What should I do when I get so many great ideas but no motivation to start doing so?
1. Count your blessings; many of us can’t come up with one great idea, aka an idea that improves our lives in dramatic ways.
2. Winnow your many great ideas to the one that is most likely to meet your primary goal, which is probably unlimited or comfortable wealth and/or happiness. Or maybe the sublime joy of working at a discipline that gives you pleasure and a considerate lover with a platinum Visa.
3. Be motivated to convert your one great idea to a fulfilled life by studying The Little Black Book for Entrepreneurs, and those who want to be. In it, you’ll find dozens of hot, timely, and proven tips derived from more than fifty years in the trenches, and counting.
4. Perhaps your most powerful motivator is knowing that putting that one great idea into action will likely be your key to freedom, a squishy and huge concept that takes on many meanings. First, it means that you alone control your present and future solvency, happiness, and security. You can do that because you can pick your bosses, aka clients, and embrace those you like and pay your fees — note the two criteria — and discard those you don’t like and can’t or won’t pay. That’s impossible if you work for a larger organization in which some invisible hand from on high picks your proximate boss, as well as your bosses on the many rungs of the corporate ladder above you.
Freedom extends to lifestyle, which in my case is a mixed bag to which you might relate. Surely, one of the many joys in being an entrepreneur is being able to work or not work on my own schedule. I love logging billable hours whenever I want, which often is in the very early morning or the middle of the night or during a holiday such as Christmas — whenever the urge hits or I get an idea/inspiration that can’t wait until ‘normal working hours’, which means nada to me. I can grab a beer, martini, or coffee and log billable hours on the patio behind my house. I can dress in leisure pants and a tee shirt in my office and change quickly, ala Clark Kent in a phone booth — how’s that for a tired vision? — into one of my several designer suits and run off to a top level meeting in an ivory corporate tower, and nobody is the wiser.
One last thought, taken directly from the book: Knowing your life’s purpose(s) keeps you on the track that you’ve decided is best for you. It shapes your decisions and prevents you from irrelevant, irritating, and costly excursions that tend to hinder reaching your goals.
Peter Drucker said that the sovereign purpose of an enterprise is profitability. Herbert Hoover disagreed when he said that American business needs a purpose greater than the struggle of materialism. I think that those thoughts apply to individuals as well, especially entrepreneurs like me, as do the three authors of Success Built to Last. They posit that making money, making a difference, and living a life with meaning are compatible goals, with meaning the more important. I agree, and nobody would ever dub me a starry-eyed idealist.
