I deal with people professionally most of the time who want to make money.

That's it pure and simple. Sometimes they want to do something on the way to that. But ultimately most of them want to get the big score.

The problem is that almost all of them don't want to do the hard yards to get there. Its like someone once told me, "Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die to get there".

I learned a long time ago in a past life in the music business that if you want to have a hit record, you have to understand the ecosystem. It is not enough to have a song that you think is a hit, or a record that you think everyone should buy. You need to think about who is the gatekeeper to expose your song to the masses. That is why radio was so important then, and why you needed to understand what the radio format was to the nth detail so that you could deliver a record that fit that format without sounding like it was a clone of everything else.

The Internet is supposed to have changed everything, and it has, but in ways that are more subtle than most people understand. Just putting your song online does not give it instant visibility to masses of punters - in fact busking on a downtown street during peak hour probably exposes your material more. It is now a more complex marketplace with a lot more possibilities.

Similarly inventing something that is cool doesn't give you instant success. You have to get it adopted by people. And that means exposing it in the right venues at the right time in the right way.

There is no easy way to do this. But the thing that absolutely has to be done is to begin.

The path to writing a great book, is to write something and to get published. It all starts with words on a page that you can edit.

The path to commercializing an invention starts with a patent. It is an expensive process. So you don't want to be doing too much of it without understanding whether your expenses are going to be an investment or just throwing money away.

How do you get started on figuring out whether your invention is going to be valuable?

You have to learn to put in place a rigorous discipline that will enable you to understand the market as it stands now, the cost factors, the competition, and a host of other things. You have to understand the business ecosystem that exists now. There are processes for doing this in most large corporations. They have resources and they have disciplines. If you don't you have to figure out how to create something similar that will give you that objective view that will help you save money.

But that is not all.

You have to put in place a structure that will enable you to learn. I deal with a lot of people nowadays who are from the academic world - really intelligent, creative people. Just like a lot of the songwriters and musicians I dealt with when I was in the music business. And the problems are very similar. An inability to understand that you have to put some very simple building blocks in place to get started....

You need to get advisors whose advice is not going to be what you want to hear. And then you need to be prepared to take that advice. And that is probably the hardest thing for most people to deal with....

Most people just want to hear that they are brilliant, and that the world should beat a path to their door. Reality is actually quite different.

You need to develop a sense of pragmatism if you want to make money out of your invention. You need to understand that it is going to cost you time and money to get to success. In every field of endeavor the overnight sensation only appears after years of time and effort and cash being invested.

Start now. Put words on a page. Build a blog that enables you to share some of your ideas. Communicate with people who have been there before. Edit the words on the page. Get feedback...

It all takes time...