I have the habit of getting attached to beliefs and letting them become the be-all-end-all and only when something painful happens do I finally take on the belief as it was actually intended to be taken on. The most recent example is the belief to build a business around something that excites me. I got this belief after reading the 4 Hour Work Week and have been following it religiously ever since. At face value this belief makes sense but has unfortunately become an excuse to focus only on exciting ideas while avoiding the harder, less glamorous work.

I will come up with an idea and brainstorm on the idea until I have enough of a document to start building the idea, and then I will love the process of building it and continue to go from there. As you’ll notice, this is entirely mental foreplay. I haven’t talked to anyone or done any research about it, and yet somehow I’ve reached conviction on the idea. I created my own signal for what ideas work and what don’t. Inevitably I have doubts about what I’m creating and the viability of it. Because this is all happening in the mind, instead of proving these doubts wrong, I give the doubts so much weight that I actually stop working on the idea entirely. This becomes a big problem when I’m trying to build a business.

The belief to build something that excites me is still valid and it’s required to sustain my motivation for what I’m working on. Maybe when I first adopted this belief it was valid and over time it slowly changed into the wrong belief. Or maybe I adopted the belief correctly but I hadn’t yet learned other essential lessons about building a business. Nonetheless, it’s time to treat what I’m doing like a business and detach myself from the ideas that I work on. This is a core part of my new approach.

The new approach that I’ve adopted is to come up with new ideas and to treat these ideas as no more than just ideas. After I choose which idea to work on, I’ll begin market and competitor research to understand its viability. I’ll then come up with a strategy for how I can make the idea work based on this research. With this new approach, doubts simply become hypotheses to explore with curiosity and test.