The Value of Your Idea

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” – Thomas Edison

Ideas are where all great businesses start.  They are the inspiration and life blood of an entrepreneur.  There are millions of people who have taken a great idea right to their grave.  The true value of your idea lies in the action that comes behind it.

We have all had friends who have talked about lofty aspirations and ideas only to see them take no action on it and still wonder why their dreams are not reality.  In fact, most of us have probably done that at some point in time in our lives.  There are two reasons why we don’t take action on our ideas.  The first is because it’s perceived as being easier to do nothing.  The second is that we fear what might happen if we do take action on a great idea.

As time goes by it’s easy to become complacent with our lives.  We are also taught that chasing after a dream is foolish.  I still catch hell for leaving the corporate world and starting my own business which is funny when you look at the landscape for employees right now.  In any event, we already have a listening about chasing dreams and following up on ideas that doing so is for foolish people with their head in the clouds.

The reality is that the more crazy your idea is the better your idea may be.  Think about electricity.  When you are used to doing everything by candlelight and by hand and someone told you they could generate power for lights and other devices in the future, you would have told that person they were insane.  It’s easy to look back and critique past achievement. It’s much harder to have faith and vision of what the future may look like.

But what if we do have vision and can see how we are able to impact the future with an idea?  That’s scary too.  You risk putting yourself out there for all the world to see.  You open yourself up to more success which means more demands.  You open yourself up to more demands of your time and more criticism.  When you add these things up they can be terrifying.  Especially if you don’t value yourself enough to think that you can handle it.

To overcome inaction and fear it takes a high level of consciousness and belief that we were not put here on this Earth to play small.  Many us don’t believe this so we let fear and inaction take over.  As Thomas Edison said, your idea is only valuable if you put it into action, otherwise it’s no good to anyone.  So what’s the answer?  How do we overcome?  Changing your mindset is key.  We will talk more about this  and other action steps in my next post.

Stay tuned….

PS… If you absolutely can’t wait, listen to this week’s podcast right now.