We kill most of our great, wonderful, creative ideas before they’re ever born.
We write them off, dismiss them out of hand, smother them…
But we can’t know if our ideas are good—if they’ll work or cause the change we seek to make in the world—until we publish them.
Only by letting our ideas engage with the market, the world, or our audience can we know if it’s good.
If you judge every idea before you try it out, you’ll never be creative.
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When you have one (or a dozen) you don’t sit on them waiting to hatch. Because they never do.
Your potential money-making, culture-changing, life-saving ideas are crops. The idea is a seed, but a seed by itself is worthless.
Unless you take action.
Till the soil; plant it in the ground; water and fertilize it every day.
You have to do something with the seed. Waiting around for it to sprout is useless.
Don’t sit on your ideas hoping they’ll hatch.
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No one ever got paid for an idea alone. Only those who came up with an idea, or took someone else’s, and acted upon it have made a difference worth anything.
“I have more respect for the fellow with a single idea who gets there than for the fellow with a thousand ideas who does nothing.”
—Thomas Edison
I have dozens of ideas pop into my head each day when I’m taking a shower, walking at the park, or driving in silence. Not one has generated anything for me or anyone else except those I showed to the world.
Better to have one idea and the will to act upon it than 1,000 ideas and procrastinate.
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You have a really good idea, an idea that people will love, that will make a difference, that will make things better. In fact, the little voice in your head continues to tell you, “This might work.” But you continue to hesitate; you still haven’t shipped. Why not?
Money.
It always come back to money…but I don’t mean money in the way you’re thinking.
You might be a freelancer, a musician, a writer, or a budding entrepreneur: you want to improve the world, and you need to eat. Essentially, you are wrestling with two competing ideas: “Will this make me money?” vs. “Will this help people?”
If you live and work by the former question, you will make very little progress. There is no way for you to know if your endeavor will generate revenue, which means you will probably wait until you are sure it will work before you act. But if you can’t be sure (and you can’t), you won’t act.
Around and around it goes.
If you are searching for “yes” to the money question, you will feel fear every time you create a new video or go to click on the checkout button of a webhosting platform. You’ll be terrified every time you pick up the phone to make a sales call or approach a new customer in a store.
If you are worried about the profit, you revert to a scarcity mindset:
“I don’t know that this article will make money, so I probably shouldn’t post it.”
“Someone else is already doing something similar; I won’t be different enough to standout and earn an income.”
“What if I spent a little money to make this happen, but I never earn it back? I’ll have wasted it!”
Is that true? What if you didn’t make any money back, but you helped someone by spending it? You gave a gift; it was charity.
You do need to eat, which might mean you need a job while you seek to serve other people. If you work to answer the question, “Will this help people?” you will find that your ideas come naturally. They will be much easier to send out into the world: you won’t hesitate, because there is much less riding on the outcome.
In fact, the outcome is practically harmless. You either end up right where you started, or you make change happen. If you only help one person, then the answer to the question is a resounding “YES!”
I think the secret is faith and the right mindset. The right mindset is seeking to help people because you want to help them, not because you want to profit from them. Ironically, if you help enough people, you will be much closer to turning a profit than the fool who is focused on it.
Seth Godin says it all the time: “Ideas that spread, win.” They do. Helping others spreads, which means it wins. If you help people, they will know who you are. If they know who you are, they will come to you for more help. They will probably tell their friends about you as well. Soon you have an audience, people who trust you because you sought to help them, not profit from them. When people trust you, you win.
Live a life of abundance and give, give, give. Have faith that if you help enough people, the money will come.
And if it never does?
Well…you still helped a lot of people.
Wheat doesn’t grow out of the ground, ready to grind into meal for the creation of bread. It comes with a bunch of extra stuff you don’t want in your loaf. You must first separate the chaff from the wheat.
The same is true with ideas: good ideas don’t just happen. If you wait to have a good idea, you will never have any ideas at all.
You won’t know the difference between a good idea and a bad idea if you have no ideas.
Ideas are simply ideas; let them flow through you, without judgement. Afterwards, you can determine the ones that might work from the ones that definitely won’t.
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