Understanding the Planets - Part 3

We know there are two planets, the Inventor Planet and the Business Planet. We know there is a bridge between them designed to get you ready for what to experience when you get to the other side. But what about navigating the many roads and being able to get from place to place?

When that time comes many inventors charge off with little more than desire and a sense of what they think they know is correct. Others – well they take a Cab.

Not a Cab in the sense of a bright yellow car, but a Cab in the sense of using someone more familiar with the area to do the navigation for you. In the inventing industry those “Cabs” are the group of service providers waiting at the foot of the bridge as you step off onto this planet you know little about.

Picture this – you are on a cruise and you walk down the gang plank into a beautiful little island port. Waiting for you are 3 Taxi drivers.

You don’t know it at the time, but one will take you directly to your destination and charge you a fair price to do it. The second will take you to your destination but in a rather long rout that racks up your bill a bit. He’s not directly stealing from you, but he knows you don’t have a good sense of where you are or where you are going so he bumps it a bit for his own advantage.  The third Taxi, well he’s fully aware you are clueless about where you are and how to get where you’re going. So he promptly drives you around the island twelve times only to drop you off very close to where you started.

How do we keep this from happening? It’s simple – we get a map of the island before we get off the boat and use it to understand where we are and where we are going. If you had a map in the third Taxi you would have seen very quickly what the driver was doing.  The same could be said for Taxi number one. A map would have shown you very quickly that you could trust this driver and each time you needed a ride from that point on you would have looked for him.

Working with service providers in the inventing industry is really no different. There are all three types of “Taxies” ready to greet you when you walk off that bridge onto the business planet – and with little effort and a few conversations they will know if you are holding a “map” of the process.

Don’t get me wrong, its fine to use service providers. Just understand while many are like Cab number one, there are some like Cabs two and three. You don’t know when you get in what Cab you have, but if you have done your homework and figured out where you need to be going and what the stops are along the way, you will quickly be able to tell which Cab you stepped into and if you should take the ride, or get out before you spend all your money.