Why your ideas never work

Here’s the storyline. You may be familiar with it. 

You decide that this year is going to be the year you perform really well at your job. You write down ideas for new initiatives and campaigns and you package them up nicely. You present them to your boss and your clients, and they love them. They say “Go for it!”

But then any time after that when you try to make those ideas happen, you get no support from anyone. 

Your boss is suddenly too busy. 

Your clients say it isn’t a great time. 

Even people who say they’re working on it don’t get back to you. 

When this happens, you’re at a fork in the road. 

You can either say “Well, I tried,” and accept the plausible deniability. It isn’t in your court anymore after all. Other people dropped the ball, yeah? It’s not on you, right? 

Or you can take radical responsibility. You can not take no for an answer. You can press and push and persuade until people actually start working on your ideas. You can do the dirty work that no one wants to do to actually get your projects over the line. 

This fork in the road is what distinguishes high-performers from the rest of us. It’s the linchpin in being a linchpin—in becoming irreplaceable. Demanding the necessary time from the necessary people. Pushing not until you get a no, but until you get the job done.