Ways to Distinguish Yourself #204 – Add Wings to Your Ideas

By Rajesh Setty on Tue 08 Sep 2009, 5:00 AM – 2 Comments

Everyone has ideas and a small percentage of them will execute on their ideas too.

However, not all ideas fly.

No, I am not talking about world-changing or radical ideas. I am thinking about everyday ideas that get stifled and buried. You want them to fly but they don’t take off.

What could be the problem?

Most ideas lack wings.

Ideas need wings to take off.

You can add wings easily but it takes a little bit of thinking and effort to attach the wings to those ideas.

To get you to start thinking, here are a few basic examples:

#1. Too much extra baggage

You write a brilliant idea in your email and send this to your Boss. However, you include a bunch of unrelated things in the same email.

Your Boss loves the idea and wants to share with a few other people. However, he realizes that he or she has to do some work ( remove unrelated stuff) to sanitize it before he or she sends it.

Soon the idea goes to the background and fizzles away.

#2 Not packaged well enough

You can’t judge a book by its cover but without a good cover someone may not pick up the book to read.

You complete a project brilliantly and rather than sending a packaged report on the project, you send a two-line email.

You are not giving enough for someone to spread your idea.

#3 Being too humble

There was a pinch and you came in the last minute on Friday to save the project. You work all over the weekend to fix something that’s almost broken. You break your back to fix everything and get everything set for the Monday meeting.

When asked about how you fixed everything, you mention that “It was a small problem and it was really nothing.”

Not everyone has the time to dig deeper so life goes on.

I can go on with a few dozen examples. Everyday ideas with no wings being fizzled out. Ideas that should have taken off but unfortunately wither away.

Before you take on a world-changing idea to work on, start adding wings to your everyday ideas and let them fly.

Photo Courtesy: Guille on Flickr

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Note 1: Here are links to the other 200 articles in the series

Rajesh Setty: Best of Life Beyond Code – Distinguish Yourself #1 – #50

Rajesh Setty: Best of Life Beyond Code -Distinguish Yourself #51 – #100

Rajesh Setty: Best of Life Beyond Code -Distinguish Yourself #101 – #100

Rajesh Setty: Best of Life Beyond Code -Distinguish Yourself #151 – #200

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:

ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself (PDF, Free)

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 6, 2008. This is a photographic manifesto featuring 15 of my mini sagas (stories in exactly 50 words). Here is the link:

ChangeThis Manifesto: Mini Sagas – Bite Sized Lessons for Life and Business (PDF, Free)

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