Sometimes we get comfortable and forget that we need to expand our efforts, our limitations, and our horizons. This goes for individuals as well as communities and organizations as well.

A recent BBC television production concerned dwarf dinosaurs of Transylvania, land of vampires and legend. Born in 1877, Austro-Hungarian nobleman and self-taught palaeontologist, Franz Baron Nopsca von Felso-Szilvas searched out fossils of dinosaurs near his castle and then at other sites in Transylvania. What he found fascinating was that his local dinosaurs were tiny compared to their cousins found elsewhere in the world.

'They would have made cute pets,' says Dr David Weishampel, a modern day expert on Eastern European dinosaurs at Johns Hopkins University in the USA, and a fan of Franz Nopsca David Weishampel says that Nopsca had a brilliant idea about these budget-sized dinosaurs and why they were small.

Nopsca thought about the creatures as a community, as members of an ecosystem, and proposed that their modest scale could be explained by the fact that they had lived isolated on a large island.
-- Working With Dinosaurs, BBC World Service

Being isolated even on a large island can be limiting. Being isolated on a small island can be ruinous.

In a History Channel commercial, a citizen of Dubai talks about the internet. He praises the amount of information available in books and writings to be found on the net. He figures if he doesn't learn all he can, it's because of his own laziness . . . and he didn't seem lazy. Daily we compete with people well beyond the shores of our own little pond. We need to learn all we can.

Learning and training go hand and hand. Receiving knowledge is good, but training in imperative. We must discover how to use knowledge and learn how to make it work for us.

There is an excellent training video, based on a best selling book, called Why Didn't I Think Of That?, which shows what we can do to help the situation.

Cultivating the creative spirit requires tools to help view surroundings in a new light. Stretch your employees' thinking skills with the 10 challenges presented in this mind-expanding video.

Key Training Points:

How to break the well-worn habits of thought to enhance creativity

How to stimulate others to share ideas and generate alternatives

How to avoid paradigms, which influence the way you look at problems
-- ad copy from Why Didn't I Think of That?

In business we need to be aware of people, customs, and ideas, as well as how we can put these elements to use. We need to constantly learn and improve ourselves. We need to seek out problems and overcome them. If we don't expand our knowledge with all of our resources at hand, we are no better than individuals who have no resources.

To be competitive in business and life, we can't afford to be lazy. We can't afford to be cute little pets. We need to be hungry for learning. We need to outgrow our pond.

Don Doman is a published author, video producer, and corporate trainer. He owns the business training site Ideas and Training (http://www.ideasandtraining.com), which he says is the home of the no-hassle "free preview" for business training videos. He also owns Human Resources Radio (http://www.humanresourcesradio.com), which broadcasts HR and business training information, program previews, and training samples from some of the world's great training speakers twenty-four hours a day. You can listen and learn on Human Resources Radio.