Station 10: Nurturing
Experience: Tenderness | Task: Protect | Reward: Maturity
Get big quietly, so you don’t tip off potential competitors.
Station 10: Nurturing
Now you're in the final quarter, Cultivation. This is where the physical work occurs, where you begin to bring your idea into form, where the product is refined and made ready for the market. Station 10 is the first response to the new thing, and your job here is to protect it, to develop it in secret. In a business, this keeps the advantage in your court; in a personal project, it keeps you from embarrassing yourself. But you also hav to work with your own expectations to allow it to mature.
Application
Questions
- What kind of growth needs to occur?
- What does it look like to nurture the New Thing now?
- What advantages might you gain by giving the New Thing time to develop before you announce it?
- How will you know when it is mature?
Exercise
- Don’t expect too much too soon. Protect your fledgling products, and give them space to develop. This is a delicate time in the process. If your own ambition or fear leads you to judge your result or push it too quickly, it will not reach its potential.
- Somewhere between speedy implementation and perpetual perfectionism lies the development sweet spot. List the characteristics of all three of these states. What are the best and worst case scenarios of each?
Actions/Homework
- What are the leaders in your domain? Who are your peers in your market? Research your competition, the trendsetters, the thought leaders in your industry and others for how they handle this phase of the process.
- Make an honest assessment of what remains to be done at this stage.
Accountability
Check in with your Facebook community or your accountability partner.
Measure your Learning
When you measure where you are today against your peers in the industry, what is the gap you're about to step into?