#firstfollower – Lykle de Vries

30 Ideas, it’s just too much. For me, at least.

So, here I am. I guess I have to own up to not completely following through on an inspiring idea. Remember when I announced to take part in Andrew Wicklanders 30 Day First Follower project? Well, I only got as far as reviewing Andrew Dubbers second idea before being drawn into a whirlwind of activities for De Ondernemers and New Music Labs. Alas, priorities took over…

I just emailed Andrew Wicklander a sort of apology for falling of the grid, and thought I would share my thoughts here as well. Because it helped me (again) in getting more insight in how my minds works. Perhaps you might find these ‘revelations’ interesting:

30 Ideas is a lot. Especially if they’re pretty decent or even very good ideas. Just processing them, considering their impact, appeal etc. was more time- and attention consuming than I thought.
The end result: I did not even get round to considering all ideas, so I would not know if there is one that truly excites me 🙁
There is only so much I can do to help. I will not commit to learning how to code, for instance, like Andrew Wicklander did when he selected the idea of the Numberless Calendar to execute. (well done!, Real impressive decision, perhaps even more important than the First Follower idea), but just blogging or whipping out a WordPress-site only goes so far… This made me hesitant in responding as well.
I was a lot more busy with projects for my companies than I expected, which is extremely good news (since my priority is making those companies work), but also reduced my involvement in the project.

So, the initial enthusiasm not withstanding, I failed in this project. As in: I did not contribute to the actual realization of the selected idea. I kind of set the rules for that myself, when I worte:

First off: I feel lucky to spend most of my time on stuff that I already am excited about doing. So it really needs to tickle me in certain places first to get me going at all;
Secondly: I need to feel I can contribute. So it needs to match one or more of my capabilites I feel good about.
Third: I need to believe in the idea enough to set aside a sufficiently big piece of my mind and time to execute

This experience has added to this initial set of checks. It has added the notion that:

Being excited and inspired only gets you started;
Unless you really get ‘hooked’ on an idea, it will just hover in your neighborhood;
To commit to an idea, you need to invest. Best way: utilize the idea to learn yourself a new trick, like programming.

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Review of Idea 02: My Radio Alerts

As I mentioned yesterday, I am part of a crew that will take a look at each of Andrew Dubbers’ 30 Ideas and hopefully pick one out that we will then execute and implement in 30 days.

Andrew’s second idea is called My Radio Alerts and has a lot of appeal to me. Here are the things I like about it:

It brings more information my way. I hardly ever listen to the readio these days, this idea might just re-open that information channel for me
It also allows me to strongly filter that information: I only get alerts for the information that I am interested in.
It offers some leverage for the ‘old radio industry’ by opening up their content to more listeners. Which might make it more likely that they would support the concept.

I also see some challenges:

I would rather not be alerted to text in commercials, so they need to be filtered out first.
It needs a ‘relevance filter’. Why? With Google Alerts, it is easy for me to scan through the linked information because it is tekst-based and readable. With audio, it takes more effort to listen through attentively and once I discover the audio-segment to be of low information value, I have already wasted my time listening. If a term I’m interested in is only loosely referenced during chit-chat, I don’t want to be alerted.
Copyrights need to be cleared. Andrew did mention the 7 days Listen Again service of the BBC, but something similar might not exist (yet) for other radio stations

Are there bigger opportunities?

This will add some more ‘social’ statistics to information, that we could -for instance- add to our new Tribe Monitor (a New Music Labs service) to expand on the amount of detail that we offer to our users. Not just airplay, but also ‘talk-about-you’.
Aggregating these alerts, it is easy to identify actual trending topics for radio stations, which might be of interest to a number of parties willing to pay for that information

Just my two cents. Let’s see how it goes down in the Ideals Project Group.

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Having ideas does not equal executing them

Derek Sivers blogged about the Guy Starts Dance Party video six months earlier, and after clever comments on that post, was inspired to turn it into an inspiring TED Talk about Leadership:

Derek: it is about the First Follower

It is not about the guy dancing alone, he’s just someone with a silly idea. It is about the first person to join the dance next. By doing so, the silly initiative turns into something that apparently is not just a party in one head. Someone said to Derek he should write a book about that, and he then handed it over to all of us.

Andrew: I’ll follow by doing

My friend Andrew Dubber picked up on Derek’s thoughts and gave it a bit of a twist by announcing that he would release 30 ideas to the world, free for all of us to consider and (if we liked any of them) execute.

Another Andrew: I’ll follow by helping to execute

Another Andrew then pledged to help organize whoever wanted to take part in all of this, under the banner of Project Idealism. And I joined.

Me: part of the cult?

So here we are, and Andrew Dubber just released the first of 30 ideas: Keymash. For me to get excited and dive into the execution, it needs to be a special idea.

First off: I feel lucky to spend most of my time on stuff that I already am excited about doing. So it really needs to tickle me in certain places first to get me going at all;
Secondly: I need to feel I can contribute. So it needs to match one or more of my capabilites I feel good about.
Third: I need to believe in the idea enough to set aside a sufficiently big piece of my mind and time to execute

I like it idea number 1, Keymash, but have to say it does not match readily with the stuff I am currently working on and interested in. So I’ll pass on this one. Luckily, there’s 29 more to come!

Join Derek, Andrew, Andrew and me if you want

If you like the thinking behind all of these, please consider joining the initiative and help turn a great idea into concrete action!

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