3
Act Quickly with the Means at Hand
Entrepreneurs love reality. They always want to be standing on firm ground. So does anyone who wants to create something new or anyone setting out into the unknown for that matter. That just makes sense. You always want to know exactly where you are.
So the ability to take stock of current reality is incredibly important, as we will see in the next four chapters. That is especially true with this one. You want to know exactly what assets you have at your disposal—and what you don’t. It is the first of the four fundamental building blocks of Creaction. And once you have taken stock of that inventory, you need to act.
ENTREPRENEURS create new businesses and new business models in much the same way as anyone else professionally engaged in the creation of new things. Professional creator is an equal if not better description for the entrepreneur than businessperson, since entrepreneurs bring new businesses into being in much the same manner as a composer who creates a new choral work. Or a software engineer who creates a new program or computer game. Or a writer who creates a book. Or a marketer who creates a new ad campaign. Where there was nothing before—a blank canvas—something is created, a choral work, software program, new computer game, novel, or ad.
You can use the creative process to bring into being almost anything you desire. And as we saw in the last chapter, the creative process begins with that desire. You want what you want, but you don’t yet have it. So you go off to create it.
Thus, the two major elements to the creative process are the “want” (desire) and the “don’t have” (current reality). The space between the two sets up a tension that drives action and invention as creators strive to close the gap between what they want and what they currently have.
Experienced creators understand that for the process to work well you need the creative tension. You must have a sufficiently clear vision of what you want and a very clear perception of current reality (in this case, what you don’t have). Without both, you have no creative tension.
Experienced creators are fine with getting started with a less-than-complete vision of what they want because they know that they will clarify it as they move along. “I want to do something to help children” might turn into “starting an after-school program,” once they have been underway for a while. But creating something new is really tough if you don’t know where you are starting from or where you are at any given moment. That’s why at inception and, in fact, everywhere along the route, entrepreneurs want to know what is. They want the clearest understanding of reality they can get. A key part of that understanding is knowing what resources they can draw on when getting underway.
With Prediction, you start with a goal and then create a plan to obtain it. Part of that plan is identifying and lining up the necessary resources. Only once this is done, do you act; that is, you don’t take your first step until everything is in place.
People who excel at Creaction don’t spend months or years assembling resources. They like to get started quickly—immediately, if possible. They also don’t spend a lot of time planning and assembling resources. They begin with the means at hand, even if the means at hand seem to be nonexistent.
For example, a few years ago, Stever Robbins got excited about doing podcasts. He bought a little recorder and editing software but was never particularly successful. One day, acting on impulse, he wrote a letter to a popular podcaster he had never met, Grammar Girl, whose Web site he admired, and offered to do a business podcast for her. Out of sheer coincidence, she had just sold her podcast channel to Macmillan Publishers, which was looking for other podcasters to add to its stable.
A simple letter sent to someone he didn’t know resulted in a new gig for Robbins. He now has 160,000 subscribers to his Get-It-Done Guy podcast and thousands of followers on Facebook and Twitter. The point? If you look around, you probably have more ways of getting started than you think. And who knows where it may lead?
The people who excel at Creaction don’t spend months or years assembling resources. They like to get started quickly—immediately, if possible.
Where do you begin to take inventory of your resources at hand? We suggest you start with yourself and ask these three questions:
Who am I? What traits, tastes, skills, and inclinations do you have that you can draw on in starting a new venture?
What do I know? This includes your education, training, experience, and expertise.
Who do I know? Who can you draw upon right now—in your personal, social, and professional networks—to help this new idea succeed?
You can start your journey anywhere, of course. You might ask, “Where am I going to get the money to fund this thing?” “How can I get community support?” “Is now the time to relocate, before I set up shop?” But entrepreneurs like to get into action as soon as they can, and their own personal assets are immediately available. By asking the three questions, they are taking stock of the critical assets immediately at their disposal.
Because your personal assets are so important in getting started quickly and on firm footing, let’s look at each in more detail.
Who am I?
When you ask yourself “Who am I?” you are trying to find out what kind of a person you are, what kinds of things turn you on, what really matters to you, and what kind of things you will not do because either they go against your values or you just don’t find them interesting enough to invest any time in. The answers give you a sense of self, which helps you to quickly eliminate ideas that don’t fit. (“Hmm. This vague idea I have for finding smart, economically disadvantaged kids and steering them to the best possible colleges is appealing. But, you know, I also want to support myself. So as intriguing as the concept of a pro bono after-school program is, it won’t provide me with a necessary income. I wonder what I can do that will get the result I want with the kids and give me a livable income?”) You end up knowing what you want to do—and what you don’t.
That is hugely important. As we’ve said before, the ability to focus your attention enables you to create with greater ease and consistency. You’ll remember from chapter 2 (and from what you have experienced in your own life) that if you are distracted, disinterested, or dealing with something that doesn’t excite you, it is hard to maintain focus. Creating under those conditions is extremely difficult.
We often are unaware of all our strengths . . . and weaknesses. Ask others to talk to you about what you are good at (and what you are not). You don’t need to accept what they say as gospel, but they may find it easier to see things about you than you can.
Conversely, when you are in love with an idea, your attention takes care of itself. The big point here is that self-awareness is key. You need to know who you are and what you want. And what you don’t.
What do I know?
You never know where the insight that leads to an opportunity will come from. That is why the mental cataloging of what you know is important. For example, you may have gone to a school known for its rigor in math and the hard sciences. But it turns out that even though your degree is in engineering, you gain the most joy in your life by bringing together like-minded people. That’s why, in thinking about what you know, you want to think about your personal and your professional lives. Again, you want to include everything you can possibly think of because at this point you simply can’t decide what is going to be relevant.
Who do I know?
The most successful entrepreneurs generally involve others in their new projects right from the conception of the idea. (We talk more about this in chapter 6.) They are looking to leverage their resources. (There is no reason to reinvent the wheel when a friend of a friend owns the world’s biggest wheel store, or more concretely, you are thinking of starting a newsletter and Uncle Jim has a printing shop with idle capacity.)
What works for them should work for you, whether you are starting a business or trying to change an organization or forming a new club at your school. That’s why determining who you know is so important. (See “Taking Inventory.”)
(For how these three questions work together, see “How This Plays Out in Real Life.”)
Everything else
So you’ve made a good start in assessing your personal assets. What else makes up the means at hand? The short answer: anything that is both readily available and might be relevant. And you can instantly see the challenge. When you’re operating in the unknown, it is impossible to know what is relevant or what might become relevant in the future. It is not always clear beforehand which pieces of information, or which potential assets, are worth paying attention to and which are not. This means everything is potentially important, at least initially. It is only later (or after the fact) that we know which things were critical and which were superfluous. Consequently, there is neither a theoretically right answer to this question nor a prescription for determining what might be a potential asset.
Making this harder, of course, is that whatever is relevant is going to depend on the situation. If you are starting a business, you want to know what is true about the technology that you might be employing or the market that you will be selling into. If you are trying to create a community recreation center, you probably want to know something about construction costs, traffic flows, and the interests of other members of your community. This is why you want to catalog every potential asset in figuring out your means at hand.
Keep your eye on current reality
You’ve taken a realistic inventory of the potential assets around you. That’s terrific, but you have to keep doing it. Updating your inventory doesn’t happen automatically. You need to make it a habit. Not taking inventory can be problematic for two reasons.
First, you are likely to miss something important. A new asset. A new opportunity. A new discovery.
Second, by not working from an honest and current inventory of your assets, you are likely to make a flawed assumption. For example, you might assume it will be relatively easy to get the government to come along as a partner. “It will only cost each taxpayer $1.34,” you say about a well-intentioned program you want to start, or you could contend that a new kind of wellness program “will pay for itself” (in reduced long-term health-care costs).
Both statements could be absolutely true, but when it comes to government spending, that is irrelevant. You need to know what politicians will and will not fund. Making assumptions based on nothing beyond what makes sense to you is not the right road to take.
If, on the other hand, you just assume the world is stuck in its ways, you could shortchange a potential opportunity, which of course is a central problem of Prediction. Coffee sales had been steadily declining for two decades before Howard Schultz created Starbucks. People assumed individuals wouldn’t pay for television or radio before cable and SiriusXM came along.
In addition, if we aren’t clear-headed about reality, we are likely to lapse into basing our actions on what reality was (not a good idea). You need to look no further than the American auto industry in the 1970s and 1980s (“Americans have always bought American cars and they always will”).
When you are heading off into the unknown, understanding current reality is a very, very, very good idea.
Just Start:
An Exercise for Acting Quickly with the Means at Hand
- Take one of the desires you were excited about from chapter 2.
- Inventory all the things you have immediately and readily at hand. (The sidebar “Taking Inventory” earlier in the chapter can help.)
- Determine the next step (any next step) you can take immediately toward your desire.
Takeways
- Once you know what you want, of course, you need to figure out how to get it. That means that right off the bat , you need to know what resources you have. You can find out by asking the questions: Who am I? What do I know? Who do I know?
- A key part of moving forward is understanding current reality. The way the world really is is not necessarily the way you would like it to be. You might, indeed, be able to change the world. But to do that, you need to understand where the world is now. This can be an Achilles’ heel for entrepreneurs. They can get so caught up in what they are trying to do that they fail to perceive current reality as clearly as they might.
- Once you understand where you are and what resources are at your command, you are prepared to take action, once you determine what you are willing to invest to “play.” We turn to that question in the next chapter.