“Many entrepreneurs feel that they cannot start a business without a great idea. They believe it will be impossible to succeed without a completely new concept, as the market will already be cornered by established businesses. Only by venturing into uncharted territory can they achieve their dreams. This is the fallacy of the great idea.”
In my last post, I mentioned about the need to be solutionary, today we have Trevor Ginn’s Ebook “The fallacy of the great idea” to further support this strange idea.
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When we take on a new project, it’s so exciting isn’t it? When I was trying to come up with some brilliant entrepreneurial idea, I always ask myself ‘what can I think of that is refreshing, unexpected and transformational?’
Oh boy, that was the wrong attitude. You probably noticed by now that some of the greatest advancements across industries were not huge, singular achievements but rather incremental improvement. Like Google, is simple and refined over time as it wasn’t the first search engine – but it is the best one.
When logically we should be improving what is around us, we still tend to think of innovation as creating something brand new. I guess it’s understandable that we aren’t as thrilled when someone has already executed your idea. Marginal improvements are definitely less flashy and interesting when compared to cutting-edge innovation. Nonetheless, these improvements are the key difference between success and failure.
We always trying to come up with better solutions, to make thing more effective and efficient. Once it’s taken in action we tend to forget them, because then we find out that other people can do it too. Take note, for leaders that focus on incremental progress – being ‘solutionary’ rather than revolutionary – are the ones that push the ideas to full fruition. It’s a demanding quality to have for it needs so much discipline an belief in themselves. But those are the people that truly makes an impact on the environment we are in.
So next time, when you take on the ‘dreamer mode’ try to conjure up something that magical but make it the little tweak that can make a big difference.
Have you participated in competitive and recreational sports? The way you think when you are playing those sports is also applicable in business and our personal lives. When I was talking to a good friend about his involvement in alpine ski racing, he mentioned the ‘40-30-30’ rule. Earlier days, he always tried to go fast and focused hard on not falling. Later on, his coach told him he was missing the point. He explained that the success in ski racing, actually for most sports, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. The first 30% was technical skill and experience, and the second 30% was the willingness to take risk.
Specifically, ski racing means to take risk of leaning harder into turns, balancing at a steeper angle to the slope and stress on the outside ski edge – all of which increase the chance of falling. So if you can’t falling enough, you aren’t trying hard enough. To excel in anything, you need to push yourself beyond the edge. Body builder will know that as ‘pain period’. Only by trying something new, struggling, learning and then trying again do we improve our performance.
When we come out from the other side, you can’t help but wonder – why didn’t I try earlier? The question of fear isn’t something. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, reveals that we deal with failure better than we’d expect. In studies, ‘when people are asked to predict how they’ll feel if they lose a job … Or a fail a project, they constantly overestimate how horrible they will feel and how long It will last”. I reckon it’s probably a biological trigger that stops us from trying harder and risking our lives (if we are talking about the stone age).
We are now so focused on building skills and knowledge, but the missing ingredient is taking action and risks. That’s why people tend to regret not doing something rather than the things they did.
Perhaps playing safe is reasonable when you are in the health care and financial industries. But for our own creative development, we need to take a step further and focus hard on the last 30%. Our little bubble is comfortable, but restricts us from getting any better. The challenge is to rebalance our nature. Expose yourself to some positive randomness and take some unexpected turns. Afterall, it is the person who pushes through the barrier of fear that reaches the highest level of performance.
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