You have some great ideas going through your head.
Great ideas for blog posts that need to be written. Great ideas for products that you want to create.
But 95% of them will probably never see the light of day. Not because you’re not smart or dedicated. And certainly not because you lack creativity – lord knows we have a lot of that.
It’s because we’re human and we’re hardwired this way.
I received an email a few weeks ago from one of my Inbound Marketing Course subscribers that inspired this post. Here’s what she wrote:
“I listened to all of your WordPress Podcast episodes; thanks for sharing! I was wondering if you have any tips on managing multiple websites & domain names. I have so many ideas, and have some of them registered … I probably went about this wrong … Have you found a good way to organize all of this?”
If you noticed, some of the words are in bold. “Multiple Websites” and “So Many Ideas”. The issue here isn’t organization, it’s something much deeper than that.
Let’s take a look into the reasons why most of our great ideas never come to fruition and let’s talk about what “having too many ideas” does to our productivity.
1. Reaching the Project Plateau
The Project Plateau was coined by Scott Belsky, which is the time period where our great ideas simply wither away and die.
When we first think about an idea, the excitement level is through the roof. We can’t stop thinking about it. I often find myself with a pen and pad, writing it all down.
What happens first, second and last is all written down. The potential of new ideas is always great in our minds. But soon after, the work begins. This is when our “great ideas” turn into an endless list of “things-to-do”.
This awesome plan, now starts to feel like a chore, and not so much fun anymore. I’m sure a lot of people reading this article can relate to this scenario. It happens to every creative person. Specially in the online space.
With so many websites, business models, products, blog articles and software thrown at us day in and day out, our minds get bombarded with tons of ideas we can execute. (this includes buying a bunch of domain names and never fully completing a website)
Some of them are great… most of them are awful. But we would never know which ones are which, because 95% of them never get fully developed.
That’s the sad truth…
2. Our Need for Instant Gratification
Let me tell you a story. When I was 18 I worked at a country club in New Jersey. My aunt hooked me up and got me working on weekends. The club hosted and catered events, like weddings and bar-mitzvahs and I was getting paid $110 per event.
Every weekend we would work 3 and even 4 events. I was making close to $400 for two days of work. It was great.
But then something happened… my friend’s car needed a new motor. I had money saved up, so lent him $700. This money was everything I had earned from working at the country club. I never actually had the chance to enjoy the fruits of my hard, 16 hour days, labor.
I quit a week later. Yes, he paid me back when he could, but I needed that instant gratification in order for me to stay and continue working. The same applies with our long-term projects.
We don’t want to work so hard, then wait weeks and even months to experience the gratification and results that the project will bring us. This is why excitement goes down. The real work needed to complete the project isn’t always fun.
…but it needs to be done.
3. New Ideas Take Over
There are two simple ways to beat the project plateau. The first way is hard. Ignore all distractions, forget about instant gratification and just do the work.
It sounds easy, but if you’ve ever tried to write an ebook, create a product or start your own internet business, you know how hard that is to do.
The second way is 100 times easier; and this is the one most people choose to do. Most people let new ideas take over. (like my friend up there)
Once an idea becomes a boring chore, we tend to let new ideas enter our minds and get excited all over again. We’re so addicted to this feeling, that we continue to do it over and over and over again. Visualization and our imagination takes us away from the current project and distracts us from the real work.
I’ll talk more about how to increase the chances of completing your projects next time, but for now just realize that this happens to all of us.
Great title, Hector. My favorite part of your post was that cute diagram outlining our emotions from New Idea –> Realization of Hard Work –> New (& Presumably Better) Idea — CLASSIC!
OMG Hector…you nailed it brother!!! Glad you’re back!
I had a little fun with that one.. but that’s exactly how it goes. Lol
Hey I can definitely relate to this article, because I’ve been in this situation before, but I’ve realized that I had to mentally prepare myself to put in the time, consistency & long hours in order to bear the fruits of my labor.
I don’t know why but we as people would rather get excited about the thought of after effects but like you said when everything kicks in (like the process of having to do the work) then the excitement usually fades away if you’re not in the right mindset that things do tend to take time.
Nice post Hector if you don’t mind me asking what program do you use to create your graphics and banners? thanks for sharing
I may be one of the lucky ones in that this only happens about 3 times a week! It is a PITA for sure but it is what makes us who we are. The discipline required to DO THE WORK is a must and the rewards will follow, (won’t they?) Thanks for the article Hector, it does a lot to validate all of us.
Hi Hector,
I can absolutely relate to this. As a web developer I can build stuff, but the early stages are so slow. On the few occasions when I do get a site up with a few features, people tend to lose interest unless I do a lot with the site fairly quickly.
In the past, I’ve also had a slightly different problem. I’ve improved projects, but maybe focused a little too much on getting things ticked off my to-do list vs. building things that are actually useful or clever. I still built the good stuff too, but it was all too easy to tick off a little bit of arbitrary optimisation that users would never really notice. The alternative was building an enhancement that would take a lot longer and would still only result in one item being ticked off the list.
There was a time I had two active projects on the go, neither of which were huge, but they both generated some interest. I closed them both a couple of years ago and learned a lot from running the projects. But nothing has really taken their place yet.
I feel violated! You entered my thoughts and wrote a post just for me. I’m constantly coming up with new ideas. I run a book promotion blog, and I’m always brainstorming new ways of promoting books. As you said, many of the ideas are awful, though I’d like to think with better organization, an awful idea can be restructured to be less awful, maybe even wonderful.
My main failure is laziness and depression. Once the high of the idea is over, I tend to get depressed because of the work involved. Or I’ll want to work on it with my boot on the laziness monster, only to fall to depression for some other unrelated reason.
The only thing in my favor at this moment is that a lot of my ideas would work together if I can get a few of them moving forward. My site is starting to make money, so if I choose my projects carefully, I should be able to work from home, but even in the meantime, whatever money is made means less I have to rely on outside work. It’s a work in progress.
They may not seem so, but thanks for the words of encouragement. Not only does this remind me that my situation isn’t unique, but it also gives me a push to keep working at it. Question is, when will this new high crash and burn? ;-P
Thanks Tracy.. it’s good to be back. :0)
Toshiba.. we’re a strange species, aren’t we? Our job is to accept the way we’re hardwired and find a way to work around it. .. I’ll talk about ways to make your ideas happen in a future post.
thanks for stopping by
Welcome Rob.. I use Photoshop.
You’re right Arnold. All we can do is find a way to work around it. Discipline is definitely a great start..
thanks for sharing
Hey Ben.. thanks for sharing your stories man. I can see the need for instant gratification affected both your customers and yourself – when I write the follow up post on “ways to make our ideas happen” I’ll touch briefly on creating a reward system for ourselves – maybe breaking down the enhancement into smaller task and creating a separate to-do list for that task will motivate you to actually get it done.
Just a thought.. but I get it. We want results now..
that’s exactly it.. we trick ourselves into thinking that our current projects suck and our new idea (no matter how awful it is) will be a home run.
thanks for sharing your thoughts Mark.. I’ll be posting a follow up post on ways to make our ideas happen, so look out for that.
LOL.. hopefully I can get it done before I get bored and think of something better to write about..
Great Post Hector, i believe am guilty of this, I have lots of post ideas and titles on ground that i have not written and when i get new ideas, i keep the former ones somewhere.
I figured out that discipline is the key, looking forward to reading your follow up post.
This post describes me for sure because I often find my self in between projects because I start multi things that I have been thinking about. Im trying to over come this habit by focusing on one thing at a tome
Thanks Hector I might give it a go
Thanks Hector for the idea
The thing is, my to-do lists get far too long, particularly when you include multiple blogs, multiple development projects, my day job and so on… I love lists, but I have too many of them!
Looking forward to your next post
Hi Hector! Just signed up to your 8 part guide to inbound marketing. Got two blogs, one WP (on-site), the other blogspot (linked to website). Had zero success with on-site but in just a few weeks had some traffic to the very recent addition – blogspot! Not sure why the difference in visibility? Could it be the on-site blog has no way to follow e.g. Bloglovin, Google Friends Connect???? Would love to have your opinon on where I’m getting it wrong if at all possible please?
Sorry! By the way, loved this post as it is helping me re-evaluate my two blogs in a new way! I think I kinda missed the point of what blogs really need to offer my audience! Many thanks, really looking forward to the new inbound marketing course!
Just going through a plateau on two projects at the moment. I am working on applying Robert Kiyosaki’s FOCUS principle (Follow One Course Until Successful) which requires a change of habits, which is not an easy task. Looking forward to your follow up post.
Yep, creating ebook requires so much hard work and I’m working on my ebook related to social media. A part from content, converting, designing,.. are also needed. Feel so hard, but need to finish it.
Thanks – Ferb
Perhaps this gets to yet another problem… I’ve ‘tried’ to focus on one project, but boy do I get bored. I have a site, for example, in a niche that I have ten years experience with, lots of connections, really enjoy, etc., but all to a point. I can only write so many articles or conduct so many split tests on one site before I go crazy. I leave it for a time, work on something else, and come back to it. I know I’d get better results if I could focus on one project , but gees is it painful.
Also, other than defeating boredom, there are things that I like about having multiple projects. One is that there are often times that one project is held up by a third party. I can maintain some level of productivity by jumping over to another project that doesn’t require intervention from someone else. There is also a benefit from multiple streams of income from different sites.
I do get the downsides, however. If I see an opportunity to expand the scope of something that I have going on, there is no room to do it and because I’m not devoting more time to less projects the quality suffers.
Do other people struggle with this? Has anyone had success overcoming it?
Hey Ben, you make a really good point. Boredom might be part of the problem, and I can see how having multiple projects helps overcome that boredom by keeping your mind “entertained” (so to speak). But you very clearly explained the downsides and I have to agree. I’m not against juggling multiple projects, I do it myself, but those projects need to have goals attached to them – or else I’ll be jumping from one thing to the next without any clearly direction of WHY I’m doing what I’m doing. Aside from building my main site (this one, of course) – am I building a blog that I want to get to #1 on google for a specific keyword? Am I creating a site that I’m going to flip and profit from? The end goal is important.. without them, we’ll all just be busy doing stuff.
Hi. Glad that I found your site man.I enjoyed the article about instant gratification and its so true.But one thing I do know to be true , and that is”patiance is a vertue(hope I spelled that correctly).Hey man ,anyway your doing a greate job.I just want to send some motivation and say keep up the good work .Peace. -BrogdenMedia.wordpress.com