During the course of a lifetime we have many ideas and thoughts on how we would like to express ourselves in the world and in our immediate community and environment. Tony Hsieh had many ideas since he was a kid at school and did many things before his Company Zappos became legendary.
Some of these ideas we have, we think we can even make money out of and other ideas are simply more personal, from which we expect nothing in the sense of monetary outcome; both are valid.
If, you have an idea which you feel could be financially beneficial to you, your family, friends and larger community, ( global or otherwise ), the best thing is to get the idea out there. If you think your idea is such a winner, try and sell it! You will probably find that you won’t get much for it and like Tony Hsieh, no acknowledgment either.
The truth is that you will have to do some work (read a LOT of work) and either make it, produce it, manufacture it, create it, and start a process whereby you can sell it. Otherwise it’s just a pipe dream and like most dreams will go down the drain because the tendency to give up is strong, when our passion is felt to be either unappreciated or even ridiculed.
The thing with ideas is that they are a very small fragment of the whole process required to get people interested enough to buy or take any interest, whether you’re selling products, information or services. We all fall into the trap of saying we don’t have enough time, but cut out a few hours of TV, movies, socialising or just plain wasting time on social media and we can find that there is in fact more than enough time.
Many times I get stuck thinking the same things because I am also interested to get my ideas out there into the mainstream and these ideas although addressed to the mainstream are often resisted by those either with a closed mind, those with nothing better to do with their time than criticise or maybe they are just not interested- their privilege!
The good thing is that when we make a strong stand for something , you may get people off side, but be sure that if you do NOT get some people offside you are NOT pushing hard enough and your ideas are mediocre. Not that the ideas are really mediocre; it’s just that because you have not illustrated how your ideas can add real value to a person’s life, they look mediocre.
Take heart and read the story of Tony Hsieh of Zappos and see what he went through to get his innovative ideas to bear fruit, countless rejections, lack of faith, incompetence by suppliers and more.
If we spent a fraction of the time pursuing our dreams that Tony Hsieh did to make his dreams come true, we would be a lot happier knowing we gave it our best shot and as he said, “whether I succeeded or not.”
So then, what was it you wanted to do if you believed you could not fail?
Image Credit:Fortune.com
Chris Borrett