Preserving Your Inspiration

Over the holidays, I re-read The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It's a wonderful book, and I'd recommend it to anyone, but I'd especially recommend it to leaders, business owners, and creatives; meaning, everyone reading this post, including you.

I've read it a few times, and with the huge number of great books out there, it's probably silly to revisit something a second time, let alone a third or fourth. But the older I get, the more I find myself drawn to going deeper, not wider, and in fact, Naval writes about his own practice of re-reading.

There's always something new to learn from what moves us.

In any case, this time around, I was struck by a quote Naval attributes to Babak Nivi, his co-founder at AngelList:

"Inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately."

I love this idea.

Do you know that feeling? You wake the first thing in the morning, or maybe in the middle of the night, with a great idea? Maybe the solution to a problem that's been holding you up, or the theme of a new blog post, or how to craft a pitch to a new client.

It's just a seed of thing, your idea, but you can feel the potential almost bursting from it. But you have to do tasks X, Y, and Z, so you put your idea aside, and when you come back to it ... well, it doesn't seem that special at all. Or maybe you can't even find it.

In December, I shared the Ariadne Strategy Framework. I'd been developing the ideas for months, testing them in planning sessions and refining them with clients.

I was pleased by the response to December's announcement. Many of you wrote back, and a few of you reached out to talk about your own strategic planning challenges. As I responded, I felt inspiration growing

I wasn't planning to publish an ebook yet; as a new, growing company, there's no shortage of things on the to-do board! Oh my, is the list long.

But this kept pulling at my pant leg, so over the holidays and into January, I relented. I wrote out the full framework, with every layer, every diagnostic question, and every connection between identity, focus, and execution that I've been helping organizations work through for the past 30 years. And now it's here, for you, to download for free. Hooray!

Here's what I know about inspiration: you don't preserve it by protecting it. You preserve it by putting it into the world. The idea that felt alive in December would have felt stale by March if I'd waited for the "right time."

There is no right time. There's only the moment when your enthusiasm is there.

It's too late to wait for everything else to align, for an open day to appear on your calendar, or for the task list to thin out a bit. When you get excited? That's the time to move. And maybe when we move, we help everything else align, too.

The result in this case is Setting Better Strategy, a free 27-page guide to the Ariadne Strategy Framework, full of practical questions and tips you can use to help your team build an inspiring strategic plan they'll actually understand and follow.

[Download Setting Better Strategy →]

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