You Need To Know That The World Needs Your Idea
You have a great idea. You are willing to give it time, money, and emotional stamina because you see a problem that doesn’t have to remain. You see an innovation that could change how people do things forever.
Your idea is all you want to talk about at get-togethers with old friends. It drives you to work late into the night. It wakes you up early in the morning. Things are going well and then BOOM.
One day you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, forget your coffee, and begin to wonder, is it worth it? The cloud of self-doubt overshadows you. You are doubting your idea. You are doubting if it is possible. Even worse, you are doubting whether or not it was even necessary in the first place.
I am here to tell you,
the world needs your idea.
Whatever it is, from small niche to audacious new enterprise, the world needs it and the world needs you to make it happen. It is the innovations of entrepreneurs like yourself that really change our world.
Every election year, presidential candidates juggle smooth slogans and catchy sound bites about changing the country and the world, but how much can they really do? Our country was designed with built-in gridlock. Our founding fathers didn’t want governmental change to be easy or fast. They worried that people might be stirred up by events to make big changes with long-term problems. As a result, change in government is slow and gradual, baby step after baby step, with a few leaps backward along the way. Innovation is almost impossible.
Big businesses are often too afraid of risk. This hinders them from pushing the limits of science, technology, and what people have tried before.
You, on the other hand, do not have a speed limit. If you believe wholeheartedly in your idea, you can take a great leap forward that nobody else can. Think of how much our daily lives have been changed since the recent invention of the iPhone and Facebook. People like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg have had ideas, executed them, and actually changed the world within their lifetime.
Entrepreneurs are uniquely placed to make big changes and execute big ideas. They can find problems and solve them far quicker than those working through the baby step system of government and/or big business. You are needed because you can take risks. You are not afraid of failure.
Entrepreneurs find problems and solve them. Whether you are working directly for a ‘good cause’ non-profit organization (DuoLingo, Khan Academy), or fixing a problem to make a profit (AirBnB, Apple), either way you have the ability to change the world for the better.
Maybe your idea seems arbitrary to some. Entrepreneur.com recently published an article about why the world needs more brilliant stupid ideas. The article charges entrepreneurs to look at the world through a “stupid filter” and see all the potentially lucrative albeit dumb sounding projects. For example, doggles, fashionable sunglasses for dogs, may at first glance sound like just about the dumbest thing ever. But doggles is a real company that makes over 3 million dollars a year.
Perhaps dog’s sunglasses aren’t fixing any huge horrible problem in our society, but it is providing jobs for hundreds of people. There are 202 million unemployed people today. As long as there are unemployed people, the world needs entrepreneurs to expand the economy and accommodate the increasing numbers of job seekers.
People will tell you that it is stupid. People will tell you to give up. No one else may believe in you, but you’ve got to believe in yourself. Turning ideas into reality is hard work. If you have a passion for your idea, that passion will become the intensity you need to travail until your idea is produced. No one else has the vision and passion to make your idea come to life.
Remember that in 1903 the president of a bank warned an investor against Henry Ford’s automobile by saying “the horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.” The radio was poo pooed in the 1920s when potential investors said “the wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” And Walt Disney was once fired by a newspaper company because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”
There will always be people to doubt you. Don’t doubt yourself. Only you can make your idea happen. So get back to work.
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. — Thomas A. Edison
Originally published at www.hourstimetracking.com on September 21, 2015.
