The great Valentine’s Day caper

I love Valentine’s Day. I’ll admit it – as uncool and lame as some of you will think that is, I get a real kick out of it.

This year on our make up Valentines Day (he spent the real V-Day working) I was annoying my husband by chronicling one of our adventures with a present he got for me on Facebook and Twitter when I suddenly realised that I wasn’t just mindlessly taking photos with my iPhone, I was illustrating two really important things – and all with coloured straws.

The present, (as you can see from the photo below) was a very groovy straw joining kit that allows you to drink out of two (or more I’ve just realised) drinks at the same time, while having all the bendy fun you can handle. I’m not sure that the cute kids on the box illustrate that it should be used with cocktails, but you get the point.

The kit consists of over 200 pieces and after tearing it open my husband and I got to work, each designing our half of the straw concoction, neither looking at each other while we worked (we were far too consumed with our design job). We only saw each other’s creations when we joined them at the yellow connector after we had completed them. Despite working from exactly the same pieces, our solutions were completely distinct and unique.

Mine is right hand side – all high and asymmetrical across a diagonal point. My husband’s (showing his very creative brain) is like a roller coaster and is completely three dimensional (which didn’t even occur to me).

In a work environment I’ve always believed that before you do a joint or group brainstorm for issues, each individual should have their own brainstorm first so that they’re not influenced or biased and have an opportunity to put forward their best and most creative ideas.

Left to brainstorm this problem together we might have influenced each other and we would have missed the unique solutions to the problem each of us made on our own.

Now – off to find two more cocktails and rework an even more sophisticated straw solution!

Kirsty Dunphey is the youngest ever Australian Telstra Young Business Woman of the Year, author of two books (her latest release is ‘Retired at 27, If I Can do it Anyone Can’) and a passionate entrepreneur who started at age 15 and opened her own real estate agency at 21. Currently Kirsty heads up www.reallysold.com the premium online copywriting site for real estate agents and is a co-director of Elephant Property in Launceston,Tasmania’s only boutique real estate agency purely for investment property owners. Kirsty’s other ventures are outlined at her website www.kirstydunphey.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter.