Personal Development for Smart People^TM

Every week I receive emails from people who tell me their ideas for new websites, businesses, or organizations they’d like to build. Usually they ask me for feedback on their ideas, implying that their ideas have some intrinsic value. Occasionally they want me to invest in their ideas, either financially or by putting in some of my time and effort.

I recall a similar experience while running my computer games business. People would send me their ideas for new games, asking me what I thought the ideas were worth. Some wanted me to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) just to hear the idea because they were worried I might steal it. I still get a few NDA requests today. I simply disregard such requests. If people are paranoid I might steal their ideas, it’s best they keep the secret to themselves.

I generally tell people that their ideas are worthless. Good ideas are a dime a dozen, and even that price is too high.

Generating Good Ideas

Coming up with good ideas is easy. This includes ideas for new websites or businesses. Anybody can generate good ideas.

One technique you can use is to simply brainstorm a list. If you write down 20, 50, or 200 ideas for anything, chances are you’ll come up with a few gems. You probably have a decent flow of good ideas popping up at random times too, such as while showering or exercising. You certainly don’t have to be a genius to come up with good ideas.

Do you honestly suffer from a shortage of good ideas in your life? It’s more likely you have the opposite problem. If you had to decide between gaining 5 great new ideas vs. successfully implementing 5 ideas you already have, which would you choose? I’d much rather have the implementation.

If you truly feel deprived of ideas, you can get as many as you want for free. Just ask other people. Post some requests in the forums, and you should get plenty. In January I asked for suggestions for future 30-day trials and got more than 100 suggestions, far more than I could possibly implement. If you want more ideas, just ask around. A small percentage of those ideas will be useful.

The Value of Implementation

The real value of any creation is in the implementation, not the idea.

Do you really bemoan the fact that you didn’t think of some great idea before someone else did? Would it have made any difference if you did? You’re probably sitting on lots of great ideas that someone else is already implementing.

In the gaming industry, I saw several companies do quite well with ideas that were totally unoriginal. They succeeded because they had great implementation of those ideas. There are a lot of Galaga and Tetris clones on the market. I remember that many developers were disturbed by the success of these cloners.

I had an original game idea that I thought was pretty good, but it didn’t generate any income by itself. It just sat there on paper. It took months to turn it into an actual game, and the final product sold quite well. Some people assumed it was the idea that caused the game to sell well. No, it was the implementation of that idea.

Ideas are easy. Implementing ideas is hard because that’s where things get complicated. The devil is in the details. Turning something mental into something physical is often quite a challenge.

Sure there are exceptions, but even when people value ideas, solid implementation is still required to extract the value.

Making Ideas Concrete

Part of implementing an idea is making it more concrete, such as by creating a design doc or business plan. A structured document is more than an idea — it’s part of the implementation process. This is where you begin working out the practical details. If you do it correctly, this kind of work can really make you pull your hair out. But it also creates a lot of value.

For example, writing a 25-word, high-concept description for a new movie is pretty easy. Erin recently took a screenwriting class at UNLV, and she and I had fun cranking out several high-concept movie ideas in a matter of minutes. Even her instructor (an accomplished screenwriter) liked some of our ideas. But those ideas aren’t worth much by themselves. Turning an idea into a complete script is hard. Getting an agent is hard. Selling the script is hard. Revising the script is hard. Filming the movie is hard. Cashing the six-figure check is easy.

I usually have at least 100 good ideas on my “to blog” list. I add ideas to the list from time to time, and people send me more ideas every week, so the list never gets depleted. Keeping a good bank of ideas is trivially easy. Turning those ideas into helpful articles is the hard part. In the time it takes me to actually write one article, I could generate at least 200 new article ideas. It would take me about a year to implement the article ideas I could generate in a single hour. If these were books or computer games instead of articles, one hour of idea generation could occupy me with a lifetime of implementation.

Even when you’re dealing with flexible content like, software, music, or video, it still takes a lot of work to turn a high concept into something you can actually implement. A general idea for a new web service is largely worthless. But a few documents that include the technical requirements, market analysis, and high-level software and database design do have some value.

The more concrete your ideas become, the more valuable they are. The ultimate value, however, isn’t delivered until your idea is in some kind of physical form that can be shared. You might be able to find an intermediary who will carry your implementation the rest of the way, but you still need to take a few steps beyond the idea phase before such people will want to listen to you.

Focusing on Implementation

It’s easy to get stuck on the treadmill of idea generation (i.e. analysis paralysis), mistakenly assuming that ideas themselves have value. I often get caught in this trap myself. I keep trying to find more optimal solutions to problems when it would be faster and easier to just implement a mediocre solution and deal with the consequences. I have to remind myself that getting some value is better than none.

There are some situations where advance planning is critical, such as the $8 billion City Center project being built on the Las Vegas Strip (the most expensive private construction project in the world). If they screw up the construction, that’s a pretty costly mistake. For that kind of project, you have to make sure your plan is very concrete before you start pouring real concrete.

In many situations, however, mistakes can be easily corrected. If you make a mistake in building a website, you can reprogram it to fix the mistake. If you move to a neighborhood you don’t like, you can move again. If you get in a bad relationship, you can break up. If you quit a job and later regret your decision, you can find employment again. If you write a bad draft of your book, you can rewrite it. Sure there are consequences, but in many cases it’s not the end of the world if you jump to implement a half-baked idea. At least your implementation will still provide some value, and sometimes that’s good enough.

If perfectionism and obsessing over finding the right idea or the right approach keeps you paralyzed indefinitely, but you have a mediocre idea you could implement right now and start enjoying the results, that’s basically a no-brainer, isn’t it?

If you’re not sure if you’re stuck in the idea phase, give yourself a deadline to start implementing your idea, regardless of how good it is. Deadlines are a necessary evil in many creative fields like movies and game development. Creative people typically hate deadlines, but without deadlines they’d rarely finish anything. They’d remain stuck in an endless loop of pondering new alternatives. What you release may not be the perfect implementation, but at least you’ll get it out the door.

For example, my website has a fairly basic design. I put together something simple and functional in order to get the site launched without worrying about perfecting it. If I were starting from scratch today, I would have done a few things differently. That’s okay though. At least I got the site launched, and I was able to adjust course along the way. The value is being delivered. Lots of people will look at my site and say, “I’m sure I can create a better-looking site than Steve has.” I’m sure they could, but did they already do it, or are they stuck in the idea phase? Are they already enjoying good results?

If an idea doesn’t quickly lead to its own implementation, maybe it’s not such a great idea after all. Maybe you’re overcomplicating the idea to the point where it actually becomes demotivating. Can you define the idea in simpler terms, so simple that you can actually start working on it today?

If you implement a lot of so-so ideas that aren’t perfect, you’ll gain experience. You’ll probably learn a lot more than you would if you spent all your time perfecting ideas instead of taking action.

Action Time

If you find yourself lost in a sea of ideas while lagging behind on the implementation side, work to shift yourself to the action side and see what happens. One of my favorite techniques for doing this is to have Action Hours or Action Days. I set aside a block of time such as an hour or a day to do nothing but implementation.

To kick off this period of action, I create a quick Action List. An Action List is a specific type of to-do list. It doesn’t include any items that involve planning, high-level decision-making, communication, or discussion. Every item on the list must be geared towards moving some project forward to the point of value delivery. This means each item on the list must shift a task or project further along the spectrum from mental idea to physical action.

Once I begin working, I tackle tasks in order, and I don’t stop to second-guess myself. I trust that the decisions I made earlier are good enough. If things don’t work out so well, I can hopefully fix them later.

What good ideas are you sitting on right now? What can you do to shift one of those ideas from your imagination into physical reality? Do you realize that your very best ideas are worth less than a single mediocre idea you actually implemented?

In the forum discussion, consider sharing your best methods for moving from idea to action. How do you get yourself to implement your ideas? How do you know when you’re ready to move beyond the incubation period and start taking action?

As a follow-up to the previous article Rise of the Lightworker, let me clarify about darkworkers being construed as bad or evil. There are two perspectives to consider. 

First, from a spiritual perspective, darkworking and lightworking are both paths to greater awareness, greater motivation, and greater power. Darkworkers and lightworkers are similar in many ways, their main difference being how they direct their focus and energy. Darkworkers direct the flow of energy inward, while lightworkers direct it outward. A darkworker consumes; a lightworker creates. Both are in alignment with forces of nature: push and pull, action and reaction.

However, from a physical, earthbound perspective, darkworkers can indeed have a destructive effect. They build their power by draining it from others. To a darkworker this form of destruction is a good and natural act. Harming another person is morally no different than eating a meal.

The Darkworker Mindset

Here’s another way of looking at it. What do you think about eating animal flesh? Does your conscience nag at you while your teeth rip into the flesh? Do you concern yourself with the animal that had to suffer and die for your gustatory pleasure?

To some people eating animals is viewed as a completely immoral act. It cannot be justified except perhaps when one’s own survival is truly threatened. To rob an animal of its life in order give yourself some momentary pleasure is an act of pure, unadulterated evil.

To other people eating animals is viewed as something completely natural. Animals are a lower species, so their needs are of no real consequence. Man is smarter and can easily turn animals into food, so therefore he might as well enjoy it. If a few billion animals suffer every year as a result, who cares? The point isn’t to torture the animals — just to gain pleasure by feasting on their tasty flesh. If an animal tastes good enough to be turned into food, it’s fair game. If it can’t defend itself, too bad.

Most people can probably relate to these different attitudes towards animals, regardless of which side they lean towards.

Now if you take those attitudes towards animals and apply them towards human beings, you basically get the lightworker and darkworker polarities.

To a true darkworker, the life of another human being is as inconsequential as the life of a food animal. The energy of other people is nothing more than a meal or a snack. If the darkworker drains or harms other people on the path to his goals, it’s considered no big deal. The darkworker has to eat, right? Other people are valued only in terms of their ability to bring the darkworker pleasure.

I realize that some people have a hard time imagining that anyone could think like this. The same lack of understanding comes up regarding people’s attitudes towards animals. Some people find it unfathomable that anyone could be so cruel as to reduce a chicken to a drumstick. Others have a hard time understanding how anyone could have feelings for an animal.

Most people aren’t polarized when it comes to animals, so they fall somewhere between the extremes. They’ll happily wolf down cows, pigs, chickens, and fish while regarding cats and dogs as beloved pets. If you ask them if they oppose animal cruelty, they might say yes… at the same time willingly funding the slaughterhouse as long as it brings them pleasure. They simply play follow the follower without really thinking through to a consistent philosophical position either way.

Most people aren’t polarized when it comes to human beings either. They’ll be kind to some people and apathetic towards others. They’ll verbally support one ideal while contributing to its opposite through their actions. They’ll claim to believe something is wrong (lying, cheating, hurting people, etc) and then do it anyway. They’ve never taken the time to push through to a consistent philosophy about how other human beings should be treated, or if they’ve tried, they don’t believe it strongly enough to actually implement it.

Lightworkers and darkworkers are people who’ve consciously chosen the extremes in their attitudes towards other people. The lightworker chooses one extreme. The darkworker chooses the other. Because the extreme philosophies are the simplest and most consistent, this choice gives both lightworkers and darkworkers a lot of power to generate results, more than most people are capable of. The notion that power increases with consistency is basically common sense if you give it a little thought. By power I’m not referring to power over other people; I’m talking about power over self here, including self-control and self-mastery.

Since most people aren’t polarized, they experience a mixed morality. That mixture reduces their power because the two polarities are incompatible. If you’re selfish but hold back because your conscience tells you to, you limit yourself. If you’re selfless but succumb to greed now and then, you also limit yourself. The purer you can be one way or the other, the greater the flow of power through your life. The most powerful people on earth are those who can express either fear or love as purely as possible, but not both.

The Darkworker Conscience

Most of us have been socially conditioned to believe that harming others for personal gain is evil. But to a true darkworker, whether others are harmed or not is largely irrelevant. Hurting others isn’t seen as a sacrifice. The conscience of a darkworker is very different from the conscience of a lightworker. To a darkworker, passing up the opportunity for personal gain would be regarded as evil or negligent. It’s like turning down a delicious meal.

The main frustration for darkworkers is that darkworking isn’t regarded as socially acceptable, so darkworkers must overcome a lot of social resistance to achieve their goals. Consequently, most would choose to keep their polarity secret, just as a hunter doesn’t advertise to all the animals in the forest that he’s coming to eat them. While honest with themselves, darkworkers are generally not open and honest with others about their attitudes towards people. Being honest just creates resistance in others and makes it harder for the darkworker to advance.

Are there really people on earth who think like this? Absolutely. Many of them are in positions of great power. Occasionally we see one of them fall from grace, taken down by whistleblowers with lightworker tendencies or perhaps undone by Darkworker Syndrome. Then we ask incredulously, “How could someone do such a thing?”

Do you really think scandals like Enron, the manufactured War in Iraq, or the sub-prime collapse are just the result of a few people exercising poor judgment? Hardly. Such occurrences are the modus operandi of darkworkers. To a darkworker the greatest good is to seek power at any cost. The only thing that holds them back is the fear of losing what they’ve gained. Darkworkers seldom regret what they’ve done, even after a major downfall. They do regret being caught. If they’re really committed, however, they’ll get back in the game and try again, this time more cautiously. Often the biggest problem for a powerful darkworker is being publicly exposed as such. Darkworkers aren’t ashamed of who they are, but they can get pretty upset when other people get in their way. Usually it isn’t lightworkers that expose darkworkers but rather other darkworkers.

Even though darkworkers tend to be a competitive lot, they often team up to achieve their goals when it makes sense, but they’ll turn on each other when it’s advantageous to do so. The perceived benefits must outweigh the bad blood they’ll create, however.

Sometimes darkworkers find themselves in a field where they have some freedom to express their true selves. They won’t do this to the general public, but they can be themselves with their darkworker buddies. For example, they may tell stories about the suckers they scammed in order to get ahead.

Are Darkworkers Evil?

Is a darkworker evil? From the perspective of a lightworker or from non-polarized people, you could say yes. From the darkworker’s perspective, there are basically two possibilities.

First, the darkworker might say, “No, I’m not evil. I’m pursuing my own good, which is the highest good there is.” Darkworkers are Machiavellian and expedient. They recognize that running over people is often more efficient than working with them. If you have to treat a human being like a slice of bacon now and then, so be it.

The second possibility is that the darkworker identifies with evil and consciously embraces that role: “I’ve decided to be evil, and I like it.” (See For Love of Evil.) In this case the darkworker identifies with the social consensus about evil and recognizes himself as having those qualities. However, he doesn’t see this as anything bad or problematic. Evil is equated with freedom and power. The darkworker views non-evil people as weak and sometimes stupid. If the darkworker identifies with the role of the villain, it’s because the villain is the smartest character in the game.

Either way the result is the same. The darkworker’s conscience is aligned with self-service as the highest possible good. Physical reality is a playground for the darkworker’s personal pleasure, and other people are merely tools to be used.

Making the Choice: Hero or Villain

Darkworking is a choice. It’s not a choice I’m willing to make for myself. Nevertheless, it remains an option for conscious growth. Most people never make the decision to polarize as a lightworker or darkworker in their entire lives… not with a real 100% commitment. But it’s only when this commitment is made one way or the other that real power begins to flow through one’s life.

In your life story, you can choose to be the hero, the villain, or an NPC (i.e. non-player character, someone passive who watches the story unfold from the sidelines). Most people live like NPCs, but the hero and the villain have far more power to direct how the story unfolds. There are lots of heroes and lots of villains in this story, but there are orders of magnitude more NPCs.

In the Rise of the Lightworker article, the main point was that an increase in the number of villains actually induces more NPCs to become heroes. In case you haven’t noticed, this planet is becoming increasingly polarized, meaning that more NPCs than ever are giving serious consideration to choosing sides.

If you don’t choose to be a hero, and you don’t choose to be a villain, then you’re an NPC by default. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being an NPC. Just be aware that if you’re an NPC, your fate is largely at the mercy of the heroes and villains. NPCs end up spending their lives riding the waves created by the heroes and villains, often serving one side or the other without realizing it. When you act from love, you help the heroes in this tale. When you act from fear, you serve the villains.