I often like to play with creative juxtaposition games in my headspace.

In fact, I have had learned this approach from the teachings of the late creativity maestro Dr Edward de Bono.

Just a quick one. This is my random round up of some astute observations and/or inspirational quotes of Dr Maxwell Maltz, writing in his Psycho-Cybernetics classic:

1. "If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone."
2. "Your most important sale in life is to sell yourself to yourself."
3. "The most delightful surprise in life is to suddenly recognize your own worth."
4. “Develop an enthusiasm for life, create a need for more life, and you will receive more life.”
5. "You can always find the sun within yourself if you will only search."
6. "Self-improvement is the name of the game, and your primary objective is to strengthen yourself."
7. "Accept yourself as you are. Otherwise you will never see opportunity. You will not feel free to move toward it; you will feel you are not deserving."
8. “Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as you can change your beliefs.”
9. “Live in the present. The past is gone; the future is unknown – but the present is real, and your opportunities are now.”
10. "When you're not goal-striving, not looking forward, you're not really living.”
11. “Every day you must try to make yourself grow. This you can do.”
12. “If you wait until circumstances justify your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are likely to wait forever.”
13. “Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still,. “Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project."
14. "You can do only one thing at a time. I simply tackle one problem and concentrate all efforts on what I am doing at the moment."
15. “You may live in an imperfect world but the frontiers are not closed and the doors are not all shut.”
16. “Man maintains his balance, poise, and sense of security only as he is moving forward.”
17. “You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.”
18. “Times will change for the better when you change.”
19. “When you believe you can... you can!”
20. "We are engineered as goal-seeking mechanisms. We are built that way. When we have no personal goal which we are interested in..."
21. “Science has now confirmed what philosophers, mystics, and other intuitive people have long declared: every human being has been literally “engineered for success” by his Creator. Every human being has access to a power greater than himself.”
22. "We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness."
23. “Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.”
24. "You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live - with your self-respect alive and growing.”
25. "When you see a thing clearly in your mind, your creative "success mechanism" within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort or "willpower."
26. "No matter what happens, you must hold your past successes in your imagination, ready for showing in the motion picture screen of your mind."
27. "Develop a “nostalgia for the future” instead of for the past. The “forward look” and a “nostalgia for the future” can keep you youthful."
28. “The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one.”
29. “Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.”
30. “We, whoever we are, must have a daily goal in our lives, no matter how small or great, to make that day mean something.”
31. "Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.”
32. “To really live, that is to find life reasonably satisfying, you must have an adequate and realistic self-image that you can live with. You must find your self acceptable to you.”
33. "Form a picture in your imagination of the self you wanted to be and “see yourself” in the new role."
34. "See yourself acting, feeling, “being,” as you want to be. Do not say to yourself, “I am going to act this way tomorrow.” Just say to yourself, “I am going to imagine myself acting this way now, for 30 minutes, today.”
35. “Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced. It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem. When one problem is solved, another appears to take its place. Life is a series of problems. If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy - period! Not happy "because of".”

What do I see as I stand back to pause to look at this agglomeration?

One quick idea comes to mind.

These are apparently the pre-requisites for creating your own economy.

All it takes is your creative resourcefulness in tapping into your innate creative success mechanism, as Dr Maltz put it so eloquently, working in tandem elegantly with the six higher-order mental faculties, already naturally endowed in each and every one of us.

On hindsight, and to drive home my point, I have had already gone through this learning curve back in the early nineties, when I departed from the corporate world, where I have had already hung out for almost a quarter of a century, to follow my bliss, by establishing three small entrepreneurial ventures.

One of my ventures was the establishment of a small but unique retail store, aptly called The Brain Resource, in the Central Business District of Singapore, for books, audios/videos, toolkits, posters, and other resources on the brain, learning, creativity, innovation, peak performance, health and longevity.

It was the only one of its kind in Singapore .

For the record, my rationale of setting up the store was actually, in a way, to bankroll and fuel my own voracious reading habits.

From another angle, I have had actually created a captive customer market, because I was also managing and running my own strategy consulting business for small businesses, as well as training development in the schools. This was one of my other remaining ventures.

I even came up with a novel solution to import all the stuff directly from the United States, through the setting up of a freight consolidator at Los Angeles Airport. Even the forwarder in Singapore I had worked with was surprised with my suggestion at first.

Why did I do it? I did it because that was the only way I could circumvent regional distribution agreements with the big boys, for my orders were shipped within the United States, and nobody knew they could be re-shipped to Singapore, through my freight consolidater at Los Angeles Airport.

One more thing: To the American publishers and producers, I was a big time operator.

This was just one of the money-making aspects arising from my creative resourcefulness.

Well, all I wish to say is that I have had created my own economy, which eventually sustained me until I retyred (not a typo; just a crafty way to express a novel spin for me in a new environment!) in mid-2005 and relocated to Vietnam in 2010.

I am now enjoying the rustic laissez faire lifestyle of this big country.