Listen UP!
I love ideas. A good idea can generate a certain, serious excitement. Everything we see started as an idea in someone’s mind (even creation itself one could say came from the mind of God). That is unbelievable. Yet ideas, without action, can lead to a debilitating sort of lostness.
And to pursue every good idea, on the other hand, can lead to a crippling overload.
Yet some ideas are certainly worth pursuing. When and if you happen to stumble upon one, you don’t really have the right to negotiate its existence. Your discovering it in some way beholdens you to escort it out of your head and into this world. Or does it?
The process of discerning what ideas are worth pursuing and which ones are not can be excruciating. Where, in the first place, do good ideas come from? Do we create them, or discover them? If we discover them, then is there some sense of inevitability about the idea? Would the idea find another birth sponsor if not you?
This process of deliberation (especially for active-brained people with lots of ideas ;-) can be challenging!
Ideas are powerful. They can change everything. Even potentially dangerous ones. Chairman Mao, for example, unable to persaude the people of China to adopt his ideas about communism, realized the need to enflesh them in a promotional book, genuisely and notably marketed to college students.
It worked. And the idea, however challenging, found its way out of his head.
Some say great ideas will make a way for themselves, and that those who carry and ultimately deliver them is somewhat irrelevant, and irrespective of ability. What matters more is one’s willingness to listen and do what the idea requires, to go where it leads. If not, the idea will find another carrier.
Ideas, in this way, are impersonal, at least at first.
This can be an exciting part of the deal. Ideas are time-sensitive. They do expire. Certain ideas are for certain times, and need to come out. If they are bottle-necked by someone’s refusal to cooperate, they will simply find another way, or expire. Ideas are alive.
And we are on the line. We have to be ready. We have to be willing to go where the idea leads. If we insist on dictating to the idea how it should go, we seal the deal that we are not the one to behold it. We must hold it tightly, and yet loosely. It is not ultimately ours (even if we “own” the copyright).
Some think entrepreneuring is sheer will power, ultimate manifest-destiny. Entrepreneurs are people who simply will or choose to make their idea a reality. We tend to give credit to the person, but forget the centrality of the idea. Our biographies salute and almost canonize people who have made their ideas reality.
There is something special about them, but not outside of the dream that inspired them. Why did “that” dream become “their” pursuit? Why did “that” dream trump all others to become the thing worth doing? What something inherent in the dream, the idea, or the belief actually deserves the credit for inspiring the work?
The power of entrepreneuring is not so much a process of doing stuff to make an idea happen. The magic is having an idea worth pursing, and learning to listen to the One who gives such ideas. Listen UP today!
