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The Shiny New Thing Syndrome: When It’s Fun for a Day and Okay for a Week . . . But Sucks for a Lifetime

NEW THINGS ARE FUN. I personally love shiny new things and am easily amused by them. Whether it is a new food product, television show, restaurant, or shoe style, I am intrigued because “new” is fun.

I am clearly not the only one that shares this sentiment. A large part of the U.S. economy is built upon selling us things that we don’t need, but that we really want, mostly because they are new. Moreover, new is exciting. Think about those advertising pitches that talk about “new” (usually with a big yellow sunburst around the proclamation of its newness). Now with new extra-stain removal power! Now with a new removable pouch! Now in a new, leak-proof container! New colors now available! We consumers love new, new, new!

It is fun to turn your attention to something new. Think of what a great feeling it is to get a new car. If you get a new house, have a new baby, or join a new religion, you may even throw yourself a party. You love to tell your friends about your latest new phone-computer-bike-television-toy-whatever. New things prevent you from having to rehash the same old stories over and over.

New versus Commitment

Liking new things isn’t bad except when you are trying to make a commitment. There are people who take commitment very seriously, and then there is someone like Larry King, who has been married eight times to seven different women. I am not judging; you can feel whatever way you want about commitment. I personally hate commitment in a lot of areas in my life. I currently don’t have a pet or child—or even a plant—because I don’t want to make the commitment to take care of something living. However, I am personally committed to making good when I give my word on something. If I am putting my own money and time at risk, you can be sure that I am committed 100 percent. If you aren’t so good about professional- or work-related commitments in your life, you’re going to want to think long and hard about an entrepreneurship commitment, as it is a costly commitment to abandon.

Have you ever watched someone do something that he is really good at and thought that it looked easy? It was new and intriguing. Maybe you saw two dancers perform a tango, a golf pro play a round of golf, or a pastry chef make an elaborate dessert? You got so excited by it that you wanted to do it, too! Then, you tried it out and instead of it being exciting because it was new, it frustrated you because you couldn’t do it at all.

You thought it was going to be easy. You invested in dance shoes, golf clubs, or a set of All-Clad cookware to pursue this new endeavor. However, it wasn’t easy and now you are pissed off because you just wasted money on new shoes, clubs, or pots and pans. The problem was that you hadn’t given one iota of thought to the fact that the reason it looked easy for the others is that they had the experience; they spent a lifetime (or a good part of their lifetime) perfecting their skill and then continually using it, practicing it, and refining it. Maybe instead of putting in the time to improve, you decided that this new thing was stupid and turned your attention to another new thing. If you quit, your risk was pretty low—the cost of the clubs or the cookware wasn’t going to send you into bankruptcy. However, if that “something” you tried had been a new business, quitting would have a very high price tag.

If you are someone who is easily intoxicated by a new idea, business concept, or business model, but you have the attention span of a fly, then you are going to have a hard time following through and making your business a success. Sometimes a new business model seems exhilarating. It is new, shiny, and fun, and you are pumped about it. You tell a few people about it and you are really convinced that you are going to have the best business ever. So, you do some research and as you are learning more about the industry, you start thinking about all of the work that is required to make this cool new thing a reality. Then it becomes less exciting. It is still cool and still new, but it isn’t quite as cool as it was when it was brand-new. As more time goes by and you think about spending your life (or even the next five years) focused on this one thing—and I do mean focused, as all of your efforts are going to be focused on this business—then the once-shiny fun thing starts to look like torture.

The business model may go from brilliant to stupid in your mind, and you are wrestling with what to do when—ta da!—another new business concept is presented to you. This one is even better than the last (of course it is—it is new), and therefore business idea number one is abandoned for business idea number two.

I spoke to one aspiring entrepreneur recently who was interested in opening a Subway restaurant franchise. She didn’t have any expertise in the restaurant industry, but she was really jazzed to sell $5 foot-longs to every hungry customer in her city. I encouraged her (as I do with many entrepreneurs without industry experience) to take a job on nights and weekends at a Subway to see what it was like to be in that environment as a workplace. I can tell you that after a few months when the idea was no longer shiny and new, submarine sandwiches weren’t so appealing anymore and she was thrilled that she didn’t spend the more than a hundred grand in expenses of starting a franchise before taking the time to check it out. She saved herself a whole lot of money and has refocused her thinking about her career.

If you are the type of person who is always looking to the next new thing, entrepreneurship is not for you. I am not talking about being intrigued and focused on “new” in terms of producing new ideas for an existing business, such as new approaches to customer service, new features for existing products, or improvements to your existing technology. I am talking about “Business Attention Deficit Disorder” (which could be called BADD, as it is definitely bad for business), a condition in which you can’t commit to one business when presented with the newness of something else.

Business success requires focus and dedication on a single path for a long period of time. The excitement factor should increase as you achieve milestones, not decrease as the newness wears off. If you don’t like commitments, or if you are hyperactive and easily distracted by the possibility of “something better”—beware! It is perfectly okay for you to be obsessed with the new, just not if you intend to run a business, because you will always be wondering what else is out there.

EXERCISE 10

TARGET FOCUS—PERSONALITY:

Are You in It for the Long Haul?

1. Write down on a piece of paper any projects that you have started in the past five years that you have stopped, quit, or abandoned before finishing.
2. For each project, ask yourself why you stopped and write down that reason. Some potential reasons could be because:
   • It was too hard.
   • You got bored or lost interest.
   • Other things became bigger priorities.
3. Now, add to the list any skills, learning processes, or activities you have tried that you thought were going to be easy but were much harder than you expected.
4. For each of those, write what you did once you encountered the difficulty (continued on, gave up, cried for three months straight, etc.).
5. Under your list, write down whether you relate a lot, a little, or not at all with the following statements:
   • I often don’t follow through on promises.
   • I get bored with projects easily.
   • I am always seeking the next big challenge.
   • I like learning something new more than doing something repetitively.
   • I love shiny new things.
   • Old things don’t hold my interest.

Use your answers to items one through four, plus any “a lot” or “a little” answers to item five to assess whether you have a pattern of discontinuing projects or have difficulty making commitments. If so, it’s no big deal (unless, of course, you invest in a business that you abandon part of the way through). Reflect on whether, given your reasons for stopping other projects, you may likely be in the same situation with a business. If so, you should either reconsider the business route altogether or initiate a jobbie on a very small scale to see if you can maintain interest. Think about whether there is a way that you can make a commitment to small milestones in starting your business before investing heavily in it. If so, what can you do to make sure that you will be in it for the long haul?