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Consistency is What It Takes: Don’t be an Idea Guy

July 6, 2009 By

How do you create consistency in your life?

Showing up, fully engaged is a big part of work.  Being a machine, like Seth Godin, like NameTag Scott is the way to have wild success, wild wealth, and more of what you want.  The quality of your ideas is less important–by far–and less novel–by far than the execution.

Ideas are everywhere.  Execution is 90% of it or more.  “Idea guys” are worthless.  Utterly entitled useless pieces of crap.  The idea isn’t the novel thing, and the older and presumably wiser I get the more  I know it.  It’s easy to have a dazzling idea, a new and novel thing that you could make some day.

It’s hard to get up every day, look people in the eye and serve them with all of your heart, mind, mind, soul & strength.  It’s hard to show the patience and confidence you need.  It’s easy to be the smart kid, it’s easy to be the one with the answers.  It’s hard, really hard, to show up every day and have the enduring faith that it takes to work towards your goal, especially when instant results are out the window.

How many exciting, great ideas have you had that would be AWESOME if they were put into practice?

How many NBA players had roughly the same physical gifts as Michael Jordan (Dominique Wilkins, Charles Barkley, Anfernee Hardaway) but didn’t hit the same heights?  MJ’s mental gifts were far more novel than his physical gifts.

Right now, I’m trying to learn to develop the consistency needed to get past the ‘next level’ and go to the one beyond that.  It’s not about intellect, acumen or acuity, it’s about just blocking out distractions and doing it.  It’s about getting up and rolling.   Not getting-ready-to-roll.  Preparation has its place, but only in moderation.

Lots of little things help.  Keeping a list helps.  Clearing a schedule helps.  Paying a little bet on a debt every day helps.  Morning pages helps.  I’ve come farther along than I thought possible.  But I need to be hitting it hard.

How do you create consistency?  Are you really doing it?  Are you being honest with yourself?

Ideas are everywhere, and without execution totally worthless.  A mediocre idea executed with passion and fervor will beat the hell out of genius ideas that sit in drawers.

Filed Under: Start Here Tagged With: ,

Godaddy, You Go To Far.

January 5, 2009 By
godaddy-blows

Hello Godaddy.  I hate you.  A bunch.  Why?  Because everything is about you, not me.  Currently, I have about 90 domains with you, and some different privacy services and more.   I went with you because you were cheap, and while I knew you wanted me to host on your crummy servers, I wasn’t forced to.   Yes, ordering I had to say “no thanks,” five, maybe six too many times, but you stayed out of my way.  I was having some misgivings about the increasingly shrill and anxious extra screens, but I kept on keeping on.   The load times to get to ‘my domains,’ slowed a bit, but it was rmanageable.

Then today, I was moving a server from my former host (maia) to hostgator, my new host.  And that’s when you did it to me.  You made me look at  what follows.  Click to embiggen:

godaddy-blows

Well, today, when I was moving from MaiaHost to ny new company, you lost me forever.  I’m never going to give you my credit card number again, and I’m never going to do business with you.  I’m not going to plunk down the extra $500 to move, and I know that domain registration is something you tolerate to get me to buy your cruddy hosting.  But your hosting is, in fact, cruddy.  Fantastico doesn’t work, WPMU takes apparently loads of effort to get done.   I might have been receptive to different ideas you had, and I might have given your servers another chance.  Not so much anymore.  You don’t interrupt people and make it difficult for them to do business.  I don’t work with jackasses that do that.

I wish you, Bob Parsons, the best in the future.  I support your ideas, but you’ve seriously got to stop selling like a street vender in Kingston and start serving like nordstrom.  Interrupting people is dissipating your reputation and jeoprodizing your future.

Filed Under: Products, Projects and Process Tagged With: ,

Precious and Abundant: Stealing Ideas is Obsolete

December 9, 2008 By

Jonathan Fields got me thinking in this post:

http://www.jonathanfields.com/blog/steal-this-idea-im-begging-you/

Regarding ideas, he writes:

If it’s that good, people will try to knock it off the moment you gain any level of traction, notoriety or both. Maybe sooner. In fact, if they don’t, it just may speak to the fact that what you’ve got is either not nearly as cool as you think it is or you’re not able to communicate it’s coolness…

I know that people will steal ideas.  I steal ideas.   I work with great people at places like Lenderama and BHB and those folks throw off great ideas all the time.  For free.  For real, and they keep on doing it, all the time.  One of my synapses will fire a half formed idea, and then Tood or Greg or Pat will throw off some nugget that I didn’t know before.  And I’ll be enriched with thoughts and thought, and I’ll be able to do my job more effectively.  These ideas are given away for free.  All the time.

And they are precious.  Look–if we apply the lessons that are here already for the taking, we’re going to get so far ahead of the curve, so enriched, so smart, that we’ll never finish.   The value of Twitter is mostly that we see other brains having firing synapes together.  Ideas are everwhere, and they’re precious.  An idea to use a spammy plugin like FeedWordPress to create a non spammy blog network came out of a conversation.  Anyone can use it.  There you go.  It just requires putting it into use.

And there’s the rub, isn’t it?  We all know essentially, in broad strokes, what to do to to make life happen.  We know that we need to pick up the phone and call people, we know we need to connect, think, help, add value.   And yet, we find ourselves not executing because the next big idea is right around the corner.   Well, the next big thing…is simply executing what we do well already.  It’s taking the bull by the horns and getting things DONE and not started.  Execution is more profitable than shere creativity.

There is nothing staggeringly new about what’s happening now.  The best of what we do is about elegance, not novelty.  Facebook could have been twitter, could have kept twitter from happening.  They didn’t go that route.  Twitter could have been blogging.  Livejournal could have been WordPress.  Etc.  Etc.   All of those ideas were half thefts, and just SCAMPER type solutions.    What was different is execution.  There isn’t really an ‘information advantage’ out there right now that has a lot of meaning, except in the realm of execution, finishing projects, getitng things all the way done.

Even though they are abundant–ideas are precious.  Having what it takes to finish, to do, to be, to have whatever we seek…starts with being created in the mind.   Instead of fighting over who owns the knife, we should help one another grow a bigger pie.  Or mix a better metaphor.   All it takes is a realization that scarcity and value are different things.  In an abundant world, we can continue to freely throw off knowledge.  Hoarding knowledge is going to become a thing of the past.

How can we encourage others to think?

How can we encourage ourselves to think?

How can we continue to make sure ideas grow?

Filed Under: Business Building, Start Here Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,