I didn’t mean to go on hiatus, it just sort of happened.

This year has been great. Beyond great. Self employment is wonderful, business is doing really very well, all is good.

When I left Telus, I was convinced that we’d have so much extra time on our hands now that I wasn’t giving away 45 + hours per week. Somehow, that hasn’t been the case.

Huh?

We still got swamped late in the season as we did the year before, and I still feel like I’m working all the time. I’m not crazy stressed like I was before though, life is SO MUCH less stressful. I’m just not *accomplishing* as much as I should be - I’m busy constantly but not constantly productive.

For a long time it was simply the honeymoon period of not having to go to work anymore so I didn’t feel guilty. Then it was crazy busy season where I really was working all the time, so I didn’t feel guilty. Then it was Christmas, so I didn’t feel guilty.

Now, I feel guilty.

There’s a big difference between busy work and true productivity, and I’ve been unproductive for far too long. I spend too much time wasting time and calling it work.

I know how to be productive - starting with turning off my email and facebook and forums - I’m just lazy. And, more importantly, I need a new project and I don’t know what it is yet. I have more than enough capacity to handle something really big - I just haven’t found it, and the longer it’s taking to figure it out the more used to this lazy unproductivity I’m becoming. I’m getting very antsy.

At heart, I’m an entrepreneur. I love business, I love new business, I love starting businesses. Right now that business is photography - and I’m really good at it. As soon as I have actually figured out my next business though I’ll be hiring someone to do all the day to day so I can for the most part direct and show up to shoot - there’s a lot I can bring in someone else for while not compromising the core of the company.

I’m also pretty damn smart and I have a decent amount of education and experience and such when it comes to business. I’m fancy like that.

What I don’t have, however, is the ability to truly think outside the box. I am not creative. I am FABULOUS at taking the seed of someone else’s creativity and finding inspiration in unrelated things and running with that and building upon it and expanding it - but that initial spark? I don’t have it. I fake it pretty good, I keep countless ideas and things filed away in my brain that I’ve seen or heard or discovered in unrelated areas to pull out when I need to. My photographs are inspired by movies and art and funky packaging and line and colour. I can run with obscure inspiration - but I can’t come up with it on my own. I have to get there from something else.

I read a lot of entrepreneur related blogs and such and I keep reading over and over and over and over again about people lamenting that all they have are ideas but no knowledge of how to implement them. Everywhere I go, it seems that everyone has a million ideas and just doesn’t know which to run with.

How can I compete when I don’t have the ideas in the first place?

I feel I have the exact opposite problem - I could build a business plan in my head in minutes given an idea to start from. The whole thing folds out for me… I can rattle off marketing ideas like nothing and can give a pretty solid roadmap on where to start and what to research and where to go. Starting a business is never *easy* because there is so much work and so much uncertainty, but for me the process is the part I enjoy and am good at.

But - where to start when I don’t have the ideas?

Of course, I keep trying to do the same thing that I do with everything else - look in unrelated areas for inspiration. I go back and forth between choosing something that has synergies with my existing business -which would make loads of sense but I’m still unsure. I step back and really analyze what I am good at and what I want to do and even though I have a good sense of the end goals I still don’t have the middle pieces.

I really just thought the whole thing would come to me by now.

Actually - it almost happened. There was one. I had an idea. It wasn’t my idea, but I was able to expand on it in a way that was new. It would have been a partnership and we began the research phase… to discover, of course, that a company operating basically identically to what we said we’d do not only existed but had just been bought out for a tonne of cash. Sigh. This is, of course, why you do research - but at least there was some validation that the base plan had been a solid one. But, I knew that. The people I was telling were looking at me with a very unsure look, but I knew. I’m fancy like that.

So, until then, I’m trying to come up with a good reason to be more productive. If I’m more productive then I have all this free time see, and that scares me, too. I don’t know what to do with lots of free time, which is why I need a new project. And really, while Guitar Hero & Rock Band are fun - they are so not it.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 12:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.