Hey – what if…
Interesting review today by Matthew May of the Derek Sivers book Anything You Want: 40 Lessons For a New Kind of Entreprenuer. You can read it here. It’s a little book with a big message, one that breaks out of the usual step by step, follow your biz plan type of advice.
One of my favorite highlights from May:
Switch if it’s not a hit
If everyone is shouting for more—”I need this! I’d be happy to pay you for this!”—you’re probably on to something, and you should do it. If it’s anything less, don’t pursue it. Don’t waste your time banging on locked doors and fighting uphill battles. Innovate until you get the massive response. “Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working.”
Read that several times, and then highlight (it’ll wash off your screen) the sentence “Innovate until you get the massive response”.
This is pretty much what it’s all about now in art licensing. Treat your portfolio as an idea book, not your finished product. We call them the start of the conversation – we love it when a client studies a design and muses “what if…” or “how could we…”. I can’t tell you how many sketches are made in the margins as we discuss alternatives, then finished up and fired off to them afterwards. Its fun, its fast and the idea may or may not work – but that’s OK because we’ve got a million more…
wow… talk about getting hit in the face with a sledge hammer ! This makes so much sense and is so obvious, BUT it needs to be continually out in front of us as a daily reminder. THANKS !!
Thanks for the reminder, Jim. And I love the “what if” . . .
“Treat your portfolio as an idea book, not your finished product.”
Thanks for this.