I’m not talking about how well Harry Kane puts the ball into the net for England and Bayern Munich, and Spurs before them. No it’s about the art/ability to see through on your commitments which for many proves tough.
How many times have you enthusiastically thrown yourself into a book/project/series/business idea/invention/Lego construction/course etc and not finished it? Why is that?
Could be time, changes in own time availability, boredom, neurodivergence and seeing the dopamine hit of completion too far away?
Is it a problem? Well yes if failing to finish what you start affects others badly or leaves you in shame for not completing everything you told everyone you were going to do at the outset!
One of my many examples was an idea for a new business I had some time ago when renting out videos from Blockbuster was the way to view new releases (so a while back!)
The concept was simple, I was to provide a service that allowed people to order a video(s), take away and drinks and my company would deliver them all in one go. I had a name for it – ‘Big Night In’ and for the sake of it here is a mocked up logo!
This was all pre-Just Eat or Uber Eats, Deliveroo etc. Not too long after my idea streaming took off and Blockbusters went from being a corner piece of the high street to becoming extinct but the concept was sound and is now pretty normal.
It failed because I didn’t take it further than concept stage and worries about health and safety issues with transporting food from restaurants to end users and whether that was a game stopper from the off.
I didn’t check it out though or get a focus group together to get views on it and refine the approach, to be fair I didn’t have funding to do it either above and beyond doing it myself until demand was more than I could do outside or normal working hours.
The learning from this? Get an idea, check it out with others and road test it before deciding on whether to go for it and get help with implementation – especially if you’re a serial procrastinator!
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