Audition Your Ideas

Some experiences simply do not translate. You have to go to know.  ~ Kobi Yamada

Although there are an unlimited number of ways to make the transition from employee to entrepreneur or from current business to a new profit center, people stuck in either-or thinking overlook one of the best options.

What I’m talking about is a variation of what Barbara Sher calls “a temporary permanent commitment.” Instead of disposing of all current enterprises, you find a creative way to test your passion.

You’re in a much better position, after all, to assess an idea once you have actively engaged in its pursuit. In many instances, you’ll have to create your own opportunities, but don’t overlook these resources that can allow you to audition an idea and decide if it belongs in your repertoire.

° Intern. Small businessowners have been eager users of intern talent during the summertime when ambitious college students are looking for some hands-on experience.

There’s a growing trend, however, toward internship programs for adults. Since many older career changers are not limited to summer availability as their younger counterparts are, this is an idea that’s catching on.

° Volunteer Vacations. In the past decade, volunteer vacations have grown in popularity with people wanting to donate time and energy to helping others. Global Volunteers has been one organization leading the way with programs located around the world.

It seems to me that there’s another reward of participating. Let’s say you’re contemplating a long term move abroad to a country that’s caught your fancy. If you’ve only visited as a tourist, you may have an incomplete picture of what it would be like to actually live there.

That’s where a volunteer vacation can give you another point of view. In most instances, you’ll be working alongside residents of the country, living in small towns and interacting in a way that tourists don’t normally manage to do.

° Apprentice. Another old idea that’s seen a revival involves an experienced person entering into a long term relationship with a novice to teach what they know. A woman in one of my workshops had set up such an arrangement with an artist she admired and worked happily alongside for several months.

If your desires are aimed at skilled trades, most states have information on apprenticeship programs that also involve classroom instruction.

° Design Your Own Curriculum. Remember those required classes you had to take (and pay for) in college even if you weren’t  slightly interested? Don’t let those boring experiences keep you out of the classroom now.

This time around, you get to decide what you want to learn. A bonus of being a regular student is that you can sort out your passions from your passing fancies and move along to things that really suit you.

° 90 Day Trial. A quarter of a year is a nifty time frame for auditioning an idea. You must do more than just carry it around. As Patricia T. O’Conner points out, “An idea in your head is merely an idle notion. But an idea written down, that’s the beginning of something.”

It’s pretty simple, actually. For 90 days you focus, experiment and reserve judgment. Once the time is up, then it’s time to take inventory, evaluate and decide if your idea deserves another 90 days or, even, a permanent  role in your life.

Not  sure if your idea passed the audition or not?  Use this guideline from David Whyte: “Anyone or anything that does not bring you alive, is too small for you.”

Running Your Own Laboratory

 

Every time my UPS driver delivers another case of Making a Living Without a Job books, I am reminded that this idea almost didn’t happen. In fact, I was downright clueless about how big an idea it was.

 

Several months after I moved to Minneapolis, I discovered Open U, our local independent adult ed program. I thought this might be a good place to try out some ideas I had for seminars so I sent them a proposal. Making a Living was one of those ideas, but I didn’t think it was the biggest. Although I’d met a number of people in my new hometown who seemed intrigued by my joyfully jobless lifestyle, I suspected it was too radical to be popular. Maybe I’d do a session or two, I thought.

 

Thousands of seminar participants and tens of thousands of readers later, I am still astonished at how excited I get every time I walk into a meeting room to talk about my favorite subject. Helping others become self-employed has been a continuous source of joy and satisfaction for me.

 

So here’s a little secret about ideas: we can’t possibly know ahead of time which of our ideas are the real winners. The only way to find out is by putting them out into the world and seeing what happens.

 

Sometimes ideas arrive too early for the marketplace. Sometimes we discover when we try something out that it’s not as much fun as we thought it would be. Sometimes we don’t get the response we’d wanted, but still love the idea so much that we start looking for better ways of delivering it. It’s all a fascinating experiment.

 

We can’t know until we get into the game. It’s as simple as that. As Paul Hawken points out, “Owning a business and working for one are as different as chalk and cheese.” Surmising, fretting and musing about being an entrepreneur may be an interesting mental exercise, but it’s only by doing what an entrepreneur does that you can know what it’s really like.

 

I’m not the first person to discover this, of course. One of my favorite entrepreneurial role models was the late Dame Anita Roddick. Here’s what she had to say about her journey:

 

There are no rules or formulas for success. You just have to live it and do it. Knowing this gives us enormous freedom to experiment  toward what we want. Believe me, it’s a crazy, complicated journey. It’s trial and error. It’s opportunism. It’s quite literally, “Let’s try  lots of this stuff and see how it works.” 

 

My thinking was forged in the 1960s and in those days I would rather have slit my wrists than work in a corporation. So we had no organizational chart, no one-year, five-year plan. What we did have was management by our common values.

 

Entrepreneurs want to create a livelihood from an idea that has obsessed them. Money will grease the wheels, but becoming a millionaire is not the aim of the true entrepreneur. In fact, most entrepreneurs I know don’t give a damn about the accumulation of money. What gets their juices going is seeing how far an idea can go.

 

And I only know one way for that to happen.

 

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

The brilliant Chris Brogan talks about Overnight Success and Excuses. Check it out.

 

IdeaStarter #19 The Only Real Test for Ideas

Minutes after I returned from a mini-vacation in California, my daughter Jennie called. “Can you talk to Zoe?” she asked. “She put glitter glue on her Fancy Nancy puzzle and she’s having artist’s remorse.”

The next thing I knew, a sobbing 4 1/2-year-old was telling me that she had ruined her puzzle and then made matter worse by trying to undo her error. In the process, she had torn the puzzle. Reliving this horror made her cry even harder.

I did my best to explain to her that we have to keep trying things and we won’t always like the results. All that mattered to her was her ugly mess. All that mattered to me was to make sure Zoe knew that it is okay to make mistakes.

Zoe’s still too young to realize that the only way to know for sure if an idea is a good one or not is to try it out. If we’re really paying attention, we’ll also discover that the bad ones can teach us as much (or more) than the good ones. Since ideas are about bringing into being something that did not exist before, predicting the outcome is an exercise in futility. A willingness to experiment, on the other hand, will often lead us to surprising success.

Imagine having the idea to write a book about punctuation. If you’re passionate about such things, you might assume that it was too weird to think anyone would be interested in reading about the proper placement of commas and apostrophes. Yet thousands of us were delighted that Lynne Truss followed through with her idea. As she writes in the preface to the American edition of her book, “To be clear from the beginning: no one involved in the production of Eats, Shoots & Leaves expected the words ‘runaway’ and ‘bestseller’ would ever be associated with it…My book was aimed at the tiny minority of British people ‘who love punctuation and don’t like to see it mucked about with.’ When my own mother suggested we print on the front of the book ‘For the select few,’ I was hurt, I admit it.”  Her mother was wrong as thousands of readers proved.

Linus Pauling said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” You can’t possibly know what the best ones are unless you’re willing to try out a bunch.

$100 Hour: Share how-to information in your own e-book. This popular way to get into publishing is ideal for niche marketers, as well as writers with expertise on timely topics. Check out Booklocker to learn more.

Explore More: If you haven’t read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, surprise yourself by discovering how interesting and funny punctuation can be in the hands of a creative writer. You’ll learn to avoid what my sister Margaret called Misplaced Apostrophe Syndrome. As Zoe would say, “Come on. It’ll be fun!”

Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless. ~ Mary Kay Ash