Love your idea into existence

If you have an idea that makes your heart pound and your hair follicles pulsate, run with it. Dream big.

Your big idea deserves every ounce of attention you can spare. The world needs to know about it.

But what if you’re not sure you can bring your idea life? What if reality starts whispering in your ear?

Love it and see what happens.

Love your idea into existence? Are you serious?

Reality says Not So Fast. 

Reality says you don’t have the resources or time. You won’t make enough money. You’ll need to work as a barista to pay your bills, you’ll never have another nice meal, you’ll have to wear the same sweater all winter, your kids will never go to college, you’ll live in a studio apartment above a four AM bar in your retirement…things you took for granted when you had a regular paycheck will become distant extravagances. Former economic assumptions will become current question marks.

Hey Danny, thanks for the pep talk!

Reality is a good voice to pay attention to. It brings perspective, immediacy, and motivation.

If dreams are the romantic bubbles in which we happily float, reality is the pin that pricks the bubble to bring us back to earth.

Lucky for us, there are plenty of tools we can employ to help make reality less real.

Focus, the way founder Kevin Plank built Under Armour. He talks about how important it was to become famous for one thing. In his case it was making one shirt for five years. He focused on becoming excellent at that one thing and used it as a springboard to do more amazing things.

Belief, the way co-founder Dieter Mateschitz built Red Bull. He and his partner were ready to roll out the drink when a research firm told them that people didn't like the taste, the logo, or the brand, and they especially didn’t like the name. But Dieter had experienced the effects of the drink himself. He believed in the product and went ahead anyway.

Blissful Ignorance, something entrepreneurs rely on when practicality isn’t on the table, the way Sara Blakely built Spanx. With no money for a lawyer, she wrote her own patent. With no money for a fancy purse, she went to her meeting with a Neiman Marcus buyer carrying her product in her lucky red backpack. With no interest from the buyer, she whisked her into a bathroom for a live product demo. It worked.

Kevin, Dieter and Sara’s combined net worth is almost $20 billion.

You can add passion, desire, luck, timing, hard work to those reality-fighting tools. And probably a few others I left out.

Then there’s love.

On it’s surface, it’s the least practical business tool you can imagine. The easiest to shrug off as a cute, nice-to-have, idealistic, non-productive endeavor. 

But you can, in fact, love something into existence.

Entrepreneurs know this to be true. People have a Big Idea and start a company and will it to life through their love for it all the time. Well, maybe not all the time. But more often than you’d think. Starting with the patron saint of loving something into existence, Steve Jobs.

“You’ve got to find what you love,” he said. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.”

I was interviewing a brilliant Harvard grad about her entrepreneurial endeavor—an incredible initiative helping women gain confidence in computer science through learning how to code—and she told me about her source of life-driven inspiration, from Harvard President Drew Faust’s commencement speech:

“If you don’t try to do what you love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it. I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been sharing it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to be and then circle back to where you have to be.”

This quote inspired her to turn down some pretty amazing job offers and become a fierce entrepreneur. She’s making great progress.

So how do you love something into existence? Well, it’s not all that different than real life. It goes something like this:

When you think about the thing you’re in love with, your heart rate jacks up, your eyes sparkle, and the corners of your mouth turn up uncontrollably. It’s a heart pounding, follicle-pulsating existence. When you talk about the thing you’re in love with, you talk faster. Your excitement bursts through clouds of doubt.

You know it when you feel it. You know it when you hear it.

And when you do, it’s impossible not to bring it to life.

Pay attention to your brain, but listen to your heart. Tell reality to take a hike. 

Dream big. Start with love.

Danny Schuman is Founder and Head Twister at Twist, a marketing and innovation consultancy in Chicago. He has loved many ideas, and many of them have become reality, the last one being the 2017 Cubs World Championship. He's currently writing his book The Worst Business Model in the World, featuring tips and stories from entrepreneurs of varying degrees of success, and speaking and workshopping the subject in various public and corporate venues. He thanks you for going here to sign up for his soonish-to-be published newsletter and will see you in the right field bleachers.

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