Recently, I had someone reach out to me, and they wanted help with a new product they were developing. What they wanted to do was hire me as a consultant, but truthfully, they just couldn’t afford our fees for our agency. So what I did, though, is I didn’t want to leave them empty-handed, so I provided them an idea.
I just told them, “Hey, look, here’s something simple you can do. You’re at the infancy stage,” and I know many of you listening to this have ideas, and you’re at the infancy stage, where you’re just developing them. I said, “Imagine you are the idea.” So let’s take a cereal box as an example. I want you to imagine that you are the cereal box. Now, if you’re a cereal box, how do you make yourself more attractive so customers want to pick you up and buy you? How do you make yourself more attractive to the grocer, so you get more shelf space? How do you make yourself actually fit into a shopping cart better? How do you make yourself stand out from all the other cereal boxes?
Maybe you’re a parking meter. How does it feel when coins are inserted inside you? What does it look like once you’ve expired? How could you be even easier to use as a parking meter? Well, now, one thing that could come to mind is credit cards. Well, how could that be easier? Well, you could say, “I could use bitcoin, and I could just transfer that over, or transfer it from my mobile device.” The key here is to imagine that you actually are the idea, whatever that idea is. So if I’m Author of Your Own Story University, if I’m actually that university, how do I actually let you know how amazing I am, how amazingly jam-packed full of useful information I am?
And there are several ways you can go about it, but what I want you to do is pick your idea. Whatever idea’s floating around your head, grab a piece of paper and imagine you’re that idea. How do you feel? How do you look? How do you interact with the world? And what could you do better? What is it that can make you more user-friendly? What is that idea? Putting yourself in that idea’s shoes gives you that mental shift that often people need to actually push a little bit further forward. Now, this is obviously a small and simple trick, but I’ve learned over the years that at the infancy stage of product development, this is a great way to get you out of that linear thinking, that really analytical thinking of developing the product, and actually get you more user-friendly, and bring you to market, and bring up new ideas, and I hope that does that for you too.
That’s it from me today. Remember, build your tribe. Go out there and share this with at least three people you know. If you’re not doing it, do the work. Come on now, you’ve got to do the work in order to get any benefit of this. Imagine your idea. Be that idea. It’s a simple exercise, but it pays dividends. Even if you’re a service company, imagine you’re the service. You can do this, and you can apply this to all kinds of aspects of your life. That’s it from me today. Remember, go out and be the author of your own story.
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