Every week I get a phone call or request to meet from an entrepreneur with a big idea. I am all too familiar with that uneasy feeling you have when an idea takes over your brain. You start to feel like you are a slave to the idea, that the implementation is inevitable. You feel burdened with the realization of the idea. You have to do it.

The problem is, ideas truly are inevitable. In fact, that’s WHY people are so passionate about their ideas. they think because it is inevitable – that THEY have to be the one to do it. Our brains are part of a biological, social, and technical evolutionary system that naturally removes in-efficiencies and synthesizes new stuff. Most are bad ideas that don’t survive, many are good ideas whose time has not come, and a few are good ideas that explode. It is easy to under-estimate the passion required to bring even the best (most-inevitable) idea to fruition.

I’m writing this for my own benefit. Ideas are inevitable, timing is critical, and execution makes all the difference. I want to be better at identifying ideas that just need execution, and be better at executing them.

Say you invented a better weight loss pill. One pill a day and you never put on weight. How will people find out about it? How will you get them to trust you enough to buy it? How will you fund your first batch of it, get it approved for market, differentiate it from your competitors? “One person will be so impressed that word of it will spread and then it will be on Oprah” is not a good answer.

Entrepreneurship is about partnerships. Creating value for everyone involved. That’s the execution of an idea. Ideas are inevitable, but they don’t come to fruition automatically.