Most of my ideas are awful. They create zero impact.
And that’s fantastic! 🎉
Thought leadership is a lot like panning for gold.
It takes a *lot* of work to find one decent idea.
It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are.
Or where you went to school.
Or who your employer is.
Or who your co-workers are.
Or how much VC funding you have.
You’ll likely have a lot of really bad ideas
over the course of your career.
Some of them will be spectacularly bad.
Become good at generating poor ideas.
Celebrate the lousy ideas.
(but don’t actually implement them!)
Most of our ideas are, by definition AVERAGE.
And many of our ideas will be well below average–
even when we’re highly successful people.
We sweat to pull together an idea that we feel proud to share with:.
✅ our clients in a sales meeting
✅ our peers in conference presentation/panel
✅ leadership team at an offsite
In the graphic below, we spend most of our time
creating poor and common ideas.
It takes a lot of work to craft a green (uncommon idea).
An idea that produces results and impact is the exception
not the everyday standard.
Be proud of uncommon ideas.
They our are high points.
And the blue and orange levels —
well, they’re career highlights —
if we ever manage to reach them
Think the “Nobels” of thought leadership.
So, keep generating ideas.
Celebrate your poor ideas.
Encourage others to work through their poor ideas.
Because one day, you’ll strike gold.
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I write about:
#ThoughtLeadership #OrgTL #ContentStrategy #Storytelling
