Ideas Aren’t Timestamped

How to identify good ideas, bad ideas, & ideas that you’re not sure what to do with... yet.

Ideas. Aren’t they the best? Is there a sentence as full of possibility as “I have an idea."? They are the beginning of everything.

For us creative people, ideas are the name of the game. It’s what we work in. Creative living is having an idea, make an idea happen, over and over again.

But things get messy. It’s not as simple as that in reality. Because ideas are like badly labeled seeds. You don’t always get what you’re expecting, or when you’re expecting it. It’s part of the fun.

It’s also a massive pain in the ass.

Here’s a scenario:

2 Ideas arrive on the same morning.

One that you’re not supposed to use for years

The other, you’re going to use that afternoon.

Both good ideas, intended for very different timelines. But how are we supposed to know? Sometimes we do, it’s obvious. That “idea seed” arrived with a good label. But what about when they don’t?

The first step is to figure out if they are good ideas. That’s a whole other blog post. But part of the “bad labeling” thing is that ideas can be a lot of things.

Great.
Great, but not for right now.
Great, but not for you.
Bad.
Bad, that seems good.
Ok.
Ok, but the seed of something great could be in there.
Good.
Good, but seems boring or too much work.
Lifechanging.
A distraction.
A distraction that you need.

This whole blog post could be a list of ideas. But that’s the job, sorting through ideas and then pulling them off.

The problem is that we can easily misidentify an idea, and start trying to use it in a place it doesn’t fit or at the wrong time.

This will burn us out, or depress us. It could lead us to question our intuition or talent. But it might just be you put a “good idea” in the wrong place or you weren’t ready for that idea yet.

Here are some of the signs the idea isn’t for right now:

You are forcing it.

Great ideas don’t need to be forced to work. If you feel like you’re forcing it, stop and reflect.

It’s distracting you

If it’s taking you away from work that you need to finish, that’s a distraction and it needs to wait. Or, you need to re-evaluate the work. Perhaps that previous idea has run its course. You gotta figure that out.

Honesty with yourself is essential here. Because sometimes we SHOULDN’T finish the first project. Sometimes we SHOULDN’T act on a good idea. Only you are really going to know that, and it can take some time to train our intuition to know what to look for.

We only get so much time on this planet and you have to narrow down the ideas that you’re going to spend your time on.

The flip side is that we are Creative People, we are building a body of work and you don’t have to be perfect. I think we should finish, or bring to an end point, most of our projects. You will learn something by finishing, and if you can bring it to a finishing point, it will give you a sense of closure.

Abandoning an idea is the last resort, in my opinion. I think a long list of abandoned ideas undercuts the confidence that you need to finish a great project. Finish the project, even if that means massively cutting down the scope. Finish something.

So, how do we know if an idea is for now?

And how do we get better at identifying our ideas?

Question it or let it be

Some ideas can be ruled out very quickly with a few simple questions. Get ride of those. BUT if the idea doesn’t hold up to logic, YET there is still something about it that is nagging at you. Just let it be. Make sure you have written out as many details as you have, and then put it in the drawer. It needs time.

Ideas matter /Ideas don’t matter

You have to be able to live in these two worlds. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this at length in her (life-changing) book, Big Magic. The short version is this; we need to fight for our ideas, but we also need to drop our ideas and move on better ideas. Fight for your idea, drop your idea and fight for the next one. We have to be good at pivoting and being wrong.

Figure it out fast

Control the scope of your project. Scale it down to something you can finish off quickly. Test the idea to see if its good and if it’s good for now. An idea that turns out to be a “meh” idea is still a win if you grew as a creative and if it adds to your body of work.

I’m still in the process of figuring all this out. I get it wrong all the time. But time is the key here… We are creative people, this is what we’re going to be doing for the rest of our lives.

Look at your past creative disappointments, see if there is a pattern. Then going forward in your work, look for the different clues. By noticing, and adapting we grow.

When we get good at this, we won’t need labels on our ideas, we’ll have developed our sense, applied our system… and when those things fail, we pivot.

That’s creative living. Have fun, try not to get too frustrated. hah

I’m here in the trenches of creativity along side ya.

Show up.
Do the work.

Hope this was helpful buds.

-Ryan Leacock