Fresh ideas, don't they always happen when the environment is like a calm sea after a storm?
If you're ever in need of fresh ideas, you're better off stepping away from the problem.
In my own experience, many ideas have become redundant because I can't fully solve the equation; ideas + execution = desired reality.
There's an abyss of sorts on the execution part, you fall into an endless rabbit hole that not only changes the idea(s) but also yourself in the process and when you finally happen to reach the end of the tunnel, the experienced outcome can be totally different from the original spark that ignited everything.
I'm not overly afraid of change, I try to welcome it with open arms, so to speak.
But it doesn't take a sixth sense to realize that whenever change comes about, the perceived worst comes first before the apparent best.
I think this type of sequencing is why we often quit mid-journey and could be a characteristic of growth itself, that is the messy middle between vision and reality.
On the one hand, you have all this ideas dancing in your head, stimulating the mind to think of more possibilities, bending reality into endless what-ifs and beautiful maybes.
On the other hand however, you're just one person, with a limited amount of time to spare for bringing ideas into life, since most of your time is spent doing basic survival maintenance or rather working on staying alive.
Sometimes, life can be pictured as being dropped into a video game you didn't remember choosing, and having a sole purpose of staying alive in the game, partly because you're not sure where were you before you entered the video game and what would happen if you become "wasted" in the video game. Could there be a re-spawn?
A way I try to bridge this gap is to think of it less as an abyss to be crossed and more as a filter.
I think this reframe changes everything about how we approach our ideas.
The ideas that truly matter(those that deserve our time and energy) are the ones that can withstand the pressure of being made real. And don't crumble when they meet the harsh light of constraints, deadlines, and limited resources.
Most of our ideas, if we're honest, are just mental entertainment.
They feel good to think about, but they don't have the structural integrity to survive in the real world. And that's okay, too.
The filter isn't there to torture us, in terms of having to make trade-offs.
It's rather there to save us from wasting years on dreams that were never meant to be more than dreams.
Because the friction of execution is mostly what proves the value of an idea.
Nowadays, almost a hundred fleeting ideas can come and go in a day, but only the one with enough gravitational pull to drag you through the difficult, messy work of bringing it to life is truly worth pursuing, in my view.
The struggle itself becomes a kind of validation, since only ideas strong enough to survive the chaos of reality deserve to exist.
Another thing to also highlight is the difference between an observer and a participant.
In the world of ideas, you are an observer, passively watching possibilities unfold.
But in the world of constraints, i.e reality, you are a participant, a player in the video game.
The act of "doing" is the only way to transform a passive thought into an active, tangible thing.
In some ways, the problem we have in this era isn't just the sheer number of ideas we can have, but the radical choice we now face: which of these ideas are we brave enough to make real, knowing full well that they will change both the idea and ourselves in the process?
For me, there aren't many of those at this point in time. Need to look for more storms, so when the storm ends, fresh ideas can sprout like flowers after rain.
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.
