What If You Have A Million Dollar Idea?

Why the ‘follow-through’ is more important than the ‘eureka moment’.

“A lot of people have million-dollar ideas. Not a lot of people have a million dollars. That’s gonna tell you something about actions versus thinking” wrote Sami Loyal on Twitter.

That sentiment expresses the perennial gulf between having an idea and executing it.

If you’re an idea person — someone who gets stimulated by new ideas — it’s easy to fall prey to the erroneous belief that ideas are the key to success.

Yes, good ideas are necessary, and every improvement or progress is predicated on good, even great ideas that meet real needs. But great ideas by themselves are not worth much.

When it concerns the two pillars of bringing goals to life, having a great idea is the easy part — even as ridiculous as that sounds. Taking a great-looking idea through the school of hard knocks that is the real world; colliding a great idea with the sometimes-brutal reality of real life is what matters more.

In other words, the execution of a great idea is more important than the idea itself. Why? Because what’s often in short supply are people that can take an idea and run with it, stay with it, sit with it, go to bed and come back to it, chiselling away at it day after day, until the idea is brought to life. Those are the real deal.

When the ability to execute is inadequate or non-existent, having a great idea wouldn’t matter so much. On the other hand, however, seemingly-average ideas are being built into multi-million dollar companies every day with nothing more than excellent execution and follow-through.

The Fatal Mistake Most Idea People Make

Falling too much in love with a supposedly great idea often leads brilliant, creative people into a mistake that often proves fatal for business: failing to share the idea with other people out of the fear that others might steal them.

It’s one of the commonest mistakes entrepreneurs make, and you see this all the time when an entrepreneur operates in stealth mode for so long making a product or service, writing a book etc, then wake up one day to present their baby to the world fully-formed. To which the world responds with a shrug of the shoulder and a cruel whisper of that’s not what I need.

A brilliant execution is what matters, and it usually has two parts to it: one, filling a pressing customer’s need and two, fulfiling it in the best possible way. Yet, both of these is enhanced by showing your hands early, talking to the customer, sharing your product or service idea with others to gather feedback that’s needed for improvement.

Understanding this dichotomy between ideas and execution makes you see why you need to stop worrying too much about others stealing your ideas.

Ideas are not what’s scarce, great execution is.

The key is to start falling in love with execution as much as you do hatching out great ideas and plans. Either that or you must surround yourself with a team of people who can execute to stand a chance of succeeding with your ideas.

Success doesn’t come from great ideas alone, the follow-through is more crucial. And having a million dollars is not as much as by having a million-dollar idea as it is masterminding a million-dollar execution.

Whether in entrepreneurship or life, what matters the most is not the eureka moment, its the follow-through.

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