One of These Days

I recently took park in the world’s largest technology competition, the Microsoft Imagine Cup. It’s a competition that challenges students to use technology to solve the biggest problems of the world today. Quite a daunting and seemingly unsurmountble task, but clearly it seemed possible to the 300,000 students who entered worldwide.

Throughout the 6 months I was involved in the competition I learned many things, how to present well, how to gather feedback on ideas, how to work in a new team, etcetera. But above all else, the most important thing it taught me was how to ship.

(If any of you follow Seth Godin, you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

The imagine cup was an excuse to do something. We all have ideas, and we’d love to seem them come to fruition. But doesn’t that take time, effort (and super powers)? Of course it does! But that’s the easy part.

We put hours and dollars into writing that work report, or doing our tax returns. Boring things that we don’t want to do, but have to. Clearly we’re good at putting in time and effort when we must.

So the hard part is getting the effort to go where we want it to. If we take that first step, and step onto the right platform however, it’s easy. A competition was my (and my team’s) step and platform, and it was fantastic.

As a result, the idea made it to the top 4 in New Zealand, has now transformed into a real business, and has opened up many opportunities for us to invest time and effort into something worthwhile.

So if you’re stuck with an idea and don’t know how or where to start, find a competition that is related to it (there’s bound to be one). This will give you the motivation, the environment, and an excuse, to start doing what you really want to do.

Besides, not only will your idea be coming to life, but you may even win something for it.