There is one trait in particular that all entrepreneurs share, and that is a being naturally creative people. Entrepreneurs need to have creative minds in order to come up with new ways to enhance their business, or devise original product ideas. I’m not sure how other entrepreneurs feel about their creativity, but I personally find my creativity to be two sides of the same coin.
On one hand, I think that my creative nature is a curse. I say this because I have many different ideas that I have that I want to create and spread with the world, but unfortunately life is finite and there isn’t enough time to accomplish all of these things. This means that many of the what I feel are great ideas never see the light of day because I’m attempting to bring various other projects to fruition.
That being said, I also consider my creativity to be my greatest asset and a blessing. Here are the top three things to remind yourself when you’re focusing on the curse instead of the blessing.
Your Pain is Your Customers Gain –While you may not have all of the time you would want to get all of your ideas to life, when you finally bring one of your ideas to life it will no doubt be of tremendous value to your customers. Whether it’s painstakingly refining a current product to become something better, or creating an entirely new business venture, your new product will be fueled by passion which will make your customers happy, even if the process in and of itself can be grueling.
The More You Create, the More You Learn – Even if all your ideas don’t see the light of day, once you have an idea you’ll immediately begin to research any related topics to see if it makes sense or to learn about any intricacies of a new industry. For example, my company the Wish Group operates multiple businesses in multiple industries, such as event webcasting, staffing, teleconferencing and marketing to name a couple. Once I had the idea to start these companies, I had to learn as much as I could about these industries to see if my business plan made sense, and if there was about the industry that I was overlooking.
You’ll Grow Professionally and Personally – Whether your idea is a success or a failure, you’ll grow from the experience. Apart from all of the new knowledge you’ll gain, you’ll also get a better understanding of why this particular venture was unsuccessful when compared to your other ones. You’ll also get a better handle on what your customers actually want, and of course if it is a failure, it will only make you stronger.
Do you ever feel that you don’t have enough time to bring your ideas to life, of that you simply have too many good ideas and not enough time to act on them? I’d love to discuss this topic with you in the comments.
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If you think of ideas as solutions for your customers, this reminds me of a quote by Albert Einstein: “‘If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
This is absolutely true, not only for entrepreneurs, but for any creative individual working in a business environment. One thing I have learnt through experience is that creativity (which I used to confuse with “artistry”) is useless without strategy, and that in any ideation process, we need to diverge before converging. Yes, time is finite, but so is the number of ideas that will actually work — the BIG idea. When working on a project, I like to think that every idea is worth being pursued and to use as much time as possible exploring, brainstorming, “diverging”… Until strategy brings me back to reality and let me sift through the ones that are more commerciable. It likely takes uncountable sessions of fine-tuning, but I believe this approach can help pinpoint better ideas quickly every time.
Time is always a rare commodity, no matter the objective. Timing is even more elusive. Both must be respected and planned if propagation is to occur.
Sometimes I believe that the only thing in the way of me and success is, “priorities.”
I have many ideas but to do some of them, I need to learn how hackers operate, lol. But the more benign ideas only require a good sense of understanding the time it will take to enact and the overall benefit and return that can be expected once employed. This should be the ground work for any idea, innovation, short cut.
Inactivity is a luxury, and a curse, also.