Take a second and think about it.
Sometimes what we want isn’t our passion, wish, and strength.
Sometimes it’s:
When you feel like you’ve nailed down what you wanted, make sure that it is in the spirit of growth.
If you are innovating, you are going to fail – period.
Anyone promising innovation without pain is selling fools gold.
Amazon is the biggest, via the market cap, company in the world. They have the concept of “Day One,” meaning they are always trying things.
Sure, this meant the Amazon Fire, Destinations, and Amazon Wallet. All disasters.
It also meant AWS and Amazon Prime. If they didn’t find themselves willing to go through the pain of innovation, then they would still just sell books.
In the spirit of that, ask yourself two things:
Pain serves a purpose. It’s a wake-up call.
The pain isn’t the problem. Pain is a signal, not the problem. We often miss the source. As a result, we lose the lesson.
Things like pain and fear are signposts for our journey, warnings for us to pay attention. They don’t usually lie.
In that sense, pain is a gift. Without pain, we limit our ability to grow.
Embrace the pain, don’t hate it – if we listen carefully, our paths become clearer.
Once you decided on that idea after two minutes and figured out what’s next, the next thing to do is to experiment. I can think of no better place to do that than the internet.
Whatever you want to try, there is a platform to test the idea out and “kick the tires.” Most of them don’t need much “social credit” (meaning you can do stuff anonymously). You can run as many experiments as you can handle, and learn while doing instead of pondering or thinking.
Once you think about something and put some words around it, you can get the “task” done, usually at cost.* There are a ton of services out there that are a Google search away from solving whatever hurdle you face.
At cost pricing means, experimentation is cheap, often free.
Some places you can use to carry out experiments:
Try one today.
*Internet companies aren’t good at pricing, so the SKU’s skew to the cheap side.
There is a rule in accounting. All transactions have a debit and a credit. You can’t do one without the other.
To call something free is to dismiss the “credit” side of a transaction.
If you just saw half of the movie screen, your imagination isn’t going to replicate what happened on the other side.
That “free” lunch?
You gave up time, money, or another resource to make it happen somewhere in the chain reaction that got you to that restaurant table.
When you dismiss a part of the equation, you miss the picture.
Even the air you breathe comes at a cost. Each breath has to filter through your body’s complex system, which takes energy and resources. We don’t feel the cost, but it’s there.
Like breathing, staying in situations that you do not like have a cost, even if you don’t recognize it.
All these situations:
They take energy away from the person you want to become. Recognize that every time you engage with those situations there is a cost. Nothing is free.
From the desk of Adam Thomas 