One of the chief competitive advantages of small creative businesses is that we can quickly create new business opportunities and innovations. We can turn on a dime and accelerate to 60 in seconds, as opposed to much larger business that get stuck in managerial bloat, review processes, and shareholder concerns. Small businesses that aren’t leveraging these abilities are inevitably underperforming and thus under-earning.
This agility leads to a lot of failure by way of missed opportunities and lost momentum, though. Our key virtues often do become the vices by which fall.
It’s pretty common for creative entrepreneurs to create a solid solution, opportunity, or market and not harness the opportunities because they’re too quick at moving on to the next thing. They’re so tuned to creating new opportunities, products, or shiny new baubles that they leave the seeds they just planted on the ground.
You don’t have to be a gardener to know that you usually can’t just throw seeds on the ground and hope the plants develop. You have to place the seeds in the soil, make sure the soil has nutrients and water, and perhaps do a little weeding. Only the most hardy plants will survive without care in their earliest stages.
Generating a new solution or opportunity is reaching into that bag of creativity you have and pulling out a seed. It’s a cool party trick, but it won’t pay your bills.
What will pay the bills is taking that seed and doing something with it. You develop it into a product, service, or event. You place it in the environment of the people it’s meant to help so that it can be nourished. You redesign it and rework it so that you prune away all the “really cool” features that don’t benefit anyone.
And then you care and feed it after it’s started to grow. You promote it, talk about it, continue to submit for feedback and get testimonials, and rework your marketing to show that the seed you planted in the past has grown into something beautiful.
The difference between creative professionals and creative flakes is not that one has better ideas or opportunities – it’s that the creative professional understands that 80% of the ideas she comes up with aren’t worth her time to develop and instead focuses on developing the remaining 20%. That’s hard for us to come to grips with because we often live for the creative chase. We love getting that Eureka moment in the creative process, but most of us abhor the implementation component. The creatives that actually put food on the table know that the Eureka! is fun, but the implementation is where careers and lives are made.
More importantly, the implementation is where the real change in the world happens. Imagine if Shakespeare’s great plays were lost to the bar or bath … or if Newton scribbled down the observation of the apple and forgot about it … or if Jobs and Wozniak threw their idea in a drawer and moved on to not-finish the next thing … or Martin Luther King, Jr. just thought about the ideas from “A Letter from Birmingham Jail?” Within each of us is a seed that can become a forest of change.
You have some seeds that you’re neglecting. Just for today, I’d like you to rummage through them to see which ones are worth keeping and which ones you need to leave in your idea garden. Those seeds might be in:
- A popular or well-received post or article you wrote
- A comment or question from a post or article you wrote
- That bit of material that didn’t make it in your last product, workshop, or call
- The common framework or mindset-shift that you inevitably end up sharing with people
- That question that people ask you all the time
- Feedback from your last offer
- The top ten most commonly used search phrases for your website
- That truth that no one is talking about but everyone is feeling
You’ve done the fun and easy part. Will you slow down and do the part that matters?
Hi Charlie-
My garden is seriously under-fertilized, and in desperate need of water, and sunlight.
You’re so right-it’s the Eureka! that’s so appealing. Digging the trenches, getting your hands dirtied, and putting in the toil is not much fun.
I think I’ll find my seeds in the truth that nobody is talking about, but everyone is feeling.
Thanks for the hoe and gardening gloves.
You’re welcome, Linda, and thanks for the comment. If you need some more tools, might I suggest Create, Connect, and Consume. How’s your balance with the three?
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for this post. I’ve struggled with this phenomenon for years and only in the last few years have I figured out how to discipline myself to dig and start hoeing. (And I mean “hoeing” in the gardening sense.)
I’ve come up with some new ideas and instead of dropping what I’ve worked so hard to grow, I’m helping others use my ideas and build their own businesses. I get to watch my seeds grow in another’s garden without abandoning my own fertile ground.
This is beautiful. One of my true joys is seeing how a client or friend can take an idea and do something with it rather than it just sitting in my head unused and therefore not helping anyone.
Nice post – I really relate to it. Got a ton of ideas in notebooks and on index cards…got to choose the best and bring them to fruition! Thank you.
Thanks, Katie! Annie Lamont has it right in Pick A Bird – sometimes the “best” one is just the one you start with. 🙂
In case anyone isn’t already aware of this, Charlie is a genius. Dead-on. absolutely correct. No arguments allowed. Hoorah.
It’s so true. A huge part of our momentum and success is simple repetition. We did something, it worked. We kept making the same offer. Although you can overdo it, I self-published our flagship program in 2005, and it continues to sell, week-in-and-week-out. Nice.
Sometimes I laugh at how many side paths I’ve created for myself when I could’ve just done something much simpler, completed it, and repeated it. It’s funnier after the realization than before it. 🙂
Thank you for the kind words, too. The respect runs both ways.
Seriously. There are a lot of solutions out there that have been working for centuries (wheel, anyone?).
Sometimes we forget that it makes the most sense to keep doing… what works. We want to do the shiny new thing, but forget that people coming to us for solutions are seeking it in a common problem. Cultivating, reshaping and refining that solution in the fire over time takes dedication and diligence. And it’s not very sexy.
Great topic and dead on for me today – I intended to “write the grant proposal” today and I’ve been sidetracked back into my favorite modes, hyper-creativity and “scheming.” Now it’s 3:00 and I am just now getting that I don’t need more ideas to go into the proposals. Actually LESS will make it work, easier to get and to have those main ideas actually take root will support the rest of the garden… A friend recently told me the story of Amazon – how when they were starting, they proposed selling EVERYTHING on the Internet, and couldn’t get funded – so they toned it down to “books.” Look at them now!
Look at them now, indeed. One of the ways we creative people make things worse is by adding too much to what we do. That grant reviewer needs one killer, sticky idea rather than 8 cool and interesting one. Nailing that one idea is the trick.
Hi Charlie,
I, too believe in the the 80/20 rule; the tricky part, as you point out, is to find the 20%. Thanks for the suggestions to get there. I will go back at look at some my posts and comments to see which ones resonate with my readers – I’m sure I’ll find some good nuggets there.
Alex
Small businesses have the tendency to be fertile ground for creativity, but they are full of impatient people. With so many ideas, it’s very tempting to work on dozens things at the same time and fail to recognize the ones which holds the best potential, focusing on them to nurture and develop them.
It takes a lot of practice and experience to be able to recognize that 20% of projects worth developing, but it’s also one of the best parts of being an entrepreneur.
Thanks for a great post. Oh, how I love shiny objects! Now they live in an attractive box which only comes out to play 4 times per year 🙂
For the last 6 months I’ve focused on the 3 legs of my holistic business and stopped chasing the rest – now it’s down to clients & relationship building, teaching & speaking, and turning the most popular topic into an “evergreen” audio & e-book. It’s made all the difference in how I feel AND in how I am received. Now, people notice and comment on how grounded and “zen” my classes are – what a change from my old more “scattered” self. Thanks for putting it so clearly!
*deep sigh* This is my problem, exactly, lots of good ideas but no staying power to make them actually happen. My question is, how do you get that staying power? For me, working on a project that I’m mentally done with is so hard it’s painful.
I feel like if I don’t allow myself to work on my shiny new thing, I don’t do any work at all. It’s like making a child eat brussel sprouts. Maybe I just need to grow up.
I have the same problem. I think you just have to get fed up of not achieving results (in my case: making a living) because of working in a scattered way. I am at that point. Kicking myself for the opportunities lost because I could not implement right to the end. One thing that has blunted the pain a great deal is to take Tim Ferriss’ advice and think of each project as an experiment. You’re not signing away your whole life. You are there to learn what works and what doesn’t, to grow and challenge yourself.
I like the image of a garden for this post. Lately I’ve been just popping new ideas (for my work, for my blog, for my hobbies) almost non-stop. Looks like it has something to do with my 30 day meditation challenge, it is like giving my mind a few minutes each day to cool down lets it super-charge it more often afterward.
Now it is time to water all those seeds and find a nice UV lamp to make them thrive!
Cheers,
Ruben
This is a very good reminder Charles. As creative entrepreneurs, coming up with ideas is what we know how to do best. But over time, I have discovered that the ideas are the easy part. No one has ever been rewarded for an idea that hasn’t been implemented. Rewards are results of ideas implemented. So it is important for us to stick to the few projects that have higher possibilities of success and nurture them till they become huge success before running off to take on another challenge. Your progress as an entrepreneur will not be measured by how quickly you come up with ideas, they will be measured by how many of them were successfully implemented. Eureka is good, but bravo is better. Get on with that idea that others can applaud you for.
Thanks for sharing.
Dear Charlie,
I love this!
I still struggle with the temptation to jump for the bright-new-and-shiny ideas I have for my business rather than stick with the tried-and-true.
That said, I know that one of the secrets to my success has been my willingness to keep tweaking and revising and updating what I’ve already begun.
My original Work on Words communication training doubled in length after the first year (three runs), then I taught it about 18 times over eight years, making tweaks and improvements along the way, introduced an intro version of the training, then recently streamlined the long training and mixed up the content, and now am introducing the home study version.
And it’s what has made my reputation.
That said, I do have to indulge my wild and creative streak every now and then . . .
I can totally relate to this post. I find it so easy to get side-tracked with the “next big idea”. As you suggest, execution is key. One thing that I’ve found that has worked for me is to have someone to be accountable to. When I tell my coach what I’m up to I know that she is going to keep asking me about the actions I’m taking to have it happen.
Thank you, Charlie, for being a steady voice of sanity in this crazy wacky world.
Very helpful and Great information,
we appreciate advise especially coming from a professional.
Thanks again and keep up the great work!
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