During my morning walk last week - I love walking, it makes me feel like I am claiming my time back in such an easy way - I was re-listening to this podcast episode with Seth Godin and Tim Ferris,

I scribbled down on my phone (I guess I should write type, as scribbling on your phone is not advised kids) this question: 'Is your idea tattoo worthy?'

He makes the example of Harley Davidson and Suzuki. If you want to buy a motorbike, there are plenty of cheaper options than a Harley, but Harley comes with a message. An experience. A lifestyle. People do get a Harley Davidson tattoo, but certainly not a Suzuki one. Or Vespa - EEKS.

Of course, I am not suggesting you need to think whether your logo would be nicely wrapped around an arm of a 40-year-old trucker named Joe.

However, I do believe that the people you genuinely want to help are the ones who can help you assess whether you are working towards a genius idea, or it's time to start over.

In summary

• Seth Godin's advice to assess the risks associated with an idea is to ask if it creates a lifestyle or community that people would be proud to be part of.
• Idea people are often plagued with too many ideas and have to learn how to manage them well to not get overwhelmed and overworked. Tim Ferriss used his podcast as an experiment for 10 episodes to see if it was worth pursuing.
• To maximise work and innovation, don’t cut work short but also don’t overextend yourself - only innovate when it has the potential to lead to something great.

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• Excellent interview full of gold-mine advice. Don't overthink simple actions. Learning to create motion before thinking can be a superpower. When your alarm clock goes off, get your feet on the floor, you won't hit snooze if you do that.
• How you can fit work into your vision of a life well-lived? Intrinsic motivation is most important. Valuing time > valuing money. And my fave, satisfying tends to be more fulfilling than maximising.
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Whenever I get interviewed, every single interviewer asks me how did I come up with the idea for the school.

The stars did not align, I did not get hit by a lightning bolt with “AMS” on it (a bit like a twisted version of the Harry Potter origin story), and neither I did wake up one day and knew it was going to work. I had no bloody clue.

It just felt right at the time.

When I had to sacrifice my online coaching - all to protect my mental sanity, and fight my Virgo tendencies to overdo things - I did more or less what Seth talked about in the podcast episode.

The way for me to assess whether this idea that I was experimenting with was worth the risk was to ask myself if this community was one people would be proud to be a part of.

I recommend checking this exercise from Seth's blog about something called ‘the first ten’.

We get so excited about a new idea/product/business and we get so attached we are almost wary of asking our ideal market for opinions, in case they shrug their shoulders and walk away Beyonce style.

The curse of idea people

Oh hello, there my name is Fab and I am an idea person. Have we met?

Joking aside, I know I'm an idea person and that is my curse.

Yesterday I was talking to my business partner at EDGE, and we both agreed that neither of us is short of ideas. Ever.

What I have learnt, over nine years of working for myself, is that the best thing that I can do is

• write down all the ideas I think worth pursuing at the time - now I call them experiments​
• leave ideas to "mature"
• have enough time to test them, but not too much that I feel like I'm dragging it out

I still remember Tim Ferriss, talking about how he gave himself 10 episodes of his podcast to see whether it would be worth it for him to pursue. That worked out pretty all right for him.

I am doing something similar with our new series on the podcast on YouTube with the short weekly marketing news.

I'm going to let it run for a couple of months and see if it actually has value to ourselves and our audience, and if not, I will just move away from it with love.

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Appreciation corner

A fantastic marketer, cheerleader and bundle of wisdom, Sophie is honestly a fantastic human I met on the interwebs - and I am so glad I did!

Her wit, her marketing insights, and relatable posts are always so spot on. So please, please do yourself a favour and go and follow this gal.

Sophie | @prettylittlemarketer @plmsoph “Would you like to hop on a call?” Honestly, no. Put it in an email, a Google Doc, voice note it, act it out, pigeon mail it over to me, anything. But please, NO MORE CALLS 🤌 March 27th 2023 84 Retweets 613 Likes

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Fab-ulous weekly highlights

1. The latest interview on the podcast is out and I'm so excited for you to meet Jeremy Enns. We had such a fun conversation together, and I love how we explored the power of a little ability in marketing and why great marketing really doesn't feel like marketing I hope you're gonna love this episode!
2. We just revamped our course library and re-launched our intro course + we added 6 new templates, including Notion and Google dashboards, traction channel calculators AND a client proposal presentation (on both Canva and Google slides). I set it as a target for me to work hard to get the library to a place of outstanding value before reflecting that on the price in May (more on this soon) so the hard work is paying off!

Are only “new” ideas worth your time?

As I said before, and I shall say again, you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Use tools that already exist instead of struggling to come up with something completely groundbreaking.

This is how Pinterest has become so successful.

Pinterest simply repurposed the idea of the pin board and put it online so people could collect interesting images and share them. This simple concept has allowed the site to experience a huge success.

Work and innovate when the time is right.

When you need to devote yourself to your work, do it. Don't cut your work short, but also don't work when it's time for the other important things in your life, like family.

Similarly, when you need to innovate, innovate.

Don't innovate just for the sake of it –you'll only waste your creative energy.

Save it for when it has the potential to lead to something great,

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P.S. if you are looking for more support, these are 3 ways I can help…

1. Learn how to market with purpose and access weekly tactics here.
2. Book a power hour session and get unstuck here.
3. Reclaim time to focus your energy where it matters here.

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