(Photo by Foster’s Art of Chilling)

You’ve been told your whole life that it’s wrong to steal. Even the bible says, “Thou shalt not steal”. But is it wrong to steal someone else’s ideas?

Clearly it’s wrong to take someone else’s artwork and claim it’s your own. When you steal something tangible, the person who had the item, no longer does. But when you steal an idea, there’s now two people with the same idea. Is that wrong?

Ideas are really the easy part. Get a bunch of friends around a table and you can brainstorm ideas on just about any topic. But unless you act on the ideas, it’s just a bunch of thoughts that don’t weigh anything. In fact, for as many good ideas that you hear in your daily life, very few of them are ideas that people take action on. Why? Because ideas sound great in theory, but when ideas are put into action, the shortcomings become obvious. And the real work becomes turning the abstract idea into a real-world sustainable result.

You’re surrounded by ideas wherever you look: websites, advertisements, musical tunes, stories, television shows, etc. Study others’ implementation of their ideas to learn what works (and what doesn’t). Borrow other’s ideas and adapt them to your business (note: abide by copyright and trademark regulations).

And if you have a great game-changing idea, consider sharing it with others (especially if you’re not going to act upon it). By sharing your ideas, you’ll position yourself as a generous creative person and you’ll learn how else your ideas can be applied in ways you’ve never considered.

(Photo by Tony Fischer)

You’ve just spent a lot of money and time hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) expert for your website. The tweaks to your website go live, and you get a large influx of traffic. But you don’t increase your sales or leads. What happened?

You get marketing tunnel vision when you focus on a specific task without considering the whole strategy picture. Before spending time on SEO, you should ensure that your website is optimized to convert visitors into customers. If it isn’t, then you’ll be getting even more people who are looking but not buying what you’re selling.

Or if you’ve spent a lot of time organizing a great event, full of interesting people, and delicious food – but you leave the marketing of the event to the last minute (and don’t sell out). Another case of tunnel vision.

Or perhaps you create a great product, priced well, with great advertising. You get a stampede of orders and find that you don’t have the time or capital to meet your demand. More tunnel vision.

To avoid tunnel vision, you need to start with a big picture strategy. What does a successful outcome look like? What steps do you need to take to achieve them? In what order? What resources do you need (and when)? How will you test that you’re on the right path? What systems can you put in place that can scale up when you hit a bottleneck? What backup systems can you put in place in case something unexpected happens?

Keep your eye on the “prize”, but make sure that you don’t forget to spend adequate time on the “boring” stuff to make sure you’ll see your dreams realized.

(Photo by William Warby)

A client contacts you and wants your help solving their problem. They asked around and were told that it would take about a half-hour to solve it. They’re willing to pay you for your half-hour of time, but no more. Should you take the job?

If you’re well aware of the client’s underlying assumptions, the true scope of the problem, and are confident in your ability to perform that task in the given time, take the job.

However, in most cases you’re asking for trouble.

Solving a problem requires (at least) three steps: analysis, execution, and verification. If the problem is poorly specified, then you’re likely to make bad assumptions which will result in your work being rejected (“That’s not what I meant”). So, your first step is to get a clear specification to aid your analysis. Next, you’ll need to estimate how much time it will take to verify the result of your work. For example, if your client wants you to update a part of a website, how much time are you willing to spend to ensure that it works on a wide variety of browsers?

Odds are the person who’s specified the problem doesn’t truly understand the effort to truly solve the problem. When someone asks for an estimate of time, most people only focus on the execution phase – the time necessary to do the specific task. However, a professional will ensure that adequate time is allocated to solve all the phases.

If you’re asked to provide an estimate, ground the estimate in reality. Otherwise you’ll only disappoint your clients and colleagues.