Kevin Ehlinger Wilde is the founder of WildSparks consulting and he joins Neva Lee Recla to share his insight on being an innovative online entrepreneur. Kevin is an author of children’s books. His books teach how to turn obstacles into fun, because he is all about being creative and having fun. Listen in to as he and Neva share some laughs and talk about the importance of having fun and being brave.

Yay! Hi Neva. Great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. I’m excited to get a chance to talk to you again.

Yeah, thank you for coming on.

Yeah.

I’m so excited. So what are your superpowers?

I have the ability to play.

So my superpowers, I would say, I have probably three superpowers. One is that I have the ability to play. I love to play a lot. I grew up in a large family. Neva, are you an only child or do you have siblings?

I’m an only child in this house.

Okay.

But I have two half-siblings from my dad’s previous marriage.

Great! So again, so you have the idea of being all alone? Well, I was surrounded by nine other kids. And I was the second youngest. You probably sleep in your own bed. I actually had to share my bed forever, like until I was 18, and I finally got the chance to move out. But anyway, because of that, we got a chance to play a lot. We always had playmates all the time. Still, I love to play. I love to draw. So here’s just a little picture on the back.

That’s awesome.

But I do a lot of fun little drawings and stuff like that. I was actually on an airplane flight once with a five-year-old sitting next to me and I showed him a little trick about how he could draw different pictures, make animals just out of a basic few shapes. Again, we had a great time with that.

That’s awesome.

Then I also have a superpower of just having a great imagination. One of the ways I do that is I play a game called What If. The idea, what if we could breathe underwater? So, you and I can play this idea, just what if? What if we could breathe underwater? How would that be something different? We’d probably have cities under water.

Probably.

We’d be able to walk in and out of the ocean, do whatever we’d want. And so, all the different fish would be like pets and maybe more like friends. And so, a lot of different things like that. What if we were all the same color? What’s a favorite color for you?

Probably turquoise.

Okay, so imagine that everybody in the whole world was turquoise. There wouldn’t be any race. There wouldn’t be anything. We just all happen to be the same color. Because of that, there would be less bullying, less pushing around. People just wouldn’t make fun of other people ’cause they’re a different color. It would just be we’re all the same.

Then, probably another good one is, one of my favorites is what would happen if people just never stopped growing? Imagine that. Your mom, let’s say, at the age of 20 was six feet tall. But by the time your mom turns 40, she’s 12 feet tall. And then she keeps on growing so that by the time she’s 60, she’s 18 feet tall. Or, if she gets to be like your grandma’s age, let’s say your grandma was 80, so then your grandma would be 24 feet tall. We just keep growing and growing and growing. You would be, say, four feet tall and you have a grandma who was 24 feet tall.

It’s just really convenient that we actually stop growing and if we never stop growing, then our houses would be different. When you go and sit on grandma’s lap, she might crush you. She might, actually, step on you. She’d have to drive a different car. So, a lot of those different what if kind of things and that’s kind of fun things. So, that’s part of that superpower of imagination.

Yeah, that’s awesome.

Yeah.

It would be kind of interesting if everyone kept on growing because then all of our things, like the iPad, would be itty bitty.

That’s right, yeah. Even like your fork and spoon would have to be…

Humongous.

For your grandmother, it’d be huge. The bed your grandma would sleep in would be monstrous.

Massive.

So yeah, totally different. It’s just one of those things. We don’t think about it, but it’s really nice in a way, that we actually stop growing so we can do that.

Yeah. So, what does being an innovative entrepreneur mean to you?

Being an innovative entrepreneur: First of all, from an innovation standpoint, it’s really about being creative. I mentioned growing up in a big family and I actually was raised on a small farm. We didn’t have a whole lot so, we ended up sharing things, making the most of what we did have. In doing that, it was using our creativity, using our minds. If something broke, we’d figure out a way to fix it using twine string or some other kind of thing. Or, we just found a different way of doing it. Either we did it by hand or something like that.

That’s good.

You can’t go out and buy everything all the time.

It’s really about using that, making the most of what you do have. You can’t go out and buy everything all the time. So how do you make the most of what you have in life? Some of us are born where we have a lot of riches. We have a lot of things we can access if we want some new clothes, we go out and buy them. Other people, like the way I grew up, well I got hand me downs. I had to wear clothes that my brothers wore before me and you can patch ’em, you can resew ’em, you can do whatever to make ’em the way you want. That’s really about being innovative, is just making the most of the resources you have.

Yeah. I think that’s really cool and that’s kinda what I believe. ‘Cause I kinda do the same thing. But it kinda reminds me when I was younger, when I was around one, two, I actually was on a ranch.

Cool.

So we raised our own food. There was a fire nearby, so we had to move, but it was kinda cool. We had rabbits, chickens, and things like that. So, that’s what it reminds me of. It is cool being created ’cause some people take what they don’t have or what they do have for granted and so when you can take something that you don’t appreciate that much or you take something that you have and you turn it into something new or maybe better or something like that, it’s being innovative.

Yeah, it’s fun. We did have a lot of, say, traditional toys. But if we wanted a car, well then we just found a rock that looked kind of cool and that became our car. We’d drive through the dirt. So, there’s a lot of different ways to have that play and I think that’s true for all kids, but especially even for adults. When we talk about being innovative, a lot of people, when they get older, they stop thinking like that. I guess that’s one of the greatest things if you have that ability to continue to use your creativity, the better it is.

Yeah. I agree with that ’cause some people like I was saying earlier, you can look at something and it might be plain like you said rock, and you can use your imagination to turn it into something, like with a bunch of mechanics, like a car. I think that’s really awesome.

So the idea of being innovative, really, is solving problems. Sometimes when you solve problems, even if it’s world hunger and you’re trying to have something for supper, it’s like, “Well there’s nothing in the refrigerator, what am I gonna do?” What can you figure out? Being innovative is like, “Here’s what I do have. So what can we do to solve this problem? What can we do to solve that?” That’s how people start companies. They see a problem and they said, “Well I’ll just invent this to solve it.” That’s how they created and all those different things is they realized well we don’t have, say oil or gas to create energy, but we have sun. We can use the sun in order to create energy. So, those are the types of ways that bring energy and using our imagination.

We can actually talk a little bit more about this, but we do have to take a quick break. Will you tell people where they can go to find out more about you?

Yes, I’d love to do that. Go to www.wildespark.com and they can learn a lot more about the types of things I do.

Awesome! So, we’ve been talking with Kevin Ehlinger Wilde about the innovative online entrepreneur. We’ll be right back.

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