The Risk of Rewarding Ideas

Ideas seem to strike at the worst possible time for me. Just as I am lying in bed watching the last show of the evening come to its conclusion and my breathing becomes shallower as I prepare to finally fall asleep.

My eyes become heavy with the glow of the television putting me into a semiconscious state. Then without warning my mind awakens to a random thought I’ve never before had. Neurons flux, blood starts to pulsate and my heart begins to beat rapidly. Immediately I open my eyes with one compulsive thought in my mind, it’s the birth of a new idea!

I have grown so accustomed to these nighttime intruders that I come prepared with pen and paper ready by my bedside. New ideas are wonderful, but unless you learn how to distinguish those that can potentially benefit your life from those that only cause you sleep deprivation, you may over time become disenchanted and quite possibly broke.

The ideas I typically have involve some sort of new product or service offering for the web. I also have many other ideas which have nothing to do with the internet at all. It could very well be as simple as an over analysis of a conversation I previously had a week before. For whatever reason, on that particular night, things decided to just click. What can I say, its how my mind is wired!

Nothing seems to gives me more drive than a solid new idea. I believe this is the same for many. It’s as if a void in my life becomes refilled again with clear thoughts and a whole new sense of focus and direction. Although, there have been many times in my life that I’ve prematurely ran with an idea without properly taking the time to consider what kind of responsibilities I would be left with once I had succeeded in developing it.

I don’t know exactly what it is. Perhaps it is something competitive that lives deep within me. There were many times in my past when I just needed to prove to myself that I could just build something. I would fail to take in consideration the business aspect once my creation was in its completion stage. Perhaps this impulsiveness was just my naiveté to how business really works; this was just me being an inexperienced compulsive entrepreneur.

An entrepreneurs’ competitive nature is a double-edge-sword. We are driven to give everything we’ve got yet also knowing in the back of our minds the unlikelihood of our successes. History has taught us that this kind of impulsiveness leaves many of us entrepreneurs poor and hungry.

I am sure many of you who work online have been in this situation. You’ve just completed working on something that has consumed quite a bit of your time and you can’t help but admire it with such pride. Everything is fresh, new and it works just like you’d had imagined it would.

Your feeling of accomplishment is wafting off of you and you’re showing everyone what you’ve built. Then a few days later your adrenalin begins to disappear thus leaving you awake at night with the daunting realization that you are now just one website idea in a sea of billions.

I was telling a good friend of mine about an ASP company I built 7 years ago. I spent eight long months designing a Managed Intrusion Detection system from scratch which was to be licensed to other online businesses. A few years after I had to shut the project down this same friend who is a true entrepreneur at heart told me quite succinctly “Just because it’s a good business does not mean it’s a good business for you”.

Experience has now taught me to think about certain things before working on any idea. It does not matter what the idea is. I force myself to sit back and think about what it is that I can realistically expect from the results of my work. I apply this notion to almost everything in my life on and offline.

Since I have started to incorporate this into my entrepreneurial mentality my work now has a true sense of focus and balance. Those days of questioning whether or not I had the ability to develop a new idea have been replaced with what do I do with it once it’s all built?

Granted this does not mitigate the risk factor. It’s the risk I take working on something that might not benefit me at all. Also, there are just times where I feel the need to gamble a bit and go all-in holding only a pair of two’s.

Developing an idea is never a straight line. Things zigzag constantly. This is why many people do not succeed at product innovation. They stumble upon unforeseen and costly problems causing them to feel overwhelmed, frustrated and then they lose focus and quit.

When I develop any new idea I know in the back of my mind what I should expect to gain when I complete the building and marketing of it. Since I only try to work on things that will contribute positively to my life, I’m mentally prepared to overcome any obstacles that always come my way.

If I go in expecting there to be problems knowing very well it is par for the course, then I know I am working on something that has passed my personal test of risk to reward.

As I have learned to tackle large concept ideas, I have also learned how to apply this same methodology to other areas in my life.

The other day my laptop operating system started to give me problems. Once upon a time, I would have tinkered with it for hours trying to get it to work only to prove to myself that I could fix it. Only this time I was of the opinion it could possibly take me several days to repair the error without any assurance of the laptop actually working.

In the end I decided the best thing for me to do was to just use the automated factory reinstall. The result would have been the same, a computer that worked. I realized my time spent messing with it also was my valuable time that I should apply to more profitable work.

I know where I want to be in 10 years. Quite frankly, I know exactly the kind of lifestyle I want for myself in 30 years. I believe in order for me to get from where I am today to where I want to be in the future is dependent upon me making the right kind of choices.

The kind of ideas I generate could keep me occupied for years. Not only do I need to be an excellent judge of my ideas before taking them on, I need to make sure my conceptions will result in reaching my future goals.

So I ask you now – be honest with yourself. Are your ideas clear to you? Do you know what your plans are once you’ve accomplished them? If you’re unsure of your answers, I encourage you to take the time to think about what you really want.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Shandy Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.