You have your notes down, and your idea is clear. How does your idea turn into reality? What are the things you need to consider as you act on your idea?
You Need to Act Now
There are a handful of usual things that can hinder your ascent from idea to action. Uncertainty anxieties, self-doubt, lack of field knowledge, and various fears can all fall under analysis paralysis. This is when you are unable to proceed because in your head you are not really ready to move forward, and failure seems too costly to end with.
FAILURE is an amazingly loaded word, something that a lot of people see in a negative way. It is quite understandable – we humans evolved from our primal ancestors with the mindset of avoiding any source of pain or destruction – and often, first-time failures sting. But you need to frame your mind into the reality of your situation. Are you blowing the consequences in your mind out of proportion? Are you having a knee-jerk reaction over something that is not life-threatening to begin with? What have you really got to lose here that you cannot recover from?
These questions are important to consider because these let you question your evolutionary point-of-view on failure. In the modern world, failure is a necessary and inevitable feature of the terrain towards growth and success. YOU NEED TO FAIL. And the sooner you fail, the sooner you will learn to get back up. Nobody has ever succeeded without slipping and stumbling on failure.
You need to act soon, even if you feel you are not ready. There are several ways to supplement the readiness issue, which we will enumerate below. But first, get over the fear of failure. You need to fail, because, without it, you cannot learn to get better.
Supplement 1: Do Your Research
Chances are, even if you think your idea is original, it may already exist in some other form. Or perhaps, there is a very adjacent idea to yours – not exactly the same product or service, but somehow similar. Research on those on whichever level you can afford to (administrative, development, business-side, even user-level). Don’t overanalyze this, either. The idea here is to see what problems you can solve ahead of time that these predecessors have already encountered.
Supplement 2: Get Trustworthy Feedback
Have a few trustworthy friends or colleagues with related interests and motivations team up with you and provide honest feedback. They can also be your team in getting the idea off the ground. Just make sure to acknowledge them appropriately.
Supplement 3: Start Small
Scale is often a major challenge to getting things off the ground. Start with a smaller scale: a smaller group of people, team, or media platform to deliver your product or service. If cost is an issue, this will help you mitigate them and get on with actually testing your ideas with an audience.
Supplement 4: Fail Strong
You will eventually experience varied sizes of failures: execution not working out according to the plan, your audience not receiving the idea well, situations not improving, environment pushing back, or outright causing a far worse outcome than intended. Whatever the case is, ready your mind to learn from all of this. Document the situation, figure out the cause, determine a solution, and get back up. Sometimes that means you change things on the fly. Other times that means you have to start over.
Whichever the case is, you will be OK.
This will be a continuous feedback loop for you. The more you fail, the more you encounter challenges, the more you learn and the stronger you get after you stand up. You develop resilience and a strategic mind in handling these situations. The least thing you can get out of taking action is the knowledge of how to do better tomorrow.
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