What do you do with an idea?
I only told this to a couple of people, but this 2016 started by me missing a very important work email that could have cancelled the biggest project our company had. In the end we made it work and our client was happy but this year brought the Sawyer Effect team countless lessons and adventures.
I made another mistake in 2016, I buy a lot of books and I have a shameful list of unread books waiting for me at home, daunting me, daring me, and reminding me that I compulsively buy new books because I like the subject or the author or just because. I have 2 dozen unopened books at home and 127 books in my Amazon Wish List, so this one one day I bought a kids book by accident and I felt a little bit silly when it arrived:
Those who know me well, know that I am a big kid, but I rarely read kids books, or watch cartoons for that matter, but after laughing at myself a little I decided to take a look, the book only has 36 pages. 12 dollars for 36 pages! I was livid, yes, I know, I know that sometimes I am cheap but you can read the whole book in 3 minutes! 12 dollars!
I decided to at least put my good 12 dollars to use I decided to read it, surprisingly, it became my favorite book! For me it represented our journey in a way.
For years, I acted like it didn’t belong to me, but it followed me, we tried to act like everything was the same as it was before our idea had shown up, we knew one thing though, we felt good when our ideas was around, it required attention and we became friends.
Now, I like to think that in a way I am a shy guy, so obviously we felt silly talking about our idea in public at first, some people thought our idea was silly and a waste of time but we continued.
What do they really know anyway?
This year thanks to countless demonstrations of talent, effort, courage and trust from our team we started to feel okay with it, we felt okay being a little bit weird, a little bit crazy, but mostly, we felt good with Sawyer Effect being OUR idea and it grew and grew, it took flight and burst into the sky!
And then, we realized what do you do with an idea…
YOU CHANGE THE WORLD.
In 2017 we’ll build it a new house (new Guadalajara office layout posts to come later) and I am sure it will encourage us to think bigger.
However, as the year ends we wanted to stop for a second and write this note to thank our awesome team!
I wanted to thank the team because it was not easy, and it probably shouldn’t be? Feeding our idea to make it happen came with a lot of effort from them, getting out our comfort zone is at times painful, so painful that you might lose sleep or will require that you’ll be willing to be away from your family to perform in a new stage or maybe you’ll be couch surfing at a coworkers apartment while you complete your move.
People ask us at times if the effort is worthwhile, and honestly I don’t know, Ben Horowitz describes it as a state of either euphoria or depression so I guess for some it depends on the person. In Mexico we have a quote, we like to say that the moments you already danced (enjoyed) no one can take away from you.
I realize that in the future we’ll have hard times, but for us to cherish each day we continue with our idea and to do our best to improve it is what counts.
This post is also to invite other people to do the same, try your idea, it might be silly at first, but silly is good, sometimes.
Share your stories with us, and if you are in New York City or Guadalajara sometime let us know so we can go for coffee or tacos, or shoot us an email if you want to share your idea with us @ Sawyer Effect.
