Overcoming the biggest impediment to creative execution

The term starting from scratch has its origin in sports talk.

Games like boxing, golf and cricket, all of which involve some sort of boundary line on the ground as part of their regulations, used scratch as the beginning of the match.

As it says in the popular eighteen hundreds cricket poem:

Ye strikers, observe when the foe shall draw nigh, mark the bowler advancing with vigilant eye, your skill all depends upon distance and sight, stand firm to your scratch, let your bat be upright.

Over the centuries, this term evolved to become more idiomatic. Soon the idea of starting from scratch meant embarking on any action or process without any prior preparation, knowledge or advantage.

Doesn’t that sound overwhelming? And expensive? And labor intensive?

Especially when it comes to the creative process of bringing ideas to form. That’s one of the biggest impediments to execution. Creators don’t want to start from scratch, so they don’t start at all.

The good news is, there’s a way to eliminate this problem. You can let your bat be upright with a vigilant eye, without feeling intimidated at the beginning of the match.

You simply need a robust arsenal of hundreds of solutions custom fit for your unique personality, value system and life situation. And when used strategically, can eliminate the need to ever start from scratch again.

Imagine the startup founder who wants to author a book to gives his company a thought leadership calling card. But since he’s never spearheaded a project like that before, it’s overwhelming to even think about, much less write the damn thing.

He has a packed schedule and limited windows throughout the week to chip away at a task of that size.

That is, unless he uses a tool like flooring, aka, corralling the entirety of a project to be viewable in a single frame on the ground. By blocking off a small, dedicated area in the back of his office to work on the book, he could leverage the persistence of information so he doesn’t have to generate energy from scratch each time he sits down to work on the book.

Coworkers could even stop by periodically throughout the day to add their ideas and give it some much needed momentum. That book could be published in a matter of months, not years.

Next let’s picture the veteran computer engineer who wants to leave the corporate world and strike out on her own as a freelancer. But she’s never worked for herself before, and it’s daunting to think about where she will obtain the resources to grow her client base from zero.

But what if the programmer learned she wasn’t really starting from nothing? What if she didn’t have to invent opportunity, but rather, recognize the resources that were already there?

The woman could employ the tool of stream stepping, aka, faithfully partnering with the existing flow of opportunities to carry her vision forward. She could ask herself a series of strategic questions:

How can you feed those who are already paying attention so that they will spread the word? How can you achieve your career goals with the network you already have?

If she physically made a list of every single person she already knew that might have a professional interest in her goals, and every single person who was already attracted to her and saw her as a resource, that client list would grow faster than she might think.

Both of these scenarios quickly went from intimidating to inspiring. Because when you learn how to use personality creativity management, there’s no such thing as starting from scratch.

Which tools will help your work advance with a vigilant eye?