In a World of Too Much

Don Dalrymple — February 15, 2017 Follow @dondalrymple

We live in a world of too many options, not too little. Solving your business problems is less about innovating and developing something new, and it is much more about putting together the pieces that are available in our democratized tech and knowledge world.

Consider all the options you have at your fingertips these days:

• Talent. You can access and evaluate technical, managerial and clerical talent on LinkedIn, Upwork and Fiverr. It’s not hard.
  
• Tools. Everything is either free or has a low monthly subscription. Extremely powerful collaboration for project management, CRM for selling, email marketing to stay in touch or website building sites to put your presence out there.
  
• Messages. Everyone can post, publish and comment these days. It’s not hard. Any thought, valuable or wasteful, can be put out there instantly for the whole world to access and see.
  
• Knowledge. What can’t you learn? Education via Khan Academy is available. Universities are putting their courses online. You can ask Siri or Google for answers and you get access to everything that is out there to learn.

We live in a hyper-efficient economy where you can navigate a day in a strange city simply with your phone and get rides, book meetings, find places to live and get a Meetup going.

And everyone has the same access.

However, everyone does not have the same motivation, creativity, or guts. Most people are waiting around for something to happen. Most people are wanting to be told what to do even though there’s a universe of building blocks available to start something or build a useful project.

If you moved from entertainment to trying to make one strategy work that would bring value to other people, you can move from a net consumer to a net producer.

If you did this on a single platform for a year, studied it inside and out, and built expertise to the point you could execute on your ideas that flow in and out, imagine the possibilities with very little risk you could gain.

Living in a world of too many options and access opens up opportunities that are limited by your imagination and determination.

Being Little and Thinking Big

I can remember when I was a kid playing with my legos having an overwhelming feeling of not knowing where to start when I saw all those legos on the floor. The mass amount of colored bricks caused me to pause. I did not know where to start. Looking at the sheer number of pieces created some anxiety.

But, I would sit and pick up a brick. Then I would grab a second one. I let my mind start to wander and my hands start to grab and try fitting pieces together.

I was sitting in a pool of infinite choices. And I simply started. Putting pieces together, seeing how they fit and arriving at some kind of car, structure or device emerged after playing.

The world still looks the same. We have this vast amount of information, technology, access and connections. We can stare and stay in our corner. Or we can explore and start putting pieces together having fun and seeing what we can build from the pieces.

What can you start?

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