I think fear prevents us from doing many things - many incredible, many crazy things. And I don't think we should be afraid of crazy ideas.
Let me tell you a story that illustrates this perfectly.
I'm from Northeast Ohio, between Cleveland and Akron. No Cleveland professional sports team had won a championship in decades, in my entire lifetime. So when the Cavaliers won the 2016 NBA Finals, the city went crazy.
They had just finished the best regular season ever, were defending champs, and had already beaten the Cavs earlier in the playoffs.
We were down 3-1 in the Finals to the Warriors. Then we won Game 5 to make it 3-2. We pushed it to Game 7 and won the championship!
It was like a collective cloud lifted off the city. The victory gave everyone in Northeast Ohio a lot of pride.
Right after, in late May/early June, we had to come up with the theme for the annual corn maze at our family farm. We have this incredible agritourism operation - hay rides, corn mazes, one of the longest slides in America. It's a magnificent family experience.
As I brainstormed with my family, we almost instantly and unanimously decided to honor the Cavaliers and their championship somehow. We got the crazy idea to put LeBron James's face in the 7-acre corn maze - the biggest ever homage to LeBron.
Instead of "Hometown Hero" we'd put "Homegrown Hero" since he grew up 10-15 miles from our farm.
We worked with the company that helps us cut the corn. In late August, the maze started taking shape.
When we took aerial drone photos of the massive trophy and LeBron's face, it looked amazing. We snapped a pic and posted it on social media.
Within hours, the Cavs reached out wanting to share it themselves.
Then LeBron tweeted it to his tens of millions of followers, saying he and his family were honored and that they were big fans of our farm.
It was as if we had won the championship ourselves!
That was just the beginning.
We've built an incredible relationship with LeBron's team and foundations. His wife brought their kids out to the farm. We got involved with his I Promise School. Every fall hundreds of kids and families come to enjoy our one-of-a-kind experience.
All because we took action on a crazy idea.
When you have a crazy idea, don't let fear hold you back, take action on it.
You never know where it might lead.
What crazy ideas do you have? I want to hear about them, so shoot me a message or join our Facebook group. There, you'll find other crazy ambitious people who are on the same journey as you, and you never know what connections you might make!
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