I was talking with a true creator of content last night, someone with three seasons of episodic, multi-cast-member comedy creation in the can. This person works hard every day to keep the momentum rolling on his baby, and try to make it all work. But before all that, he had the passion to launch.
Great Intentions
I could fill volume after volume of books with the ideas I’ve come up with that would definitely be winners, that I never acted upon. We all have great ideas. Lots of us have ideas that we discuss with our friends or coworkers, all agree are top-notch ideas, and then we don’t execute against them.
Having ideas but not executing against the best of them is like having extra tokens at the video arcade when they close. They’re useless. They are a currency of contextual relevance.
What to do? What to do?
Start
Start. Start small if you have to, but figure out the best of your current ideas (dear LORD don’t go back and get out those mothball ideas, because one way or another, I’m sure they’ve snuck themselves out into the mainstream and someone else is doing it. Put on your tinfoil hats if you want, but your old ideas have already found their way into the world, I nearly promise you).
Take the BEST of your current ideas and ask yourself, “Is this something I’d be willing to BLEED for over the next several months?” Not forever. That’s a sucky way to consider a new idea. Ask yourself if you’d be willing to get a tattoo for this new idea, provided you can remove it 9 months from now. That’s the idea you want to be working on.
End in Mind
Stephen Covey talks about Beginning with the End in Mind in his book, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The idea is basically this: where do you want to go? Once you answer that, you organize and execute around that priority. So, specific to this idea, what if you’ve got an idea to make custom tee shirts and you want to quit your day job and make enough money to do this for a living? You’ll have to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine how much money that equals, and how you’ll get there. Right?
Plan
Take that idea and ask yourself: how do I put it all together? Can I do it all myself? How few people will I need to make this go? (Obviously, if you’re starting your own venture, and if you have to pay your partners, the fewer the better, if you want to make a living). Decide what has to come first. And here’s a trick: if you can figure out a way to try your new idea without quitting your day job, all the better. Don’t ever do something that means giving less to your day job than your best, but instead, look for ways to dovetail your other interests into the spaces in between your day job and your family life.
Set Small Targets, and Hit Them
Sound a bit like some of my other recent posts? The idea definitely relates to you and launching your ideas, right? The plan is simple: decide which of your ideas you want to execute, figure out the end point of where you want to go, make a plan for how to get there, and then break that plan down into easy-to-digest “small bites” that make it easy for you to feel like you can make it there.
At the Heart of it all, The Passion to Launch
The only thing that might separate you from countless other people with great ideas is whether you do something about it. What are you going to do to turn your idea into a passion? What will you do to turn that passion into something real?
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