Coupla Jerks, Part II: Laying the foundation

The first step in building ideas is to get lots of them to choose from. It gets your creative juices flowing and lets you build something bigger.

But to get a lot of ideas, you have to overcome that nagging voice in your mind. You know the one that tells you things like:

• Someone else is probably already doing this.
• No one will think this idea has merit.
• The timing's just not right.

And on and on.

I thought like this at the beginning stages of Coupla Jerks. I kept thinking that everyone already knew how to leverage social media tools. How could I come up with something that would add value? I kept getting more and better ideas of how to share my knowledge with people, then killing them off.

Then, when I finally decided to move forward with a course about making better cold calls by using LinkedIn, I tried to think of the best way to present it. I brainstormed about 50 ideas, from the totally crazy (build a LinkedIn profile for the roma tomato in my brand, roma creative) to the mundane (just use my own profile as an example).

The entire time I went through this process, I had to focus on not talking myself out of my own ideas. And I'm the biggest advocate I know for not killing ideas! It's a hard thing to do for all of us.

So lesson from the first step: Are you creating a strong idea foundation for yourself? Ignoring the nay sayers (even the ones in your own mind) and letting ideas flow?