What's the big idea?

Someone said to me “you guys make a big song and dance about how you understand implementation. So tell me how it is that I can know all this stuff and I still don’t get it done. What’s the one thing that stops business owners from execution”? 

The cute answer is, of course, yourself. But that doesn’t really help – we know that’s true too but knowing it’s true still doesn’t help us get stuff done. 

As I reflect on my own business, and especially a session we’ve just had with an external adviser, I think that failure to implement is really about lack of clarity, not lack of resolve. And it’s certainly not about lack of ideas. In fact, it’s the opposite. I think we fail to implement because we have too many ideas. Specifically too many good ideas (no one ever deliberately sets out to implement bad ideas). 

Too many good ideas are bad for us because they get in the way of the very few great ideas. We would have no trouble with implementation if we took the best idea we had (the one that moves us closest to our vision) and only did that. 

So here’s the foolproof approach to implementation: take the best and biggest idea you’ve got, the game changer, the 10x idea. Work out what’s involved in bringing this idea to fruition, mapping out the action steps and milestones. 

And then take all your other ideas and put a line through them, cut them and paste them at the back of the document, delete them forever – whatever it takes to clear your mind and your desk of everything but the big idea. 

Now I know this is obvious. It’s certainly obvious to me because it’s what we teach. So why did it take an external adviser to point out what we already knew and take our own advice? 

What happens for me is that I’m so wrapped up in creating great answers I forget to ask great questions – great questions like “how does this relate to the guy we’ve agreed is our target market?”, “which of these two things will help us achieve our goal faster?”, “which big goal does this relate to and how?”. 

And the very best question is, what am I going to stop doing so I can break this project down into chunks and get something done every single day.