Quit Thinking, Start Doing, And Commit To Your Idea

The following is an edited excerpt from the book The World Needs Your F*cking Ideas: How to Start a Business That Will Save Our Universe by Benjamin VandenWymelenberg.

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The only impossible journey is the one you never begin. — TONY ROBBINS

What happens if you have a game-changing idea to build something great but never take action on it?

Absolutely nothing.

You will go to your grave holding on to an idea that could have positively impacted humanity, but instead it will remain in your decaying brain, serving as nothing more than worm food for years to come.

Always remember that nothing in business or life is perfect. You can engineer a product to death, apply for patents that take years to finalize, and research the shit out of everything, but nothing will happen if you don’t quit thinking and get started.

Striving for perfection may sound like a noble and worthy cause for aspiring entrepreneurs, but obsessing over an idea and never turning it into reality makes you something quite different: a wantrepreneur. I was never a wantrepreneur, but my idea did take a while to manifest.

Franken-Cases For Beer Money

In college, I worked three jobs to pay for my education. One of them was in the studio of an architectural company called Cunningham Group, where I used a laser cutter to stick wooden models together. That gig was a great fit because it was the only job I could find that would let me show up after cheer practice and get paid to work until three in the morning.

One day before work, I took a header while Rollerblading and shattered my iPhone. Luckily for me, the device still worked, but the screen was shattered, so I had to endure shoving shards of glass into my face every time I used the phone, which gave me an idea when I got to work that night. As I was cutting some wood veneers in the studio, I thought, “I should totally cut one of these things to fit the back of my phone.”

Inspiration turned into motivation and I quickly went to work, cutting out a backing for the phone made from a piece of mahogany — real wood veneer — and wrapping it in plastic wrap. This protected the device from further damage and prevented the broken glass from stabbing me in the face, which resulted in unnecessary bleeding. Honestly, it looked like the worst third-grade art project you’ve ever seen. It was a total Frankenstein of smartphone cases. But strangely enough, people thought it looked pretty cool.

When I brought my Franken-case-looking iPhone protector to cheer practice the next day, a couple of my buddies saw it and said, “Dude, that thing is awesome! Can we buy one from you? We’ll give you twenty bucks,” which happened to be just enough for a case of beer.

I thought to myself, “It cost me about a penny to make the damned thing, so I’d be an idiot to not do it. After all, beer money is still better than no money, especially to a starving college student.”

You’re probably thinking, “So that’s when you had your aha moment? That’s when it all came together: your idea for a multimillion-dollar business? All of a sudden, you went from a beer-drinking architecture student to a visionary entrepreneur, right?”

Not exactly. In fact, I made about fifteen of those Franken-cases for friends without any thought of taking the idea further. An interesting side note is that I still have one of those original cases.

Know Your Why

My makeshift device finally turned into a clear vision of something much bigger and more impactful about four to five months later, when my buddy Kevin and I watched a TED Talk hosted by the legendary motivational speaker Simon Sinek.

Kevin Groenjes was and still is the best friend I’ve ever had. We were introduced by a mutual friend about a year before I made my first Franken-case for beer money. Instantly, we hit it off and have been close ever since.

About two-and-a-half months after making the commitment to start my business, I asked Kevin to be my right-hand man because we always had a contagious energy together, which was incredibly valuable because I needed someone to match my determination to build the foundation of my business. I knew that Kevin and I would go into beast mode together, work all hours of the night, and hit the ground running.

We watched that TED Talk from the living room couch of my rental house in the ghetto of South Minneapolis. The couch was one of those old beat-up pieces of furniture you might find curbside with a big “FREE” sign on it. Nonetheless, it was incredibly comfortable, and it served quite admirably as the centerpiece to our office/living room for the first six months or so of the business.

Neither Kevin nor I knew anything at all about business, but we plugged my laptop into the television one night and watched Sinek’s incredibly impactful and motivating TED Talk. He said that people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. He tells business leaders and entrepreneurs to start by asking themselves why they want to start a business or why they’re in business.

Sinek’s point is that it’s not enough to just want to make a bunch of money. There’s going to be a lot of turbulence in starting and running a business, and the sheer motivation of earning more money won’t be enough to get you through that. He suggests that the key to surviving the volatile highs and lows of being a business owner is knowing your why.

That concept made a lot of sense to Kevin and me, and it absolutely blew our minds. It inspired a conversation almost immediately because we shared some common interests, like environmentalism and job creation. Not long after watching that TED Talk and talking about Sinek’s revelation, we came up with our why: we wanted to bring nature back into people’s lives, create jobs in the US, and build high-quality American products.

Notice our why didn’t include anything about how much money we wanted to make or specifically mention wooden smartphone cases.

Making money doing anything is nice because you need money to live, but if Kevin and I were in business exclusively to make money, we could have been architects, personal trainers, writers, or anything else. Kevin was a kinesiology major and could have earned a nice living as a therapist or personal trainer. I was an architecture major and could have made plenty of money designing and constructing buildings.

Did we have any special affinity for smartphone cases? Nope. Does anybody? However, we were deeply passionate about our why. Nature, jobs, and the satisfaction of creating a high-quality product were all sentiments we could get fired up about. That was what really mattered. When we unwrapped those common motivational factors, we didn’t need to wait any longer. We were ready to quit thinking, start doing, and commit to our idea.

Key Takeaway #1: You can make money doing almost anything in life, but by knowing your why, you can make money, feel fulfilled, and create significant positive impact for yourself and everyone around you.

On And Off Target

Maybe six months after watching that powerful TED Talk, Kevin and I approached Target and Best Buy with our why. We didn’t just brazenly walk in there and announce, “Hey everybody, look at our kick-ass wooden smartphone cases! Aren’t they awesome? How many do you want to buy today?”

Our pitch went a little more like, “Look, we’re incredibly passionate about what we want to do. We want to bring nature back into people’s lives, create jobs in the US, and build high-quality American products, and we would love to partner with you to make those things happen.”

That interaction eventually led to us selling our wooden cases for the iPad in all eighteen hundred Target stores and select Best Buy locations. Unfortunately, we didn’t perform any due diligence in reading the fine print of the deals we signed. If we had, we would have realized that the deals were based on consignment, which made it a terrible idea. Consignment meant that if the products didn’t sell (and they didn’t), we had to take them all back and not get paid for a penny of them.

The end result was that we were paid a small sum of money up front, but received nothing for the products that didn’t sell, which was almost all of them. The bigger problem was that we had already spent all of our friends’ and families’ money on high-end packaging to complement the high-end product, which was a fine idea. But when that product didn’t sell, it meant we had no money to pay anyone back. All things considered, we were about $500,000 in debt.

If our why had only been concerned with making money, we would have slammed on the brakes of this operation and closed the doors at that moment. However, we still believed strongly in our why and we’d learned some things as well. One of those lessons was that selling these wooden smartphone cases to retail establishments was not the way to make it happen.

The bottom line is that we were still committed to our idea, and that’s a big lesson I’ve learned in life and business. You have to commit, because indecision could have disastrous consequences. Take, for example, the time I went dirt-biking with a friend at Gorman Canyon in Northern California.

Commit Or Die

I’m a huge fan of motorcycles, so when a friend from one of my entrepreneurial groups, named Ian, asked me to go dirt-biking at Gorman Canyon, I jumped at the chance. Gorman Canyon is a beautiful, natural landscape of mountainous terrain in Northern California. I figured it would be an intense experience to go dirt-biking there, and I have never been more right about anything.

I was pretty sure I’d be able to keep up, so off we went. The weather was perfect when we got there, and we enjoyed the views of some of the most picturesque areas we had ever seen. After we had ridden around for a while, Ian stopped and said, “See that mountain ahead? We’re going to ride up that motherfucker later.”

Point-blank, I said, “Ian, there’s no way in hell I’m riding up that beast. Fuck that!”

Initially, Ian didn’t completely acknowledge my resistance and kept riding toward the mountain. It took a while to get there, but the more we rode around, the more comfortable I got. I hadn’t done any serious dirt-biking in a few years, so I was a little rusty when we first started. But by the time we got to the base of the mountain, I was feeling pretty good about my dirt-biking ability again, so I said, “Alright, I’m ready. Let’s do it.”

“Awesome, dude. You’re going to love it! Just one thing, though,” Ian said in a disturbingly nonchalant manner. “There’s one crazy turn up there. If you don’t commit to pushing hard down into that turn, you will fall off a fucking cliff and die…got it?”

I stared at him blankly for a few seconds, not knowing how to respond. He finished his weirdly motivational speech by ignoring the dumbfounded expression on my face and matter-of-factly saying, “Cool, let’s go!” Then he rode away, completely expecting me to follow.

After about fifteen to twenty seconds of pausing to fully understand what I was about to do, I decided it was now or never and hit the gas to catch up to my friend.

When we began to climb the mountain, Ian accelerated about twenty yards ahead of me. A few minutes later, his bike seemed to completely vanish from the path ahead, leaving nothing but a small trail of dust behind him.

As I rode on for another twenty-five yards or so, a wicked ninety-degree turn appeared from out of nowhere, and immediately in front of me was a few-thousand-foot drop. This was no hill I would have tumbled down and gotten a few bumps and bruises from, or maybe a broken arm or leg. This was the kind of drop where my body would have likely disintegrated upon impact, sort of like Wile E. Coyote in those old Road Runner cartoons, when he slips on a banana peel, slides off a cliff, and all you see is a tiny cloud of dust kick up from below. (Beep! Beep!)

Fortunately, I kept hearing Ian’s voice echoing in my brain: “Commit, commit, commit!” In an instant, I closed my eyes and leaned right into the turn as hard as I could. At the same time, Ian’s voice was replaced with my own: “Ben, you fucking idiot; you’re going to die now!”

When I initially opened my eyes, I wasn’t sure if I was dead, free-falling ten thousand feet and about to be dead, or in a dream where I was about to be greeted by the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. Another two to three hundred yards down the trail, I finally realized, “Holy shit! I did it! I’m alive!”

Ian and I rode for another half mile or so before we stopped to collect ourselves. I said, “I can’t believe we fucking did that. I thought I was going to die for sure.”

“I knew you would do what you had to, but what did you learn from that?” Ian asked me.

I told him, “I learned to fucking commit; it’s the only option.”

What an experience that was! It was one of those occasions that you can’t truly fathom unless you’ve actually experienced it for yourself. However, I want to take this opportunity to express to you how valuable that lesson regarding commitment has been to me. It has played out numerous times in my life since then. I’m incredibly grateful for that experience at Gorman Canyon now because, from that point on, I only go into something with all of my energy or not at all. For me, it’s everything or nothing; all-in or all-out; commit or die.

Key Takeaway #2: Whether you’re involved in personal, business, or financial relationships, you need to commit. You can’t half-ass anything and expect positive results…ever. You need to give 110 percent or nothing.

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To keep reading, pick up your copy of The World Needs Your F*cking Ideas: How to Start a Business That Will Save Our Universe by Benjamin VandenWymelenberg.