10 Rules To Make Your New Business Ideas Matter
#1 - Start new things as if you were a complete beginner
You would like to try a new type of advertising or you are thinking about hiring a consultant to develop an exciting market. You’re motivated but you’ve seen things fail before. You are already biased! And these biases will make you blind.
It’s simple: either try it or don’t. But if you do, make sure you treat this new growth opportunity as completely new. Forget EVERYTHING you think you know, in order to make the most out of each new idea.
#2 - Stay focused
You’ve finally decided to sit down and work on your company video. After 30 minutes, you find your mind keeps wandering away. You spend the next 2 hours going back and forth between working and feeling really bad about not doing the other things on your mind.
Don’t fight it. Quickly write the issue/thing that pops into your head on a notepad and come back to your work. It’s written in black and white! You know you’re not going to forget about this. And your mind will be free to get back to business. Quite often, when you get back to your notes.. you'll realise it wasn't that important after all.
#3 - Active reading and watching
We know that we constantly need to learn new things to help our business grow. But learning is not just reading a book about recruitment or watching a youtube explaining social media marketing. For learning to sink in and be implemented you first need to remember.
Make sure you are active while reading/watching. Constantly ask yourself : “how does this apply to me?”. Be active mentally but also physically… get up! Speak out loud! Move your hands! Doing a quick exercise session before any new learning will work wonders.
#4 - Learn to teach
When you discover something that could be useful for your business, think about how you’ll explain it to your staff. How will they respond and ask questions ? How will you explain certain details and leave other details out to get your point across?
This will force you to structure your thoughts. It will allow you to digest the idea with simple terms that your team can understand without knowing everything that you know about your business. You don’t even have to actually tell anybody after. The exercise of preparing a conversation will engrave this new idea into your memory bank.
#5 - Block slots into your calendar for implementation
You have a new idea :
Day 1 - you're motivated and you work 6 hours
Day 2 - still motivated you work a good 4 hours on your new idea
Day 3 - you have other things to do but you manage to get 2 hours in
Day 4 - you’re annoyed about yesterdays 2 hours, and you don’t do anything
Day 5 - you didn’t sleep well, the excitement of the new idea is gone, and you’re left with no implementation and a lot of frustration.
Calm down. If you have an idea, that's awesome! Now schedule a slot every day for some quality work on this new idea. You can do more if you can, but think about quality time spent on an idea rather than progress. This does not guarantee that your idea will work out. But it will keep your mind fresh to either implement or move onto the next idea.
#6 - Implement with space repetition
It’s amazing how quickly we forget how to do things. On the day that we set up our automatic newsletter everything is clear. Click here, copy paste here, we’re good, it’s off! 3 months later, the excitement is gone and when it’s time to do this again… we go blank. We muddle through another send and then give up totally on the next one.
When you implement something new, make sure you schedule a few repeats after 1 week and 1 month. You should be okay after that. But don’t waste a good new implementation by letting the day to day get in the way repeating good things!
#7 - Remove negative thoughts
“I’ve done this before, this will never work! We’re doing it but it’s a long shot. They’ve done it and it failed. We’re too late.”
Being a bit pessimistic can sometimes be useful. But once you’ve made the decision to jump in, set yourself a goal and a stop loss and no more negative talk! A goal can be time spent or performance. A stop loss is "stop working on this idea if XYZ happens."
If other people are giving you the negative talk just don’t talk to them. If your goals and stop losses are in place, even if this particular play fails, remember that you are getting closer.
#8 - Visualisation
Just remember everyday what you’re aiming for with this new idea. It doesn't matter what it is. Remind yourself what it’s going to look like when it works out. It takes 30 seconds a day, but give yourself a break and remember what is going to happen when you pull this off!
#9 - Purpose vs passion
Purpose and passion often get confused. You want your business to be successful. That does not mean that you have to love doing paperwork. But you do paperwork for your business to be successful and that’s okay. Not everything in your new idea will be fun, but it doesn’t matter, it’s part of the plan. Not being excited with a particular task does not have to mean that this idea is not a good fit for you.
#10 - Baby steps - the 1% rule
Most ideas don’t even get past your head. Especially the big bold ideas. It doesn’t matter what you are working on. Map out the first few important steps and start one of them. Allow yourself to be wrong. It’s okay if you find out that you didn’t start the with right step. Just try and get closer to your idea 1%/day. And it’s okay if your initial idea isn’t where you end up. As long as you do baby steps everyday, you’ll never make any horrible mistakes and progress will happen.