The 4 Priority-Setting Tips That Will Make Your Biggest Ideas A Reality

culled from:.fastcompany.com

1. Wastes of time: hard-to-execute ideas that would have little impact on you achieving your goals anyway. Dump these now and invest the energy you save into more productive activities.
2. Tactics: easy-to-execute ideas that will not significantly impact your success. Execute these if you want, but they are not important enough to be a strategic priority.
3. Winning moves: easy-to-execute ideas with huge impact. Execute those now!
4. Crazy ideas: difficult-to-execute ideas that, if you could figure out how to make them happen, would really make a difference. Most companies discard these "go to the moon" ideas. Outthinkers spend time figuring out how to make these feasible.
Eighteen months ago I applied the Outthinker Process to my own business and divided my activities into these four categories.
1. Wastes of time: I had been busy trying to certify coaches in my process. I realized that while I love doing this, it is not a profitable business, so I stopped doing it.
2. Tactics: I had been doing a lot of consulting and realized that while I love doing this and can now charge a lot of money for it, it is not a scalable business. I am stuck on the hamster wheel just charging for my time.
3. Winning moves: My speaking business was a winning move. I was already making money from it, I loved it, my fees were rising, and there was still a lot of room for the fees to grow.
4. Crazy ideas: I had three crazy ideas in mind that I had not been investing enough time in. First was to take my process (the Outthinker Process), which I had trained perhaps 2,000 people in, and package it as a program. I could find a home for this program in a high-end training company and license it to them, thereby making money while I sleep. The second was to complete my PhD, a project I had been working on for four years now, but that was not advancing quickly. The third was to launch a private equity fund that would find emerging Outthinkers, invest in them, and help them grow. The fund had become a dream that I did not know how to start.
I realized I was so busy doing my "waste of time" and "tactical" activities I had little energy left to invest in the "winning move" and turning my "crazy ideas" into reality. So I wrote my new priorities down on a little card that I keep in my wallet and pull out every few days to remind me of my priorities: stop doing certifications, just take consulting work you like, push hard on speaking, figure out how to license my IP, get my PhD, and launch a fund.
Eighteen months after clarifying my priorities, I realize things have transformed. As I finished my last workshop and left Kraft headquarters, heading to the airport, I pulled out my BlackBerry. In my inbox were emails from three potential workshop clients, two groups interested in my fund, and two speaking inquiries. I caught up with each of them by phone as my taxi navigated Mexico’s busy traffic. And now, with two hours before boarding, I will finish editing a section of my almost-finished dissertation.