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The willingness to try—to harness those fragile ideas—exists here. —Jonathan Ive
In case you don’t know who Jonathan Ive is, he’s recently Sir Jonathan Ive, the British-born Apple designer who is famous for the iPod, the iMac, the iPad, etc., etc., etc.
Something he said a few years ago struck me. He was asked by Stephen Fry (British author and tv personality) why he resided in the United States of America rather than in Britain or Canada or elsewhere and his answer was so interesting.
The willingness to try—to harness those fragile ideas—exists here.
I particularly loved the middle piece of his reply—to harness those fragile ideas—the most. It’s exactly the purpose of the new Trishlawrence.com. Ideas are fragile. So very fragile, and so quickly, we give up on the most fragile wisps of a business idea just because we are afraid or we’re sure that people will think we’re stupid, or because we’ve been trained to believe that “we” will never come up with anything useful to the universe. That we can’t possibly do it right or well or the best.
But we do live in a country that rebukes those beliefs, you know. We do. Entrepreneurial pursuits are on the rise, entrepreneurship is far from dead, in fact it is thriving, growing, galloping across analysts’ forecasts. I will be so bold as to say that entrepreneurs are keeping this country afloat. It is not the big corporations who can turn on a dime, who can innovate, keep a fragile business idea from bursting apart into nothing. It is the small ones, the underdogs, the woman-owned businesses who really are powerhouses in disguise.
And we all need a good dose of how to handle our fragile business ideas. How to be willing to try and see what they can become. New business idea, wavering in the breeze, barely a spine, not anything more than a puff that can blow away into the wind. That’s where the best business ideas come from. Remember the business idea that we were going to get a handheld tablet from Apple? Remember the laughter when they named it the iPad?
Even big companies have to learn how to take fragile business ideas and make them leaders in an industry. We watch it all the time. But I don’t want the small biz/entrepreneurs reading this to use Apple or Sir Jonathan Ives as an example of how to grow your biz. Sure, he can be our hero (he’s one of mine), but he cannot be what we compare our progress to, especially in these fledgling moments, when the business idea that came to us, that we wrote down in our notebook, seems so tenuous, risky, too far of a reach, scary, and impossible.
It’s the willingness to try, even when all we have is a wisp of a business idea that we feel could float away as quick as it arrived, to attempt to shape it into something bigger and better and bolder.
How do we begin to do that?
That’s what my Idea Creation E-Course is about. It’s about creating a safety net for your fragile wisps of ideas, for small business owners, one-person enterprises, entrepreneurs, people who are bootstrapping it and can’t luxuriate in time and wasted ideas. Do you already have a lot of ideas coming? This would definitely work for you. Are you feeling uninspired and not sure you will ever come up with a good business idea that would actually provide income AND JOY and let you help others? This e-course is for you. Do you already have a small business or entrepreneurial idea that seems stuck in the mud, stopped at a fork in the road, hampered by lack of tested, researched, genius ideas? This is where you’ll find help.
It’s free, no charge, no strings attached. You just give me your first name and an email address and the e-course comes without a hitch, streaming from my brain. (Scary thought!) I have thought of little else the past nine months or so, wondering how to be a better “idea catcher” and reading everything I could find about idea creation so that I could help people just like you.
I’ve watched people talk about small business creation, about how to begin, about how to grow, how to continue (I’ve been doing this for 17 years, reframing, morphing myself into new and better business models, and I think we’re getting some great information (FINALLY!; I wish I’d had this info 20 years ago when I was on the hunt for a small biz, entrepreneurial biz model) and yet . . . and isn’t there always a yet . . . I think there is still a deep chasm between reading all those books, getting the right idea (a book author has to write as generally as possible, remember), and putting it into action.
Think of me as the “idea catcher”—the person spreading the net across chasm, waving you on, telling you to take the leap.
Trishlawrence.com bridges the gap:
Dreaming up ideas that maybe, hopefully, might work < putting actionable ideas into play that really DO
Care to join me?
