This is part of the “Dirty Dozen” series. In Part #5, we covered the word “Indifference.” Today we will cover the word “Impatience.”
Dictionary definition: Restlessly eager
It is probably because of the speed of life, we have started equating “long term” to “slow.” Long term and slow are two entirely different things. Most things in nature happen over a long term ( examples: baby takes nine months to be born, a tree takes a few years to bear fruit etc.) but that’s not slow. It’s just that some things take time.
When you read about someone’s accomplishment, typically details are missing – especially the details about all the effort that went in leading to this accomplishment. Movies and books make it look simple and say, “If they can do it, you can too.”
This leads to impatience. You want that accomplishment yesterday. In other words, you want the prize without paying the price. That just does not make sense.
I call this the fascination with Newton’s Third Law applied to the wrong place. Newton’s third law states that action and reaction are equal and opposite. That works great in your daily life. Simple things like you throw a ball at the wall and it will come back to you. You push someone and they will push you back – may be.
However, things will start getting messy when you start applying this to the wrong places. For example, building a personal brand may lead to a promotion. The action is building the personal brand and the reaction from the marketplace is the promotion. What is missing in the equation is the time lag. Action and reaction are equal and opposite but with a time lag. Forget the “time lag” part and you can get all confused.
In real life, you need to make investments in the right places first and also have the patience to wait for the results. You can, of course get lucky sometimes but that’s an exception – not the rule.
In summary – patience rules!!
You can listen to the audio here:
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Illustration by Ming. Ming is the creator of the Fantasy Story webcomic. He is also a freelance illustrator, designer, painting instructor and occasional luxury car salesman. Ming is based in Penang, Malaysia. You can find him on twitter @Artmaker
In the last article we discussed the need to create a cohesive IP strategy, in this article I’ll discuss the first step in creating your strategy.
Like every article I’ve written on this topic, I’ll remind you that you need help, and you need the best help you can get.
Strategy Creation:
A few guidelines to help things along:
1. Be clear on why you are creating an IP strategy. All reasons are valid, some will work better than others. For example: if your goal in creating an IP strategy is to to tell all of your friends how many patents you have; you may want to think a bit more deeply about what you will do with those assets (make no mistake they are assets if treated right) and how much you are planning on spending to create them. On the other hand if you plan to exploit what you have invented, create a new business, and bring new products to the marketplace, then you are thinking in the right direction for strategy development.
2. Determine the direction you want your IP portfolio to grow into, find your market landscape. For instance; if you are making wire coat hangers and you suddenly come up with a new idea to make them cheaper, faster or in some other way better for the same cost, that’s a great invention in your current market landscape. If, on the other hand you make coat hangers and you come up with a great new telescope design, you may want to think about the new invention within the direction of your market landscape and the way you prosecute that innovation in the marketplace. Is it a different marketplace? The direction component of your strategy helps to keep costs under control. Costs can include nearly everything you can think of, from time spent thinking about the innovation, to the actual patent write up and filing fees, and everything in between.
3. Determine what areas you are NOT going to explore, such as a wire coat hanger manufacturer working on auto parts cleaning machines. It doesn’t matter what limits you put in place but you must at least think about them, and draw limits that suit your situation and remember they are your limits, you can change them any time you wish.
4. Determine when you will start, never when you will stop, and start. Create consequences for not starting, and rewards for getting going. Innovation should never stop, it must be continuous if you are to be successful in the long term.
This all sounds like a lot of work and, that said, it’s not a trivial task. However, as humans, we are what we practice, and our practices define us. Therefore you need to develop a practice of creativity, and a practice of managing your strategy.
So, having read all the above; It’s time to get moving!
This article was contributed by Thomas Frasher, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Thomas on Twitter at tfrasher.
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This is part of the “Dirty Dozen” series. In Part #5, we covered the word “Indifference.” Today we will cover the word “Impatience.”
Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. He maintains another blog called Life Beyond Code and tweets as @UpbeatNow
