How Can We Better Grow From Our Ideas?

Young creative minds don’t need more ideas, we need to take more responsibility for the ideas we speak about. It is not about ideas. It is about making ideas happen. We need to stop sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Say little, do much. Be lesser, do more. I believe one of the reasons we don’t act on our ideas is because we don’t want to face the exact problems. We can come up with a rough gauge of what will go wrong, and we give an estimate of how we will fix it.

But, life favours the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.

Often, we ask unclear questions. If not, we don’t even bother to ask questions. A question is a problem, and a problem is a terrible thing to waste. We shouldn’t run away from it. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities. All problems have solutions. The solution might involve trade-offs or expenses that we don’t want to incur. We don’t want to use this amount of money. We don’t want to use this amount of time. We don’t want to use this amount of energy. In one way or another, we might choose not to solve the problem. But the fact remains — there is a solution to the problem.

If there is no solution, then it is not a problem.

“I want to grow an Instagram page for dogs and funnel it as a business, but the landscape is so saturated.” That is a problem. We can solve it with consistent posting, engagement with other dog pages and research on viral videos. “I want to grow an Instagram page for dogs and funnel it as a business, but I’m not willing to post consistently.” That is not a problem. That is a conflict of interest.

Give in to one, or give up on both.

The latter is what we normally do, which is how the idea remains as an idea rather than a reality. Nothing will change. I propose that we start to stack our self confidence by shifting perspectives. Instead of seeing the idea as a potential solution, we should see it as a question. A vague question typically comes together with a vague answer. Good questions lead to good answers. As we go along, we also need to keep in mind that good is the enemy of great.

The effects of such a method is disproportionate to the effort.

We don’t simply ask, “How can we grow an Instagram page for dogs and funnel it as a business?” We ask quantifiable questions. If we can’t measure it, we can’t improve it. We can’t manage what we can’t measure, unless success is defined and tracked. So we ask, “What is the problem to be solved? How are we going to solve it? How can we test if our approach matches our problem? How will we know if it is working?” It is our questions, and it is worth finding our own metrics to it. How about you? What have you been asking lately?