Marketing Secret #94 Don’t Get Emotionally Involved With Your Project/Business/Service!

Whenever you have an idea of something other people will want to buy, it’s inevitable that you will be convinced that everyone else will be as impressed with your idea as you are. You love it, so why wouldn’t everyone else?

Well, let me give you some friendly advice:

Don’t Get Too Emotionally Attached to Your Project!

Yes, you should be passionate about your brainchild. Yes, you should be excited about the possibilities. Yes, you should put everything you can into making it successful. But the line between necessary passion and unhealthy obsession is sometimes so thin, you can slip into a self destructive state of mind without understanding it has happened.

You need to understand that being so obsessed with your project, that you can’t see reality, is not a healthy state of mind. I’m saying this because you must have a clear, uncluttered perspective of whether or not your test results are good, bad or ugly!

You must test your concept as cheaply, and safely as possible. But if you don’t have a firm grip on reality, before you spend your first cent, you may end up in deeper water than you should be swimming in!

See, I love my business more than I could have imagined I would. I love the marketing of information to business professionals and leaders. I have three different active information marketing business going on right now and have two more in the preliminary testing phase as we speak. And if I get bad results during the testing phase, the approach taken gets changed into something that will, hopefully, give me great results.

You realise, after some time, that each bad result is a steppingstone to great one. Thomas Edison, when asked why he kept going on trying to invest the light bulb, after getting bad results 10,000 times, said that he now knew 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb!

As an example, I once spent two months writing a book, I was sure was going to sell big. I knew the market I was going after would eat it up. I spent countless hours writing the ad for it. I committed $10,000 to the test ads. I knew that it would at least break even. I had 1,000 books printed to handle all the orders I knew were coming.

All my associates at work said it was the best thing I had ever done.

When the first ad hit, I knew the idea was dead in about two days. We had only two or three orders.

As the weeks went by, I knew all was lost. I ended up eating a lot of the books for dinner since they weren’t much good for anything else.

Now, one thing I didn’t do was get all pissed off, and stew about the failure. I actually liked the disaster.

Why?

Because it taught me how to never make any of those mistakes again.

It taught me humility. It taught me to listen to my own advice.

It also hurt me enough to make me sting very badly, which I deserved. Fortunately, it wasn’t even close to being fatal, because, by that point, I had achieved enough success that I had plenty of cash reserves.

The moral of the story?

If you don’t have the clarity of objectivity, you may have the fog of wishing, which covers up the truth. Wishing you were in an alternate universe in which your idea worked is a waste of time.

If you have a bad idea, no matter how much you love it... dump it now!

All ideas are nothing more than ideas. Some will work, some won’t. That is an idea you need to get used to.