Читать книгу Secrets to a Successful Startup - Trevor Blake - Страница 13
ОглавлениеTurn a Moment of Insight into a Winning Idea
A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.
— OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.
When most people come up with an idea for a startup, they are inspired by something they do well, have experience with, or enjoy and are passionate about. In that moment, many startups are doomed.
My advice is: To come up with a winning idea, pay attention to what makes you mad. Don’t focus on your skills or what you love and want to do; figure out what you want to change.
What Makes a Winning Idea?
When I decided it was time to be my own boss, I did what most people do. I considered what I enjoyed doing and what I was especially good at. However, when I analyzed my life honestly, I had to admit that I was not very skilled at anything. It came as a bit of a shock to realize that I had no talent, but that revelation is probably what saved me from joining the millions of failed startups.
By my fortieth birthday, I had changed careers three times, and without much of a plan, I had become a sales manager for a biotechnology company. In essence, I was responsible for managing a sales team, which involved some skills, and I could lead a team, but those talents were not unique in any way. I could not figure out how to turn that experience into a winning idea for my own business. In addition, the dot-com bubble had already burst, I knew nothing about computers but how to type on them, and my lack of do-it-yourself skills was a subject of family legend. I had long been banned from going near a toolbox, so being any kind of tradesman was easily ruled out.
When I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere struggling to solve this alone, I decided to research others who had faced this same problem. After all, this strategy had already worked for me once. When I was younger, I lived a hardscrabble life. I wanted to travel the world and to be an adventurer, but it seemed impossible. I couldn’t work out how to escape the quicksand that was my life back then. So I read the biographies of explorers. Dozens of them had started out in even worse situations than mine, and their inspiring life stories helped me rewire my thinking. I began to mirror their attitudes and habits, and before long, I took my first adventure. Over the next two decades, my travels included lengthy visits to fifty-six countries.
Now I wanted to be my own boss, so I sought inspiration in the biographies of business pioneers. I hoped their inspiring stories would reveal some latent skill or knowledge that I shared with them. I wanted to know what talents had triggered their pioneering business journeys.
That is when the real “secret” to a winning idea hit me. It jumped right off the pages of every biography. It wasn’t a particular talent or skill. It wasn’t passion for what you are selling or doing what you love. It wasn’t some innate quality that some entrepreneurs are born with. It wasn’t some life experience or education that turned someone into a successful entrepreneur. In fact, the desire for success or to make millions seemed to be the wrong mindset entirely. Instead, the one thing every legendary entrepreneur had in common was that they were ordinary people who got so hopping mad about something they were driven to fix it.
Further, they did this even when they lacked the experience or qualifications to solve the problem. Most of them were clueless about where to begin. They didn’t have top-notch management teams or access to funding, and in most cases they didn’t desire to be entrepreneurs at all. They were simply driven by a deep motivation to find a way to fix something that had somehow got under their skin, and in the process they inadvertently became business leaders.
This is the simple yet profound secret to a winning idea: Be motivated to improve the world in one specific way.
Henry Ford grew up on a farm, and later he became an engineer working at the Edison Illuminating Company. He didn’t set out to become an entrepreneur who would revolutionize the automobile industry and manufacturing. Instead, he was mad that, when he was growing up, driving a car was a rich man’s privilege. Ford wanted to make cars that common folk could afford, freeing them to travel.
The story of Madam C. J. Walker is one of my favorites. The daughter of former slaves in the American South, Walker became angry because her hair kept falling out due to malnutrition, stress, and the damage caused by all the “snake oil” concoctions being sold by traveling salesmen at the end of the nineteenth century. She got so mad she developed her own hair tonic for herself. When other African American women began asking her for some, Walker started selling her hair tonic door to door.
By the time she died in 1919, Walker had become America’s first female self-made millionaire and was considered the wealthiest African American businessperson, and she achieved this against almost unthinkable odds. She was the wrong color and the wrong sex in a racist, male-dominated society. She was the wrong class, she had no formal education, and she had no expertise in chemistry, beauty products, or business. Few successful entrepreneurs anywhere, at any time, have had as many hurdles to overcome, and I consider Walker one of my heroes. I wish I could have met her. If you could bottle what made Walker tick, you would surely make billions.
Another story that inspired me was Sir Richard Branson, whose dyslexia led to poor academic performance in school. His first business was a magazine called Student, through which he advertised discounted records for students, who typically couldn’t afford the record prices at “High Street” stores. This made Branson mad, and he later said, “There is no point in starting your own business unless you do it out of a sense of frustration.”
Selling records eventually led Branson to found a record label, Virgin Records. Then, another moment of frustration led him to start an airline. About thirty years ago, American Airlines canceled his flight to the British Virgin Islands, where “a beautiful woman” was waiting for him, and Branson became incensed.
“I went to the back of the airport, hired a plane, borrowed a blackboard, and wrote, ‘Virgin Air, $39 single flight,’” he recalls. “I walked around all the stranded people and filled up the plane. As we landed, a passenger said to me: ‘Virgin Airways isn’t too bad — smarten up the service and you could be in business.’” Branson eventually married the beautiful woman, Joan, and turned his anger into a profitable airline.
Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings started Netflix after he was charged forty dollars in late return fees for a video at his local Blockbuster. “I had misplaced the cassette,” he admits. “It was all my fault. I didn’t want to tell my wife about it. And I said to myself, I’m going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee? Later, I realized my gym had a much better business model. You could pay thirty or forty dollars a month and work out as little or as much as you wanted.” Hastings transformed his embarrassment and frustration into a new model for renting movies, and just as importantly, Netflix has since adapted with the times and become a global streaming sensation.
Sara Blakely was irritated by the seamed foot in her pantyhose, so she cut the toe section off. When she realized others had the same dilemma, she knew this common problem represented a business opportunity. Fearing ridicule, however, she didn’t even share her business plan with her husband or family until her company, Spanx, was well underway.
Academics might try, but I can’t find any genetic, psychological, cultural, or environmental commonalities between Ford, Walker, Branson, Hastings, and Blakely. Before starting their businesses, none had a shared identifiable talent or passion. What happened, however, what unites their stories, is that they used their experiences of frustration to do something to change and improve the world. That is where winning business ideas come from.
A Winning Idea Fills a Need or Fixes a Problem
However, the truth is, you don’t necessarily have to get mad. But if your winning idea does not fill a need or fix a problem that frustrates customers, then it won’t make a successful business, and by successful I mean one that makes millions by delighting those customers. Your business does not have to be the first to market to succeed. You don’t have to be the only company offering your product or service. But you must fill a need or delight customers in a specific way and do that one thing better than anyone else (for more on this, see “What Makes a Winning Product or Service,” pages 178–81).
For instance, Southwest Airlines was not the first airplane service, and within a year of their launch, with nothing much to distinguish it, the airline was in trouble. They had posted a net loss of $1.6 million, and the company was forced to sell one of its planes. Desperate to keep up, Southwest’s vice president of ground operations, Bill Franklin, was tasked with finding a solution. The answer he came up with was simple but brilliant: Unload and load passengers faster than the other airlines, and get the planes right back in the air. So Southwest’s “ten-minute turn,” as it came to be called, was born, and they effectively turned the planes like an assembly line. This winning idea was born of adversity, but it worked because it served customers better.
The story of Google’s founding is another tale of success born of frustration, but of a different kind. Two Stanford University doctoral students — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — had created a search engine algorithm (called PageRank), but according to Luis Mejia, Google’s associate director of technology licensing, “The inventors did not want to do a startup company — they wanted to finish their PhDs.” Mejia worked with the pair in the mid-1990s and says, “We spent half a year trying to market [the technology] and find licensees. But nobody really expressed much interest.”
After a few “road shows,” Mejia says, Page and Brin realized no one understood what they were doing. “So it was really out of frustration that they decided to start a company. . . . In that respect, it was chance.”
Mejia says the pair — who never finished their doctorates — did not have a business model, “but then a lot of things just sort of fell into place. Maybe that’s where serendipity comes in. . . .There is a chance we could have licensed it to another company for a very nominal sum of money. But it isn’t clear that they would have done anything with it. And there probably would be no Google today.”
Occasionally, moments of insight lead entrepreneurs to solve problems people haven’t yet realized they have.
Ask Yourself: What Makes Me Mad?
Once I realized the “secret” to startup success, I reviewed my life for the things that made me mad. I drafted a long list, but one in particular made my blood boil. For years I had been frustrated that the company I worked for had created a product that could successfully treat a rare disease, but then they spent no money making physicians and patients aware that this solution existed. Though this sounds callous, it is typical of a lot of large businesses. Originally a small, private company that could make scientific and patient-focused decisions, it had become so successful that it went public. Now the company had to answer to shareholders, who generally prefer to increase profits and dividends and don’t have much tolerance for potentially risky or low-revenue strategies.
The company estimated that less than two hundred people in the world suffered from this rare disease, and the cost of making all physicians aware of both the issue and the solution was considered exorbitant compared to the potential return from sales. Three times I proposed plans to justify an investment, and three times I was rejected and warned to focus on selling our other products. Yes, this made me mad.
My idea was born. I had never started a company before or raised finances, and I knew very little about research and development, but the unfairness of the situation motivated me to want to do something for patients suffering from the disease.
Take Notes: Make a List of Problems
Every time something gets under your skin, make a note of it. When you hear yourself or others complaining about something being wrong, jot it down. When someone expresses a wish for something that does not yet exist, scribble the request on a piece of paper.
Writing things down is important. Don’t be fooled into thinking that making a mental note is all you need to do. It is scientifically proven that people who physically write something down tend toward taking action, and writing aids with memory retention. It is also scientifically proven that writing by hand creates greater retention than typing.
Good entrepreneurs keep a pen and paper handy at all times. This might be the simplest entrepreneurial tip of all: Never be without access to paper and pen, whether by the bed, in the kitchen, in the car, or in your pocket or purse. For the want of a pen, brilliant ideas have come and gone. Buy a stack of sticky notes and litter your life with them. I still do.
The first problem you identify may not lead to a winning business idea. Or the second, third, or fourth. Yet over time a pattern will emerge. Some things will make your blood boil more than others. In that pattern is the seed to a winning idea.
Find a Winning Solution: Tap Your Intuition
Of course, identifying a problem is only half the battle. Discovering what makes you mad is only one side of the coin, and relatively speaking, it’s easy. What’s harder is coming up with an ideal solution, and what’s harder still is turning that solution into a practical business. However, once you’ve identified something in the world you want to change, your next task is to figure out how to fix it. The winning idea is a problem-solution package.
Finding a winning solution requires accessing your intuition. This may not sound practical, but every successful entrepreneur I know does it. Analysis will only get you so far. Ultimately, you’re seeking that famed lightning bolt of inspiration: the solution no one has thought of yet. People access their intuition in different ways, and some people are more comfortable with it than others. However, it’s possible to cultivate your intuition in ways that invite inspiration, and I have developed tools that have helped me harness this power. While the process is still a wonderful, mysterious thing, the easiest and most effective ways I’ve found are through meditation and immersion in nature. Whatever methods you use, developing your intuition is essential for success in business.
The Power of the Feminine
In most cultures, intuition is considered a feminine trait. While it’s something all people possess, women tend to be more open to it than men. Whatever the case is for you, the goal is to access and enhance your intuition so that it becomes a powerfully complementary, interconnected, and interdependent part of your intellect, or your ability to analyze, which tends to be considered a masculine trait.
I have been blessed in my life to be surrounded by determined women with powerful intuitions. I credit all my business success to the lessons they taught me when I was younger, even though they often had no idea I was paying attention. My wife, Lyn, is one of those women. Lyn “just knows.” She is the only female in my soccer fantasy league, and she has won every year since she joined. I have come last on several occasions. Some of the participants spend hours studying form tables and injury lists. What they don’t know is that my wife makes her predictions at the last minute and without any thought, and she still wins by a mile.
Lyn often ends her pronouncements with the phrase “I just know.” Being male, it drives me to distraction. A typical conversation goes like this:
Me: I’m going to invest in Bob’s startup.
Lyn: Don’t, he’s bad news.
Me: How can you say that? You’ve never met him.
Lyn: I just know.
Me: How can you just know if you’ve never met him and have no idea what his business is?
Lyn: I just do. It’s up to you, but if you want my advice, I wouldn’t do it.
Today, I take her advice, but it wasn’t always that way. I had to learn the hard way. The first few times I ignored her intuition, it cost me, financially and mentally. Now I know better. I also know that my wife is not unusual. Many women have powerful intuitions, while many men ignore their own. Some people dismiss intuition because they think it isn’t “logical,” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid and real.
Who else trusts their intuition? Bill Gates. Steve Jobs believed intuition is “more powerful than intellect.” Warren Buffett only makes decisions based on it. Richard Branson prefers it to “stats and data.” Albert Einstein called it the “only real valuable thing.” In a 2016 study, only one-third of the CEOs surveyed said they trusted their data and resulting analytics, while in another study, 59 percent of decision makers said that “the analysis they require relies primarily on human judgment rather than machine algorithms.”
At Cornell University, Dr. Daryl Bem oversaw a decade-long series of experiments involving a thousand participants that showed humans do indeed have the ability to “sense” future outcomes. Because of the intuition study’s paradigm-shifting implications, Dr. Bem waited until he had reached a “74 billion to 1” statistical certainty before releasing the results. By anyone’s standards that is statistically significant. Dr. Bem said, “It violates our notion of how the physical world works. The phenomena of modern quantum physics are just as mind-boggling, but they are so technical that most nonphysicists don’t know about them.”
Yet the implications for business of embracing the power of the feminine goes beyond just intuition and coming up with winning ideas. This approach should inform how every business is run. For instance, one 2013 study concluded that women’s abilities to make fair decisions when competing interests are at stake make them better corporate leaders. The study found that the more cooperative approach to decision-making translated into better performance for their companies. “We’ve known for some time that companies that have more women on their boards have better results,” explained Professor Chris Bart. “Our findings show that having women on the board is no longer just the right thing but also the smart thing to do. Companies with few female directors may actually be shortchanging their investors.”
The researchers found that male directors preferred to make decisions using rules, regulations, and traditional ways of doing business. Female directors, in contrast, were less constrained by these parameters and more prepared to rock the boat.
Several other studies have shown that gender equity in senior management and at the board level brings many tangible benefits. In 2016, Forbes said, “Today’s corporate world may be male-dominated but companies should take note: Hiring women is actually good for business. It’s not just about equality, it’s a business case with measurable success. Companies with more women onboard tend to outperform companies with more men onboard.”
My own experience matches this data. While startups don’t usually have to worry about hiring lots of employees or contractors and the composition of an executive board, it’s a good lesson to remember. Strive for gender balance in hiring in the same way you strive to balance the feminine/masculine attributes in yourself.
Meditation: Training the Mind
Meditation is called mindfulness training because, like practicing a sport, it improves us in measurable ways and increases our mental and emotional skills through focus and repetition. If you want to improve your intuition, meditation is one of the best ways.
According to University of Iowa researchers, the brain’s so-called “axis of intuition” is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the middle of the forehead. This is what gets depicted in cartoons of superheroes or spiritual gurus — a power emanating from the forehead. Further, a 2014 Wake Forest University study looked at the brains of fifteen volunteers before and after four days of mindfulness training. What did they find? In addition to a host of other wonderful brain enhancements, the freshly minted meditators seriously increased the “activity” and “interconnectivity” of their ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex has been shown to play a key role in the extinction of conditioned fear responses and, importantly, in the maintenance of fear extinction over time. Fear is known to kill intuition.
Meditation can change your brain by eliminating fear for short periods, like thirty minutes, to create winning ideas and make better decisions. Every good idea I have ever had in business or life has come shortly after a session of meditation. I might feel fear before I sit in meditation — fear of problems, finances, growth, and so on — but by doing the meditation, I free my mind from fear and allow it to access solutions. It is the only method I know that helps.
There are many kinds of meditation techniques, and just like different forms of physical training in sports, they are used for different purposes and outcomes. Here, I offer one simple meditation technique that is intended to increase the frequency of great ideas.
Taking Quiet Time
I call this meditation technique “taking quiet time” (or TQT), and the whole thing takes about twenty minutes. It requires no skill or experience, and there are no advanced levels. It is a variation of a meditation technique that can be found in most spiritual practices.
The goal is to sit quietly, clear the mind, and for a few minutes think of nothing, which sounds simple but is actually very hard. It is contrary to the media-filled distractions of modern life and to how most of us have learned to behave. Yet to me, taking quiet time is the number-one business-growth tool in your arsenal.
Just like any sport, or any particular meditation technique, taking quiet time can be explained in simple or intricate terms, in four or four hundred steps. But if I want someone who has never played soccer to get excited about the sport, I will simply take them to a park and kick a ball around. If I first subjected the person to a step-by-step soccer lesson and explained every rule and technique, they would be bored to death. I want you to be excited about taking quiet time, so here is the four-step version. Kick it around for a while. If you want to know the intricacies of meditation, you can go as deep down that rabbit hole as you like (and a good place to start is my website, www.trevorgblake.com). But if you have never experienced the amazing benefits of meditation before, just try this simple process.
1.Get up thirty minutes earlier than your normal wakeup time.
2.Go to a quiet part of your home.
3.Sit upright in a chair, feet on the floor, hands overlapped.
4.Do nothing for twenty minutes. Try to think of nothing. Focus on your gentle breathing through each inhalation and exhalation. When the mind chatter kicks in — as it always does, even for expert meditators — smile and imagine the words floating out a window. Then start again and focus on breathing.
That is all there is to it. I never time myself because somehow I always know when twenty minutes are up, but you might want to set a timer at first, in case you fall asleep — and there is nothing wrong with falling asleep.
Your Intuition Needs a Distracted Brain
Meditating and taking quiet time work in ways we don’t fully understand. It seems counterintuitive that thinking of nothing could help improve intuition and inspiration, but it does. Not only that, it’s been proven to aid concentration, creativity, self-confidence, problem-solving, analytical ability, and brain functioning.
The best way to find the brilliant solution we seek for our winning business idea is sometimes not to seek it. Instead, we consciously and deliberately empty ourselves of all distractions to make room for the kind of new inspiration that makes our stomachs flutter with excitement.
Why first thing in the morning? In a half-awake state, your brain is not as good at filtering out distractions and focusing on a particular task. It’s also a lot less efficient at remembering connections between ideas or concepts. These are both good things when it comes to creative work, since this kind of work requires us to make new connections, to be open to new ideas, and to think in new ways. So, a tired, fuzzy brain is of much more use to us when working on creative projects like finding solutions to a winning idea.
In 2012, a Scientific American article described how distractions can actually be a good thing for creative thinking: Insight problems involve thinking outside the box. This is where susceptibility to “distraction” can be of benefit. At off-peak times, we are less focused, and we may consider a broader range of information. This wider scope gives us access to more alternatives and diverse interpretations, thus fostering innovation and insight. It is also noteworthy that when, for whatever reason, I skip my early-morning meditation session, sometime later that day Lyn will invariably say, “You didn’t take quiet time today, did you?” When I don’t, she says my self-confidence vibe is “off.”
Connect to Nature: Expanding the Mind
As I read the biographies of successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs, another character trait that jumped out at me was their affiliation with nature. All of them turned to nature in times of stress or when big decisions needed to be made. Today, what I’ve found is that connecting to nature is a companion activity to meditation: It decreases stress, improves health, and sharpens the mind. To improve intuition and invite inspiration as you develop your winning business idea, take a walk in the woods.
This has been my approach in all of my businesses. I split my day up so that I have dedicated work times and dedicated distraction times. It is always when I close my office door and go for a thirty-minute walk in nature that the great ideas arrive. I notice, however, that if I skip my meditation in the morning, it doesn’t matter how many nature walks I take. No great ideas come to me. The two are definitely bedfellows. Meditate, do some work, go for a walk: I’ve found this to be a pretty powerful prescription.
Henry Ford was passionate about walking in the country and reconnecting to nature. He encouraged workers to exercise in their off-hours and believed that, next to work, a person’s duty was to think. Ford retreated to an old farmhouse near the family dairy in Dearborn. He sat on the ground when it was dry and in an old rocking chair when it was wet and simply let thoughts come to him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was another who attributed his success, and his sense of tranquility, to being at one with nature. He spent as much time walking in a forest as working in an office because that is where he found his inspiration. Emerson described being in nature as “a high discourse; the voice of the speaker seems to breathe as much from the landscape as from his own breast; it is Nature communing with the seer.”
To channel his restlessness, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s mother paid him to clear and plant an eight-acre field. In that solitude, he came up with the ideas that made him a billionaire. I read that it worked for them, so I tried it and discovered that it worked for me. Kick it around. What do you have to lose? To enhance the benefits of taking quiet time, plug into nature and access its expanded reservoir of knowledge, just as a single computer plugs into the World Wide Web.
Here is my four-point nature prescription:
1.Reconnect with nature daily. No excuses. I consider this a necessity, as vital as eating, drinking, and working.
2.Keep reconnecting simple: Observe a flower and silently compliment it on its beauty, say hello to a bird, relocate an insect outdoors and wish it a safe journey, admire the landscape, stand barefoot on grass and experience the sheer joy of its coolness. You don’t have to climb Mount Everest and sit on a pointy rock in a vow of silence. Nature is connectivity; being in it, you become part of its matrix. It will teach you. Just relax and listen.
3.Observe mostly in silence without doing anything else. If you take a stroll with someone and chat the whole time, you will miss the point and the benefit. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen dolphins or whales while the people around me miss them because they are gossiping, complaining, or exercising so intensely they aren’t observing. Leave the phone behind; don’t let calls or texts interrupt.
4.If you live in a concrete jungle, you may have to work harder to find nature, but she is all around: in the clouds, in window boxes, in grassy sidewalks. There is no difference or separation between a patch of grass in a disused parking lot and a giant oak in a wood. As Henry Miller said, “Even a blade of grass when given proper attention becomes an infinitely magnificent world in itself.” All life is a doorway to reconnect with the force of nature. Go outside and observe, admire, respect. Simple.
Winning Ideas Create a Sense of Awe
A winning idea, when it comes, is not like a typical, everyday “good idea.” Trust me, when you have a winning idea, you will know because you won’t be able to stop smiling or pacing the kitchen floor. Meditation and connecting with nature are powerful ways to deepen intuition and expand connectivity into a universe of solutions. The flashes of insight we receive as a result are more like complete blueprints than “wouldn’t it be cool” flights of fancy. They have us smacking our foreheads wondering why we never thought of them before, since they now seem so clear, so obvious, so perfect. Truly inspired, winning ideas induce a sense of wonder and awe.
That said, insights can take their own sweet time, and they usually arrive when we least expect them. Before I started my first company, I knew what made me mad. I knew what I wanted to fix. But I didn’t know how. Every day for several weeks I meditated and connected with nature. Lots of ideas sparked in my mind, and I was careful to jot every one of them down. However, none of them were quite right. Then one day I took quiet time just before checking out of a hotel room.
An hour later, I was walking through a busy airport terminal when the solution to the problem came to me in a flash. It was not a vague idea or a notion. It wasn’t a sketch. It was a detailed architectural blueprint, as if a diagram had unrolled on the floor in front of me. All at once, I saw the whole business model that could work to get those patients their medicine and make a profitable business. I actually stopped walking and let out a laugh that had other travelers thinking I had flipped out.
For my second company, the idea came to me while I was driving shortly after taking quiet time. I had to pull over and start writing feverishly on sticky notes. When I had it all written down, I continued driving to my appointment, but I could not get the idea to go away. So I canceled the appointment, turned the car around, drove home, and immediately set about turning the idea into a real company.
This is why you should never be more than an arm’s length away from pen and paper.
How can you distinguish a garden-variety good idea from a genuine “winning idea”? What do awe and wonder feel like? In a way, it’s like love. You know it when you feel it, and if you’re unsure, you probably aren’t feeling it. But I like how Emmy-nominated TV personality, filmmaker, and futurist Jason Silva puts it:
It is an experience of such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world in order to assimilate it. One of the ways we elicit wonder is by scrambling the self so that the world can seep through. In doing so we feel such a blast of energy and expectation that we literally want to rocket to the moon. We feel stupefied amazement every time we think of our dream. It is rapture. It is magic. Only in these moments do we experience the power of a lightning strike in our minds and nerves. It is rhapsodic. It is what I saw in my wife’s eyes every time we talked about it. She glowed. She floated. It was as if every time we talked about it, I had just placed a tiny puppy in her arms. That is awe. That is the state of ecstasy that must accompany a dream for it to have any hope of ever becoming reality.
Why is it so important to feel this strongly? First, it’s how we identify a winning idea. But just as importantly, we need to be truly inspired by our dreams, since we will need that motivation to do all the hard work they require. According to one 2015 study, experiencing a sense of awe promotes altruism, loving-kindness, and magnanimous behavior. The researchers described awe as “that sense of wonder we feel in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.”
This is similar to the peak experiences described by Abraham Maslow, who wrote that these are “especially joyous and exciting moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, wonder, and awe, and possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity or knowledge of higher truth (as though perceiving the world from an altered, and often vastly profound and awe-inspiring perspective).”
Thus, winning ideas inspire awe because they represent a profound desire to change the world in order to help others. They are solutions to problems that transcend ourselves. Yes, we may be happy for ourselves, too, but what really energizes us is feeling that larger sense of purpose, to be playing our part within the interconnected matrix of society and the world. Every time we think of our dream, we should want to dance on a mountaintop and scream with wonder and delight.
Enjoy the moment. Revel in it. Then immediately take steps to make that winning idea a reality.
