Last week, I talked about the 3-step process of handling your overload of ideas. Here is the second key in this process that you must remember:
Remember this #2. You have too many ideas.
Let me make this clear: In your big pile of ideas, some of the ideas you’ve gathered are not that good. Some of them will make your business identical to everyone else in your industry. Personally, I teach the opposite of this in my Destination workshops and BootCamp. I recommend trying to separate those ideas out because you received those ideas from all the owners who were at that trade show who all shared all the things that worked in their businesses. Everyone puts all their same ideas together, like a big casserole, and says “You should do this.”
Have you ever had a really good casserole? I never had. Excuse me for saying this, Mom, but except for the potato chips crumbled on top, it’s all the same inside, a bunch of gooey consistent slop.
Plus, why is everyone surprised when they take these ideas, collected from everyone else in the same industry and you run back to your businesses and implement the same things that everyone else is doing, and then, a couple of months later, all your customers start ignoring what they’ve seen everywhere else?
My advice is to avoid ideas spun from the masses. Think originally! Seek out ideas that are one-of-a-kind, unless you want your business to be just like all the rest.
You don’t want to focus on those identical ideas because you want to be a Destination. Magnifying your differences should be your focus.
Let’s keep going through that pile of ideas, and how you sort them out. Some of the ideas in your pile are bad. You read them and they are impractical, poorly thought-out, illogical, or just dumb. Ignore those ideas.
But even if you remove all of the casserole ideas and the bad ideas from your list, you will still have a huge pile of ideas that are good and some that might be brilliant, and some that you don’t understand at all, but there are probably still too many ideas in your remaining pile for one or two of you to implement.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the strategy that creative business owners use to get through their mass of ideas to find the gems!
