While you were sleeping

The question we get asked a lot is this: “How are you able to complete your client projects, build your products, and maintain your website? Do you ever sleep?” The answer is simple. We have the will to do it and we sleep enough to get by. In many industries, people are getting lazier. They prefer to have others do the work while they are sleeping in and dreaming up the next idea. Dreaming by itself is unfulfilling. Jeffrey Hirsch, a good friend of mine, once said to me, “An idea without execution is just a hallucination.” I am an idea guy myself, doomed to know how to make just about anything better, yet possessing a limited amount of time to execute it all. Like everyone, I have to pick and choose, so I go after the dreams that are within my reach. It is a gift. It is a curse.

I have only so much time to manifest as many of my dreams as I can, rather than dreaming up new ones every night. I can’t possibly create all the things I think up, so I share them with clients and hope they can get some use out of them. I have mentioned before that I open source most of my ideas. Consequently, only a small fraction of my dreams do I actually get to execute to my own personal standards.

Where there is will, there is a way. Wanting to do something and devoting every moment of your life to it are not the same thing. Obsession and devotion should be prerequisites to any execution. These two key elements are the spark and fuel that make a dream become a reality. Never start working on your own idea if you are not fully passionate about it. How can you measure your passion? Simple: Am I willing to work on this idea everyday even if most people do not appreciate it in the same way I do? or Am I doing this because I think it will make me wealthy, and that is my only motivation and goal? If you answered yes to the first question and no to the second, then you may be on the path to creating something terrific.

Getting rich off your execution should be a bonus, a surprise, not the point of doing it. If you simply execute on an idea to make you rich, it will probably suffer from mediocrity and poor adoption. Why? When you don’t care, it shines through. Either your offers will seem like a rip-off or the quality of the experience will be poor because you truly don’t know how it “should” be. This is the most common failure I have ever seen in modern business. Too many people think they know what people want, but deep down they really don’t care enough to make it better. Status quo or slightly better is adequate.

Stick with it even when others tell you to give up, or the signs are on the wall. I tend to be a stubborn optimist. I believe that anything is possible and giving up is only an option when it allows you to free yourself of the constraints that are holding you back. Giving up because nobody likes it is a cop out. There certainly exist ideas that are just plain bad, but that doesn’t mean when positioned properly, to the right audience, at the right moment, that they couldn’t work. The dreamer should know without hesitation who that target person is, and what they fundamentally want. Without that instinct for the product and the market, I am skeptical that an idea will catch on.

It is tough to admit you are working when it is your own idea. It should take a long time and is not easy to pull off, but it should never feel like a job. Jobs are for other people who work with you. As the executor, it should feel like pure pleasure each time you get the opportunity to develop your product or service. Eating, sleeping, shopping, and entertainment seem to become secondary obligations, not what you prefer to be doing with your time. You will genuinely love what you are doing ,and can’t help but want to surround yourself with it at all times. Obsession is what it takes to create something remarkable; lack of sleep is a symptom of having one. It’s not that you aren’t tired, you just feel alive when you are developing it, and that provides the will you need to see it through.

So, if your mind is racing about an idea when you are trying to fall asleep—get up, turn on the machine, and start making it happen. You are otherwise doomed to watch your vision be executed poorly by others. That is the true nightmare.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Posted on Apr 25, 2008 by Kevin Milden

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