GOT A GREAT IDEA? BIG DEAL.
Over the course of the next week or so I’ll be rehashing all my notes from the 99 Percent Conference I attended in NYC a couple weeks ago. There was SO MUCH to digest it has taken some time to begin cataloging my thoughts. Because the conference centered on the ability to execute ideas, I thought it best to make these next posts as succinct as possible - focusing on digestible and executible tidbits only.
Let us begin.
I will come back to the following point again and again over the next week, in fact, I think it may become my life’s mantra:
THERE ARE NO GOOD IDEAS. ONLY GREAT EXECUTION.
This was repeated a number of times both by Josh Rubin of Cool Hunting and Scott Belsky of BeHance. As someone who boasts that his top strength is Ideation (see Strength Finders) a thought like this is a little hard to swallow at first. And then I begin to think, who cares if I have a great idea if I can’t execute it? If I’m not able to see it through to creation, I may as well have never had the idea in the first place.
Joshua Blankenship recently twittered, “Ideas are commodities (yes, even your brilliant, amazing, non-disclosure-agreement-needing idea). Execution is business.”
The emphasis on execution merely focuses your attention onto what is truly important: the actual creation. Oftentimes as creatives we expend too much of our energy brainstorming and ideating, when our resources might be better spent on figuring out just HOW to make the idea into something more than well, an idea.
Great, you have an idea. Now DO something with it.
