Refining your idea

Hey world, I have had a long and eventful weekend, and as some of you may relate, that means my Monday is going to be less productive than usual. So far I have caught up on some reading and made some calls. Then I took out my idea book and started to refine.

Creative individuals have plenty of ideas. Great big, earth-changing ideas. Unfortunately, not many of them ever evolve into anything fruitful. Why? Because having an idea is only half the battle. The real challenge is refining the idea into something than can and will happen.

There is a fine art when it comes to refining an idea. It’s what separates good ideas from great ideas, and will ultimately define your success.

Most ideas have a clear cycle, I am going to attempt to breakdown some points for refining your ideas.

Make it usable
An idea is worthless unless it’s transformed into something useful. Incredible ideas can turn into stupid ones very quickly if the idea isn’t doable.

What makes an entrepreneur great isn’t necessarily the greatness of the idea he has. A special entrepreneur is one who can make the idea happen.

Define it
To refine the idea, you have to first define the idea. By creating a definition for your idea, you’ll make a clear focus on what the idea is going to do. How is it going to help? What will it do? How will it do it? These are things that have to be carefully thought about in the early stages.

You may find that you’re constantly changing the definition to your idea, and that is totally normal. You might change the definition many times before the project is done.

Make it sellable
If you’re going to invest time, sweat and money into an idea, it needs to have a business plan. In other words, can it make money?

Money plays a huge part in refining ideas, whether creative types want to believe it or not. Money is what gives you the ability to create the idea, and later to sell the idea. Some people don’t want their ideas to have anything to do with money, and that’s totally fine. You should figure out up front if you want to make money from your ideas or not. Most people do ;)

Does it makes sense?
After you’ve done the other three steps, I find that if I can explain my idea to my parents or grandparents without them walking away scratching their heads, than the idea has been well defined. What may make sense to you might not make sense to anyone else. If you’re finding that nobody is understanding a) the core concept of the idea or b) how it improves something, you’ve got trouble.

And that's all folks, hope you have fun refining