Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Make $1,000,000 by Accident

Is it really possible? Inc. Magazine points out a few stories such as that of Richard and Betty James. In 1934 (wasn’t there a recession going on?) Richard was working in a Navy tool yard and saw a spring coil fall off a table. His wife Betty found the word slinky, Swedish for sleek and sinuous, and the couple followed the idea with two years of testing.

Two years later they placed their invention in a store for $1 each and sold out within the first hour. To this date more than 250,000,000 Slinkys have been sold worldwide.

At only 16 years old, Catherine was able to convince two others to put up over $250,000 to start Yearbook.com. With over 20,000,000 unique visitors each month it has had growth spurts that have outpaced facebook and MySpace.

The point to be made here is that neither of these ideas made their inventors millions of dollars by accident. Each of them took a great idea and brought it to the marketplace to fill a need that was missing at the time.

Ideas really are a dime a dozen. Your ability to act on the ideas flowing through your mind is the only thing that will bring compensation. I’m convinced there are many ideas out there that will never be acted upon, and I heard some tremendous ones this past weekend at the 212 Connection Round Table.

What’s holding you back from significance? I have two suggestions to get moving on your ideas.

First, don’t get hung up in fear. Don’t choose a life of comfortable misery over one of significance. It is easy to look back on a long life and wish you had done more. It’s much harder to do something great and look back with abundance and thankfulness.

Second, don’t get hung up on the “how”. Instead, take the time to develop your “what”. Too often I see people putting their ideas on hold because of a lack of time, money or other resources. If your idea is a good one, nothing will stop you from greatness.

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