, co-founder of BBD & O. Its main principles:
- Rule out all critical judgments during your idea generation session. If it’s a group session, make it absolutely against the rules to criticize any idea, or laugh at its or deflate it in any way.
- Welcome wild, ridiculous ideas.
- Concentrate on quantity. Forget quality. Don’t stop to assess ideas. The sole object is to get as many on paper as possible.
- When the brainstorming session is over—and only then—go back over the list and begin judging the ideas.
One classic example of brainstorming concerns the group that set out to solve the dishwashing chore. Prize solution: Use edible dishes and eat them after dinner for dessert. A more prosaic example is the bicycle repairman who got publicity and doubled his business by staging races for the kids.
Down-to-earth ideas about solving common problems can be very effective. So can fanciful ones like edible dishes. You won’t know until you try them. And you can’t try them until you force your brain to produce them. That’s the important thing to remember.
You can set up brainstorming sessions where you work. Or set them up with the men in your carpool, your wife or your neighbors, to tackle everything from boosting your neighborhood to winning suggestion-box awards.
The best brainstorming group includes people with different personalities and backgrounds. If possible, bring in somebody who doesn’t know anything about the problem at hand—your wife, for example, on a semi-technical or business problem. She probably won’t know certain things are impossible, so she’ll suggest to them— and maybe they’ll turn out to be possible after all.
You can brainstorm by yourself. Groups produce the most ideas, simply because more creative heads are at work. But according to some researchers, you yourself will create more and better ideas when you are alone. Yale University Prof. Donald W. Taylor found that lone thinkers turned up twice as many ideas per person as people in groups. What’s more, the individuals’ ideas were as original and useful as the groups’.
Another kind of idea generation system, first developed at Hotpoint Co., is called “reverse brainstorming.” In this system, criticism isn’t ruled out; it’s emphasized. The idea is to look at something long and hard, then list as many things as you can think of that is wrong with it—including wild and ridiculous criticisms.
For instance, suppose you figure you can make some money by inventing something—an improved bicycle, say. Go out in the garage, sit down and ponder your son’s bike. Search out every detail that might possibly cause trouble. Follow the usual brainstorm rules: quota, deadline, no judgment of ideas. Very possibly you’ll come up with an idea for improving the bike- something that was blocked in other minds.
Still another idea generation system was developed at MIT by Prof. John E. Arnold. Its main purpose is to get you into the habit of thinking along untried, unorthodox paths.
Arnold told his industrial-design students to imagine a planet named Arcturus IV. This planet has gravity 11 times Earth’s, a methane atmosphere, ammonia seas. Its inhabitants are manlike creatures with two Earth-type eyes and one X-ray eye, three-fingered hands, fragile bones, and so little dexterity that they’d kill themselves in minutes if handed the wheel of your car. Arnold’s students were assigned the job of designing products to sell on Arcturus IV.
This kind of exercise gets you used to traveling in totally new regions of thought. Paradoxically, that’s where you’ll often find the best ideas.
The above article was first published in 1959.
I’m looking for examples of innovative experiences in people’s regular lives.
Maybe something they have done at their job, school, church, sports team, etc.
I’m trying to get a flavor for the types of innovative things, across the spectrum, that people are up to.
Thanks all!
by Chris
(Salem, Massachusetts)
Our H.R. director was a horny old man who genuinely pissed me off. So I sent him a subscription to Playboy magazine addressed to his office. Knowing he had been in trouble for sexual harassment on the job and that he couldn’t keep his nasty fingers off the magazines.
He was caught with them in his desk drawer by the assistant female HR, and that’s all it took. FIRED!!! As he was leaving I smiled and said ‘We sure will miss you!”
by Lee
(Knoxville, TN)
A warm welcome to the ‘how to judge creativity’ section of the web site.
Judgement and creativity is an interesting topic. On one hand, you need to avoid being judgemental in order to let creativity flourish, but on the other hand, at some point, you have to make a judgement on whether or not it’s the right thing to do.
IS JUDGEMENT OK?
So judgement is OK as part of the creative process but just not at the start of the process. Freedom from judgement at the start of the process is extremely important otherwise it would hinder the flow of new ideas.
Ideas often lead to more ideas. Start judging ideas too early and people will start to shut down their creative thoughts and soon you will have no new ideas coming into the process.
DOES JUDGEMENT HAVE A PART TO PLAY IN THE CREATIVE PROCESS?
There are some schools of thought that suggest judgement should be left out of the creative process entirely but in my opinion, the problem with that is you end up with nothing to really focus on. You have many ideas but no priorities.
So yes, judgement does have a part to play in the creative process. It’s just that you need to ensure that your judging is done in the latter part of the creative process. After all the new ideas have been thought up.
Judging creativity gets you to an endpoint. Ultimately you need to produce results from your creative exercise and it’s the judgement of what best to focus that will get you those results.
HOW TO JUDGE CREATIVITY?
When judging creativity you need to think about the novelty of the idea. Just how new and unusual is the idea? Does it excite you or interest you? Is it completely new or will it only be new to the organization or area to which it will be introduced?
You also need to consider if it’s fit for purpose. Will it work? Will it do what was intended for it to do?
Could it be improved? Consider combining the idea with other ideas that were submitted. Would this work? Would it improve things?
If the creative idea has been thought up as a result of a problem statement then how well does it solve that problem?
How feasible is the idea? In your opinion is it likely to succeed in the market place or social setting to which it will be introduced?
Then if you work for an organization you also need to consider if it fits in with the overall strategy and core competencies of that organization. Is it something that your organization can handle? Does the organization have the right skill sets and resources available to make the idea a success? Will it add value?
I like to put a cross-reference grid together when judging creativity. Use a spreadsheet or a table in a word processor and put your ideas in the rows and the qualities or attributes that you want to grade the ideas against in the columns e.g. novelty, usefulness, cost, value add, overall fit, solves the problem, etc. then score each idea against the attributes. In theory, the idea that scores the highest you should run with. If some attributes are more important than others then consider multiplying by a weighting factor.
I’ve never done this but it will work.
Step 1. Tell your target to go get food, drinks, etc. or anything to get them out of the house for a while.
Step 2. After they leave, get a bucket and fill it with cold water.
Step 3. Open their bedroom door a crack about 3 inches open.
Step 4. Put the bucket on the crack of the door to where it sits perfectly without stumbling.
Step 5. Tell your target you will be waiting in her/his room and to meet you there.
Step 6. When the target opens the door they will get splashed by the cold water.
Step 7. Make sure you record it.
Step 8. This step is optional post the video on Youtube.
P.S. This revenge works best with hardwood floor.
Make sure to have a PEACE OFFERING!!
HOPE IT WORKS!
by Amy
(OHIO)
By Norman Carlisle (This article was originally published in October 1963)
When George Breen a young electrical-equipment salesman, moved to a Vermont farm with the idea that he’d make maple sugaring pay, he soon tired of the backbreaking labor involved in doing it as it had been done since the Revolution. Extracting sap from the trees and conveying it by bucket to the evaporating tanks was a tedious business. Breen, using his head instead of his back, decided to automate the process.
He rigged up an intricate network of plastic tubes that ran from tree to tree and ended up in the vat. Realizing he had an invention that others could use, Breen, applied for a patent. Then he asked himself the question that plagues every inventor: “How can I sell it?
Breen had heard that inventions were hard to sell, especially to big firms with their own research departments, but he boldly discussed his device with the company that had sold him the tubing – the giant Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. It promptly bought the rights to Breen’s invention, and now markets it under the name of Mapleflo. Royalties flow into Breen’s pockets as easily as the sap flows through the 20 miles of plastic tubing in his 65-acre sugar bush.
Was the ease with which Breen sold his invention to a big company – which holds hundreds of patents of its own – just a freak? Not at all. Only the fact that he sold it to the first company he offered it to is exceptional.
THE ODDS ARE WITH YOU
How many inventions are actually sold and used? Statistics are hard to come by because the U.S. Patent Office keeps no records of what becomes of an invention after it’s patented. But studies by the Patent, Trademark, and Copyright Research Foundation of George Washington University revealed that a surprisingly high percentage are actually sold or used.
While authoritative estimates just a decade ago ran as low as 20 percent, a study by the Foundation indicates that between 55 and 65 percent of all recently patented inventions are actually used. And the remaining 35 to 45 percent of unused ones include some that obviously had little chance of a sale, to begin with – like a recently patented bagel slicer (a bagel is a doughnut-shaped hard roll); a balloon-supported, flying landing field for rescuing stricken airliners; and an improved dowsing rod that uses copper tubing instead of the familiar “witching” stick. That unused category also includes “back-up” patents taken out by company researchers who have simply patented embellishments, which may never be used, on existing inventions.
What’s the secret of selling an invention to a big company? The success stories of independent inventors, research directors, patent attorneys, and invention brokers indicate that the trick is to offer the right invention. George Breen picked the ideal concern to approach because 3M had much to gain from marketing his pipeline sap-harvesting system.
Sell to a big or small company? The small one is probably more anxious for new inventions.
THE “BIG-COMPANY” PRODUCTS
Some inventions are, by their very nature, “big-company” products. Jim Robbins, the man who devised the coin-operated do-it-yourself dry-cleaning machine, knew from the start that only a big appliance maker could buy it and put it on the market; a small concern could hardly have coped with the manufacturing and distribution problems.
While he was working on his machine, Robbins and his lawyer studied various appliance makers. They picked two as the first targets. The second Divas Norge, which sent a team of top executives to the lime Michigan token ~ which Robbins had built his sample machine. Norge bought it on royalty teams that promise over $2,000,000 for Robbins.
A few years ago, Leonard Marrafino, a Mount Vernon, N.Y., printer, and John Spero, a draftsman, joined forces to develop a “crazy” invention: a way to put stripes in toothpaste. By much tinkering, they devised a tiny plastic gadget that goes on the top of the tube. When the tube is squeezed, coloring matter comes through the slots, making stripes in the toothpaste. The inventors decided that no small company could make a go of distributing the novel toothpaste, and offered it to the pharmaceutical giants. Lever Brothers bought it. The result: Stripe.
While most big companies are receptive to the right offering, only a few inventions are really big-company naturals.
What’s the secret of success for the independent inventor? Offering the right invention.
THINK SMALL
Aim for the littler fellows. “I generally seek out small companies,” says K. O. Kessler, an invention broker. “The big companies rarely need an invention—lots of smaller concerns do.”
Kessler cites cases like the bricklaying device developed by Henry Ruzza of Eau Claire, Wis. It enables a do-it-yourselfer to erect brick walls and maintain a level line. “No good for the big companies—but we found a small plant in Michigan that snapped it up because the firm needed something to keep its machines busy.”
There are hundreds of similar examples. Dr. Robin Beach, a Brooklyn engineer who invented the Magic Wand, a simple wood-and-wire device for bleeding static electricity from industrial machines, could have sold to a big firm. Instead, he decided on a small specialized one that he felt would really push his invention.
A small firm was also the choice of Frank Bellock of Chicago whose invention is a kid-proof wall outlet, developed after his son received a bad shock when he thrust scissors into an ordinary outlet. Bellock picked a modest-size local company that needed specialty items.
When Dr. Robert Horton, a Minnesota physician, developed the Slumbertone, a small transistorized gadget that emits a sound soothing to a baby, he found the ideal maker – a small company already making a baby product, and which could easily handle another with its sales and manufacturing setup. The terms for the inventor were much more favorable than he could have obtained from a company in less need of his invention.
HOW DO YOU FIND THE COMPANY?
Your local Chamber of Commerce will be eager to give you information about any firm that might be interested. Many trade associations will provide you with a list of members, and with information about which ones might be interested in your invention. A visit or letter to a field office of the Small Business Administration will get you advice about firms that might be prospects. You can get the “Directory of National Associations of Businessmen” by sending 50 cents to the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington 25, D.C. “Thomas’ Register,” available in most public libraries, lists all U.S. companies by products.
It’s not impossible to get firms to come to you. Classified advertisements in newspapers have attracted buyers. A man with a pharmaceutical process sold it for $200,000 through an ad in a New York daily. For a fee of $3 the Patent Office will list your invention in the “Official Gazette.” The Small Business Administration puts out a “Products List Circular” in which, without charge, it will describe and picture your invention.
You can offer your invention to a company in person or by mail. If you’ve got a patent on it, the basic document, of course, is the patent application. A lot of inventors wonder about offering a patent-pending invention, or one on which they haven’t even applied for a patent. You can offer either. Many companies will look only at patented or patent-applied-for inventions; others will consider unpatented ones. One firm that takes inventions at any stage is Trigrett Industries, of Jackson, Tenn. It’s headed by John Trigrett, one of the country’s top invention experts.
The question that Trigrett hears most frequently from inventors is: “How do I know they won’t steal my invention?”
“The idea that companies steal inventions is a myth,” Tigrett told me. “It’s cheaper for them to negotiate a royalty agreement than to risk litigation. I’ve handled hundreds of inventions, patented and unpatented, and I’ve never heard of anyone stealing an invention.”
DO COMPANIES STEAL INVENTIONS?
A myth, says an inventions expert. It’s cheaper for a company to pay royalties than fight lawsuits.
SHOULD YOU USE A BROKER?
If you want to eliminate the nuisance of peddling your own invention, you can. Many patent attorneys will help you follow through on sales. There are reputable invention brokers and patent agents, such as K.O. Kessler, who operate on a percentage basis. With their considerable know-how in negotiating agreements, as well as their knowledge of markets, they are well worth patronizing. You should be warned, however, that there are some “brokers” who don’t do much for you. Make sure that the man who undertakes to sell your invention really has the experience and facilities he says he has. Check with the Better Business Bureau before signing up.
Another possibility is to set up your own company and keep all the profits for yourself. To do that, of course, you have to want to run a business and have some business qualifications. Take the case of Al Creighton, a young Boston economist who cooked up a concoction of resin and metal powder into “plastic steel.” He figured that his putty-like metal, the formula of which he didn’t want to disclose, would be hard to sell to an existing company. He knew just what his product would do; he’d mixed up considerable batches of it in his kitchen. And he thought that he could get salesmen carrying other lines to take on his product and show it during their calls on hardware stores and other outlets.
Creghton rightly figured that he had a perfect setup for his own business – a conclusion since confirmed by the fact that now, 10 years later, he does a comfortable $3,000,000-a-year business.
His story, like those of almost all successful inventor-operated companies, has the ingredients necessary for success:
- You’ve got a demonstrably marketable product.
- The production problem is not heavy
- A selling method is available
- You can raise the capital
THE SQUANGLE STORY
For an instructive blueprint, an inventor pondering making his-own could hardly do better than to study the way Ove Hanson of Seattle worked it out. Hanson invented the Squangle, a combined variable-angle square, level, protractor, and handsaw guide. He had a real handy item for home craftsmen, and knew he could find a company to buy it. He reasoned, however, that his device might be lost in the line of a big company. Sell it to a small one? Yes – but Hanson figured he had his problems so well under control that he might as well start his own business.
First, he knew that his invention was saleable: He had made up a number of Squangles by hand, and they had been snapped up by craftsmen.
Production? No problem there. He didn’t need a factory. After he had his dies made, Hanson found a number of local machine shops that had presses standing idle at odd hours. He arranged to use them at lower than-usual rates. Assembling and packaging he did in his garage.
As for selling, Hanson didn’t need a sales force. He had no difficulty finding manufacturers’ representatives who were glad to take on an extra line.
The all-important matter of capital was handled locally. Hanson put in some of his own money and persuaded friends to put in the additional money needed for getting started. Later, with a going enterprise, he had no trouble raising $10,000 more for new dies and larger inventories. The success of the Squangle was now well known enough in his community to make it easy to sell stock to 25 local people.
Squangle may not have made Ove Hanson rich, but it has brought him a return far beyond anything he could have expected by selling it any other way.
Does your invention meet the basic specifications for success? Is it useful, workable, producible, and marketable? If it is, no matter how you decide to sell it, you can figure that the odds are in your favor.
End of article
I perform a comedy cabaret act which has never made me more than a fraction of a living. I started dating a workmate a few years ago who claimed to have been an actress and TV and radio presenter for 20 years with a wealth of experience and contacts in the entertainment industry and she could use these to help me take my act to “the next level”.
Over the next two years I was with her I diverted vast amounts of time, energy and money into a variety of her hair-brained schemes for this purpose all of which led to nothing. Furthermore her behaviour backstage at some of my gigs got me banned from certain venues, as she was doing things like muttering snide remarks about other acts within earshot. Towards the end of our relationship I started doing some detective work and discovered that she’d only done a bit of amateur dramatics and been in a handful of “independent” films – i.e. “bad home movies”.
She lasted one night in a Fringe Festival play because other cast members complained about her reeking of alcohol on stage and ruining the whole performance. Also she couldn’t remember the names of any of the school plays in which she’d been nor could she remember the name of the university at which she’d allegedly studied acting.
She would also get quite nastily defensive every time I tried to scratch the surface of her blatant façade by suddenly making stinging remarks about how little I had to show for my life at 40. In otherwords, she knew as much about the entertainment industry as my next-door neighbour’s cat knows about The Theory of Relativity. I was so in love with her that I fell for it all like a ton of bricks – how did she get past my bullsh*t radar?
However, the thing that drove me to alcoholism, anti-depressants and diazepam was that she claimed to have a fatal disease and had only five years to live. After we split up a doctor friend told me that her disease was indeed debilitating but NOT fatal. She just used it as a way of screwing money out of gullible, emotionally vulnerable, middle-aged divorcees like me. I have now been diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety disorder, my cabaret act is lying in ruins and I have about 800 unsold CDs in my wardrobe collecting dust … plus a COMPLETELY broken heart. It has now been three years since I last saw her and I still wake up every morning with a cannonball in my stomach.
Anyway, I found out after she gave me the boot that she’d been fired from two day jobs for gross professional misconduct. I just want to know the name of her insurance company so I can tell them anonymously that she had her old car deliberately stolen to claim the insurance money. Oh! And I must call the British Embassy to tell them that she over-stayed her two-year working visa, something for which she could be barred from ever entering the UK again.
Anyway, my main method of revenge has been writing cruel, spiteful songs about her and putting them up for sale on the internet. I can send you the link if you want.
If these songs amount to libel and she tries to sue me – GOOD! – it’ll be fantastic publicity for my act.
Any other suggestions for sweet vengeance would be greatly appreciated.