Say you have a lot of Ideas, especially one that is really exciting, how do you motivate yourself to take the next step? –@richardpaulsen
Several answers:
- First, and I’ve written this before: most people let their idea muscle atrophy. When your leg muscles atrophy, in just two weeks you can’t walk without extreme therapy.
Same with the idea muscle. You have to sweat that muscle. Come up with ideas every day. But it’s more than that.
Let’s say after six months of coming up with ideas you START to have good ideas. What next?
Well, think of each idea as a quadruplet.
Don’t write down an idea unless you can write this:
Idea:
Next step:
First customer:
First partner
I am horrible at executing. Horrible! I hate it. It’s boring and time consuming. I’d rather be coming up with great ideas.
My last business that I sold was stockpickr.com. I came up with the idea and liked it. But I had to force myself to take the next steps. So at the exact same time I had the idea, I spec-ed it out completely, within an hour I had put an ad on scriptlance.com and hired an Indian developer to develop screen shots. And I set up my first meeting with my eventual partner on it. And I thought of the ten different ways I would distribute the site so people would see it.
Execution is forcing yourself to do those ugly things that come side by side with the idea. Don’t even write the idea down unless you also write these ugly things down.
Here’s what it reminds me of. I read a post recently by a woman who writes lots of novels. Sometimes she writes 15,000 words a day. In my life I have never done that. My tops is probably 7,000 on a GREAT day. She does it every day.
How does she do it? She totally outlines every step first. Then she sits down and bursts out the 15,000 words
So outline everything out or your idea does not even count as an idea. Then close your eyes and do it. You think writing 15,000 words in a day is fun? It’s misery. It’s boring. It hurts your hands. But that woman does it