Several years ago I had a good friend.
He had some ambition for life.
He wanted to get into business. Some kind of business. He wasn’t sure exactly what and I could relate to that.
It was pretty cool. We’d sit around and have a beer and talk about business ideas. Most weren’t really that good, but a few probably could have become something.
Once in awhile the guy would say something like:
I just want to be the idea man in a business. The guy with the original great idea. The guy with ideas on how to take the business further.
Now, there is nothing wrong with a person with ideas. In fact, that can be one of the most challenging things.
It’s especially tough in the world today where people are busy all the time. It’s difficult to make time to think, observe and creatively think about ways to improve life.
Execution
Lots of people like the thought of having a business.
Maybe they have a dream to own a business one day.
The truth is that parts of running a business are fun and challenging. But there are many reasons many people don’t do it.
One of those reasons is that it usually takes a long time to reach the success everyone sees from the outside.
Ideas are one thing.
There have been lots of people with great ideas.
There are fewer people that execute good ideas.
The people that do are doers in life. They’re usually the ones that don’t spend too much time thinking about how great an idea is. They’re too busy getting started on trying to make it happen.
They hear about an idea and they begin testing. They see ideas as problems.
Problems that need to be figured out.
They get to work on a solution. Usually the first few (or first few hundred) solutions don’t work exactly right so they iterate until they have something that does a good job.
I guess a good example of this would be the iPhone.
That wasn’t a new idea. It really wasn’t even that exciting on the surface. We had phones. We had portable music players.
What’s the big idea about combining them?
And Apple certainly wasn’t the first to mess around with that type of thing.
They were, however, very persistent. They probably went through tons of designs until they had one that was pretty good. One that was quite a bit ahead of everything else out there.
Even ten years later it’s easy to think about the iPhone as an overnight success. But it’s already been ten years since it was first introduced.
It takes time to execute.
The Right Ideas
I’m sure some ideas are brilliant, sexy, glitzy and all that.
But over the years I’ve learned that most business ideas – large and small – really aren’t that exciting or anything like that.
Yet when people sit around thinking up business ideas like my buddy and I used to we would try to think of the coolest things.
Then one of the things that turned into a business was blogging for businesses on their websites.
I was messing around with my own blog. Just experimenting. Writing about my work and my life. Things I found interesting.
Learning the craft.
Then a business owner that sold skincare asked if I would write a weekly post for their site.
Then I saw another guy on Twitter asking if anyone knew a blogger that wanted to blog about motorcycles each week for his motorcycle fan forum.
After taking on those two opportunities I had the light bulb moment…
Business ideas come from needs.
They come from gaps in people’s lives.
I got lucky in that two people were asking for a service. Sometimes it’s trickier. You have to see someone struggling with something and realize that they have an issue that needs solving.
And then once you have an idea it takes execution.
Conclusion
It’s okay to have ideas for business. It’s a little trickier if you just want to be the idea person in a business. I don’t know if that’s really a thing.
The world doesn’t need more ideas. The world needs doers. People that execute ideas. People that get things done. That aren’t afraid to solve problems and fail a few times before making some progress.
If you’re looking to get into the entrepreneur game this is a good mindset to have. It’s an important lesson I learned awhile back…at least originally. Sometimes I need to be reminded of it.
