Stay True To Yourself and Your Ideas
Running a venture requires a lot of unique and creative thoughts and the entrepreneurs who are able to think outside the box stand much greater chances at success.
Even though thinking different from the pack can often times lead to something great down the road, getting your vision accepted by others within the community can be an almost impossible task during the original developmental stages.
Really this is totally natural, but just because you’re able to see the opportunity and awesome aspects in your idea doesn’t mean that you will be able to interpret it to others. Even if you can get your message across many people just won’t possess the same faith and ambition in your proposal.
Many times a major problems can also come when trying to pitch your ideas to financers, project managers or other potential clients and associates. It’s not odd to find that companies will want to take a certain aspect of your venture or one particular idea, then take over creative control and move the purpose of your creation in a totally different direction.
When these situations arise it is imperative that you remain true to yourself and also your original vision and don’t let others who may have greater power and resources influence you to go a route that you don’t want to travel down.
I’m not saying to close your mind to other opportunities and ideas because many times fresh insight from others can assist you with your original thought and help expand your creative initiative even further-which is absolutely great!
I am talking about the people who want to pull you in a direction that’s against your will and against your personal hopes for the invention that you’ve created.
Of course you want to accomplish great success with your firm and some people will offer you great materialistic rewards or try to sell you a dream in order for you to sell-out your creative and visionary soul to them.
So instead of becoming frustrated or giving in quickly to others who want to take your venture towards alternative routes and offer you strong open-ended promises, just remember what your original goals were for your idea, creation or venture and see it through until you properly tackle your original strategy.
4 Comments
Lars
October 20th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
I just read a great book: “The Entrepreneurial Imperative” by Carl Schramm. The author discusses how kids are discouraged from individual thinking and innovation by our schools. We all start out as creative and inventive, but as we start our schooling we learn how to conform and be like everyone else. I really think he has a good point - we should encourage and be encouraged to “think different”.
David Askaripour
October 20th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
William this post is dead on! I have been in the presence of many people who “thought they knew better” than me and thought that their plans for “my business(es)” would be better than “my” vision. It’s important to look at these people like a grain of salt; just take the advice and if any of it’s good at all, then use it…if not, then just say thanks and move along.
William Quisenberry
October 21st, 2006 at 9:37 pm
Lars,
That’s an interesting point, I’ve really never looked at it from that perspective before, but I think many times society in general tries to push people towards conformity and then when somebody comes along and thinks outside the box and hits a complete home run everydody acts so amazed!
Like Donald Trump said in this months issue of Entrepreneur Magazine, creative entrepreneurs usually just make logical decisions that are common sense, but everybody looks at them like they are great masterminds, I think this is because the average person (non-preneur) thinks with such a compressed and minute mind-set. I’m definitely going to have to check out that book you mentioned, it sounds like a great read.
David,
Isn’t it always amazing how many experts you meet when your creating a venture. The funniest comments usually come from people who have done nothing more than TALK about all these entrepreneurial pursuits that they PLAN on implementing one of these days! Yea, Right.
Like you said, these people are worth nothing more than a chuckle! However, just as you mentioned we can never become too closed-minded because you never know who might be carrying that next little linking idea that can make your venture even stronger, but usually that’s just not the case.
Ngamita Richard
April 6th, 2007 at 11:15 am
WOW
Im learning everyday guys
thanks for these posts
thanks a bunch
Leave a Comment