Starting is always hard not because of the glorious finish line you see at the end but because of the process it requires to start right.
Parents are the most familiar with this process and in some way every woman who has experienced the process of birthing and mothering a child will understand this easily. From the nine/ten months of waiting and watching the belly grow as the body changes to experiencing birthing contractions and then counting the moments till the baby begins to eat solids, to crawling, then walking and running. When a baby doesn’t crawl, we get a little apprehensive about whether he will walk and if he does, we scream “hallelujah” because he skipped a loop in the process.
This is how enterprise developers and strategist like see a startup. We see your process and if you walk before you learn to crawl then that’s awesome but in this case learning to loop every single piece of the process chain is important. You may not crawl but you should know what it means to crawl to understand the “loop” of walking or running.
The first question is; Why this idea?
You must realize that no idea is original; every thought is born out of an existing reality which can be the problem you are trying to solve. So even if your idea is not “original” it can be authentic! If you check wide enough “The Infinite Monkey Theorem” will apply – every idea duplicates itself around the world within seconds of being birthed. What you need to thrive in your own space is innovation and creativity. Saying it simply is “do what they do but do it differently” or “see what has been done and make it better”.
Example; Facebook, Hi5 and Myspace *spot the difference*
Your difference is in your “why” and then your “how”.
Why – Ask yourself why you are deciding to tow this path. Steve Jobs wanted to put a dent in the universe by making information more readily available in a way that makes people feel special and there came the Apple brand.
How – Ask yourself how you will do this differently from other players in the market. Khan wanted to teach students Mathematics but differently and he opened an educational website that now covers more subjects and has many more teachers.
Always start with the WHY and the HOW.
Excerpt:
“The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. However, the probability that monkeys filling the entire observable universe would type a single complete work, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but technically not zero). The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events which has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly eventually occur, given enough time.”
Ihotu Eritosin-Gregory is an Enterprise Educator with her niche as Organisational Design/Development and Strategy. She is a certified Goals and Accountability Coach. She holds a masters degree in Creative Enterprise from Birmingham City University and has other certificates from various fields. She has facilitated numerous projects on business startups, vocational training for women, mentorship for girls and is a sought after speaker in her areas of expertise.
