Picking a place to start

The other day, I suggested to a friend that they should start a business. Their reply was, “What would I do though?”

I listed a bunch of ideas that included a dog poop scooping business, lawn care, shoveling snow, reselling used cell phones and patching drywall. That was just in the first five minutes of conversation.

The problem isn’t finding a good idea. The problem is having the guts to start something that might not work. There is no shortage of good ideas out there in the world. Ideas are everywhere, especially if you are looking.

Of course, it is easy to point to where we feel deficient. “I don’t have enough education/experience/resources/good ideas…” And on, and on, and on.

It makes me wonder what Lin-Manuel Miranda was thinking before producing Hamilton. Let’s do a broadway show on a lesser known founding father, while casting historically white characters as black, latino and asian, and use heavy influences of hip-hop for the lyrics.

Doesn’t sound like a good idea on paper until you see it. Most good ideas look terrible in the ether until they are done in real life.