We are living in a time when market is saturated with various types of creative ideas and innovations. Everybody is creating something and obviously it is a good point. Moreover, now a days creating something is an essential for survival. But every creation does not sustain as we want it to. The reason is simple and that is-mediocrity. Everybody is creating something that is average. Truth is that, the average would not be in market for long time. Something extraordinary will sweep it away from the scene.
In a market where idea is not a big deal and creation is saturated, the only way to survive is to create something that "drops someone’s jaw". The reason why most people cannot create something jaw dropping is that, "we want to be everything to everybody and we want to do it now." According to the writer and cartoonist Huge Macleod, "doing something worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what separates successful people and failed people are time, effort and stamina."
Fortunately, most of us cannot wait much longer, or cannot resist our instant gratification. Time is a factor and it adds different flavor to things. The amount of time you put behind an idea, initiative, or work defines the fate of that particular idea or initiative. One cannot create something extraordinary just by doing it tentatively; rather it takes time, experience and great deal of effort and passion. The fact is that, most people are unwilling to put unnecessary amount of raw materials to make something great.
Why most people create something average instead of something insanely great? Is it because that they are not talented, passionate, or capable enough? The answer is none of these.
Before, knowing how to create something great we need to know to what hinders the process of creating something great. Here goes some of them:
Multitasking: We love multitasking. Even I saw some CVs where people mentioned themselves as capable of multi-tasking. I don't know what did they meant by multitasking but to me it means checking your face-book in every minutes when writing a blog post! Stop multitasking. Although, we think we perform better when we do lots of tasks at a time. However, research finding tells different tale, when we multitask we perform poorly and it would take less energy to
accomplish the entire task when it takes to accomplish one task when we work on more than one task at a time.
To be everything to everybody: It's impossible, though we cannot help ourselves. We tend to be all things at a time. In creating a product we like to ensure that, it'll be less costly, minimum price, high quality, popular and so on. At the end we make a "nothing".
Creating only for the sake of creation: Absence of purpose leads us nowhere. Sometimes we create things just for the sake of creating, no other reason. And quantity becomes the priority over quality. When you focus on quantity over quality, it sucks.
Inability to being different: To be different is not easy to do. It takes gut. Everybody cannot be different. Because, if you create something different, you would be rejected, most of the time. People will mock you, criticize you and underestimate your effort. Creating something different has huge risk that refrain people from doing so. To be normal and with the existing system we create something that is average, that people accept and forget.
Due to increasing easy access to resources everybody is creating something. Moreover, with the advantage of social media, like, facebook, twitter, it's becoming easier to promote any idea, good or worse. However, no extend of promotion can save an average idea. To live you need to create something that is extraordinary. Add a wow factor to you work or it will fade away.
