Recently listening to Mark Zuckerberg at the Harvard commencement speech I had my Eureka moment on a comment he made. In fact it is kind of paradoxical that the comment was a complete opposite of the moment I experienced ! He said “The idea of a single Eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate because we feel we haven’t had ours yet and it prevents people with seeds of good ideas ever from getting started in the first place!”

The more I lived with this comment the more it made me think about the impact of this insight. Its not that we haven’t heard this before, I remember reading this one of the Nolan Bushnell’s (founder of Atari) article where he said “Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference“. Yet everyday we have a shower (I hope !), we have ideas (for sure) and we get out and forget about them even before we get to the breakfast table cause it didn’t have the background music with bubble on our head screaming “Eureka !”

Look around and you realise most of the great organisations or business leaders we love and respect were not the ones that started with a “Eureka” but were the ones that needed persistence, perseverance and most of all conviction. Almost all of them got challenged and stood at the point of choice where there was an easy option and the one they believed in ! Life isn’t easy…no one ever told us that from Jesus to Mohammed to Ram to Budha. Its the quest of purpose that makes it worth it ! Yet, everyday we are waking up waiting for the one Eureka moment that would change our lives.

Everyday at work we have several ideas of doing things differently (read innovation) and then we let it slip in the name of culture. Oh ! This won’t work here. If I suggested this, no one would even buy in ! If I put this on the table, I will have to work on it as well, often without support !

We work specifically with Sales professionals and in every workshop I hear few of them come to me and say “ what if I proposed like this” or “what if I walked out of this deal” and I struggle to give them a standard response but for “it depends on you” or “go ahead try it, you have nothing to lose”.

I am going to sum this up with another insight from Mark Zuckerberg speech where he says “a change in the world that seems so clear that you are sure someone is going to do it”. You just don’t realise that someone could be you.

So lets stop waiting for the “Eureka” moment and build a participative ethos around us where we can find each other with our purpose and with persistence and conviction deliver extraordinary results !