Everyone has a million ideas that come across their mind, but not many people act on them. I feel as if I have a trillion ideas a day that could catapult my business or could get me a sit down with Oprah. None of them have actually gotten me to Oprah level, but it has brought me within a couple of years, to the six figure income level.
The issue with ideas isn’t that they’re a dime a dozen, it’s the person who is in charge of executing the idea. We, as humans by nature, have hundreds of thoughts coursing through our mind at any given moment of the day. Let me break down how you can execute an idea like a boss.
Brain Dumping Leads To Mind Mapping
This is something I discussed in the “Passive Income: Make Money In Your Sleep” eBook. About once a day, I literally sit in front of a piece of paper or my note sections and write all of my thoughts out. I also do this throughout my day. After a weeks worth of brain dumping, I sit down on Saturday and start mind mapping out the ideas, in order to see what works better. When I’m mind mapping my ideas, I have some simple criteria I follow when checking things off of my list.
- Ties back to my company’s mission, goals, and vision.
- Adds more than 20 hours a month to my workload.
- Creates revenue stream quickly.
- Needs to be outsourced to start the company.
If there is more than two No’s amongst my criteria per idea, I immediately stop the project there. This is a huge issue people who don’t have criteria have. They keep working on projects that suck them dry.
Download PDF — How To Execute An Idea Like A Boss worksheet.
Best Friend Test
Now that you have flushed out your idea and you believe it’s the greatest thing since slice bread, email, text, or call your 10 closest friends to talk about the idea. Be vague about the project. Meaning, they don’t need to initially know that this is your project. Friends tend to believe in you even when your idea sucks. They are supportive by default. I did this with two companies I’m launching this fall. Everyone understood my visions and asked where they could sign up. In addition, they didn’t bat an eye when price was mentioned. If you passed the best friend test, great! If not, fine tune your project, if you truly believe in it. Adhere to their advice and see what you can fix.
Designate Days
This is going to be extremely important in executing your idea like a boss! Anything worth achieving requires a couple of things; a capital investment to infuse the start-up plus the sacrifice of the time. Time is a high form of currency in my mind, because you can’t get it back. If you have a full plate already its time to dump what is not yielding a return on investment. After you cut out everything that is not adding to you, then it’s time to designate those extra hours to your project. If you realize you have 6 to 10 hours available, then you can utilize the weekend to help your idea. If you have 20+ hours to use, then the week and the weekend are going to be your best friend.
Deadlines
If you have watched “He’s Just Not Into You”, Justin Long’s character has a moment with Ginnifer Goodwin’s character that highlights procrastination. Something that is second nature to her. Finally, while she was paying her phone bill (which was late again), she had an Aha! moment; realizing what it had done to her. We are not those kind of people, we are people who set deadlines and achieve them. In the last two months, I have become a spreadsheet queen. If you don’t have Excel sign-up for Google Docs, it’s free. Create a simple spreadsheet with the task, what you need to do, and a deadline. Finally, set reminders to go off before and on those dates.
Tunnel Vision
It’s funny, some time last week I was sitting down with a guy friend of mines, and he asked me if I checked out my competition. I told him in all honesty, “no, I have tunnel vision when it comes to my business”. Truth be told, you have to. There are so many shiny toy distractions out there that can knock you off course. I legit focus on the task at hand. This isn’t something that came super easy, I had to train myself to stay focused on the task in front of me. When it came to social media, I had to hope I could post what I needed to post and leave. Everyday, I have a to-do-list. I would rather achieve everything on that list than to read random facts about things that will not help build my business or that won’t enlighten me.
To execute an idea like a boss, it takes work. It’s not just something that happens overnight. You have to fine tune the method to your madness. Once you get it, go with it. I have created 20 digital products because I have fine tuned my ideas by mind mapping them out.
