Ideas aren't scarce

There will always be more. (Image by Couleur)

When I was a kid, I hung onto things. Candies, stickers, little soaps, fancy erasers and pencils, personalized stationery — instead of consuming them or using them up, I would hoard them and relish the perfection of their untouched, unblemished potential. More often than not, they’d be tossed or lost before I did anything with them.

It became the same with ideas. Rather than create the drawing, song, poem, story, or business offering, I would collect ideas for someday. And like my childhood collections, these would languish, unloved, in notebooks and on recordings until they were lost or forgotten.

I’ve come to realize, however, that ideas are a renewable resource. Like rosebushes, they bloom more when you prune them back. Cutting the flowers just leads to more flowers. Use the ideas you’ve got and you will discover more. Ideas aren’t scarce, and they aren’t precious.

It’s tempting to save and savor your best ideas, waiting for that perfect time when you have all the tools to bring them to life in a way that befits their magic. But the ideal is just that — it exists only as an idea, not in the real world. Part of creating something is to accept that it will have flaws compared to the version in your head, no matter how professional your execution. That’s not a good enough reason to leave your ideas alone to incubate, though.

There are meany benefits of developing ideas from concept into reality: You get better at doing whatever you’re doing (for instance, designing and building furniture); you attract an audience for your work (because it’s not just in your head anymore); you discover the satisfaction of making something (or making something happen); and you make the world a better, richer place.

In addition to all of these things, you also generate more ideas. You will not run out. Since I began publishing articles on a daily basis nine months ago, I now have more ideas for articles, not fewer. I may be “using up” the ideas I started with, but I’m finding more all the time.

I can be hard to let go of the instinct to protect that shining, magical idea that arrived so mysteriously and shows so much promise. It seems fragile and private. It’s not. There are more where that came from, and the best way to attract them is to cultivate the ones you’ve got.