However wonderful your idea is, it’s not a career or business opportunity until you’re able tick off a series of questions.

(For this lesson you can save your notes using Exercise File 4).

To do this we’ll be largely using the Japanese concept of Ikigai, which translates as ”Reason for being”.

This will evaluate your idea based on what you love. What you’re good at. And what you can be paid for.

(We’ve already discussed what the world needs in the previous lesson).

We would suggest a useful exercise to do at this point is the Myers-Briggs personality test. You can find the link to that in your Tools folder.

This exercise will not only help you confirm to what extent your purpose and personality are in alignment, but the information here will also help you when developing your personal brand later on.

The personality test scores you based on each side of the psychological and emotional spectrum. The criteria largely focus on:

Mind: i.e. Are you Introverted or Extroverted

Energy: Are you Structured (i.e. have an ‘employee’ mindset) or Intuitive (have an ‘entrepreneurial’ mindset)

Nature: Are you a Thinker (i.e. you tend to make decisions based on reason and logic) or a Feeler (i.e. emotions play a large factor in how you make decisions)

And finally Tactics: Which determines to what extent you are a Prospector or a Judge

The best thing to do is to just take the test and find out which personality type you are. 

We would recommend that you copy and paste what you think to be the best nuggets of information as bullet points from the Introduction, Strength and Weaknesses, Career Paths, and Conclusion sections of the website into Exercise File 4.

And then try and revamp that info into your own words.

The website has a wealth of useful information, which you can use as a good starting point to help you identify more about your personality, your strengths, and what type of work might suit you best. 

What you’ll also find is that the insights you gain from this exercise will also help you when crafting your elevator pitch, which you'll probably quite frequently use in emails, investment pitches, and marketing materials. 

Once you’ve done this you can then evaluate to what extent the results from the test match up with your purpose. You can give yourself a score from 1 – 10 to help you evaluate this.

Now ask yourself to what extent do you think your idea will keep you motivated?

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, famous for his work as an existential philosopher, says that “when we resist being who we’re meant to be we cause ourselves the most pain, often ending up ill both mentally and physically and burnt out from the effort of fighting our own authentic self, and living meaningless lives”.

So, the first question you want to be asking yourself is, how passionate are you about your idea? Will your idea keep you motivated in the long run?

The thing about your career that you need to know is that it will be incredibly intense. 

It will most likely require the large bulk of your focus and time. There will be lots of ups and downs along the way, so if you want to be successful you really want to be choosing something that you love and will become naturally obsessed with.

If you’re obsessed with the problem that you’re trying to solve and it really aligns with your values of what you want to achieve in life, then that will be the thing that drives you forward.

You can give yourself a score from 1 – 10 to help you evaluate this.

The second step to helping you evaluate your idea is to assess to what extent do you have the technical skills and knowledge required for this type of work?

Again using Exercise File 4 make a quick list of the skills and knowledge that you think you’ll need in order to turn this idea into reality.

And then analyse what level you currently possess those skills and knowledge.

You can then give yourself a score from 1 – 10 for each of the relevant skills that you need in order to fulfill your mission.

If you assess that you have less than 70% of the skills and knowledge required it means either this idea is not for you, or you need to be able to set aside some extra time to address this, which is not a huge problem as we’ll be discussing how you can go about developing your skills and knowledge later on.

This would most likely involve devoting further time to private study and product development, but you could potentially also outsource an external freelancer to help you fill any skills gaps too.

The third step is to assess how realistic is it to turn your idea into reality.

Firstly, do you have enough money to start the idea?

How much money do you think you might need? (Assuming you won’t make any profit in your first year).

Secondly, how quickly and easily can your product or service be developed and then distributed?

Again score yourself here from 1 – 10 for this.

Probably the most important question you then need to ask yourself is what potential does your idea have in order to make money.

We will be discussing budgeting in more detail later in the course but at this point you may want to think about your monetisation strategy.

• Will you be promoting affiliate products (as we’ll discuss in Lesson 20)
• Will you be creating a B2C product (such as an online course or app as we’ll discuss in Lesson 21)
• Or will you be setting up your own freelance B2B service (as we’ll discuss in Lesson 22)

You will also want to estimate:

• How much could you sell your product or service per unit? 
• What is the break-even number so you know how many units you need to sell to break even? 
• What would be your annual financial goal and how likely is it that you can hit that goal?

Taking a look at these numbers will tell you if this is an actual business opportunity.

Again score yourself here from 1 – 10 for this.

Finally, how lucrative is the market or industry you’re selling to?

What’s the market size? (You can use the Facebook Insights tool as discussed in Lesson 10 to help with this)

Are you selling directly to people (B2C) or businesses (B2B)? Or perhaps both? If you are able to develop a business model that can target both then that’s better.

Are you selling locally or globally? If it’s a global audience again that’s better too.

And how unique is your idea? 

Again score yourself here from 1 – 10 for each of these questions.

By the end of this exercise, you should be able to total up your overall score, and if on average you’ve scored more than 70% then it’s a strong indication that you’re onto a winning idea.

If not, then you may need to go back to lesson 2 and come up with a new idea.