Friday, May 24, 2013

Experiment

How do you know whether an idea is stupid or not if you don’t act on it and see what happens?

Ideas have always caused me problems. I have lots of them. Some may even be good. Until a few years ago, I wasn’t writing any of them down. Something would come to me, I’d spend a minute or two congratulating myself for potentially shining my brilliance on humanity, and then the thought would pass on through, never to be heard from again.

Then, through a combination of technology—Siri plus Evernote on my iPhone—and the obvious practice of carrying a notebook everywhere I go, I enabled myself to capture all these ideas as soon as they materialized.

You’d think this would’ve solved the idea problem by now, but it hasn’t. This is because I don’t act on any of these things—thinking, in retrospect, that they’re too stupid to go anywhere. That’s the common theme here—that idea of just letting things rot. I’m nothing more than a list maker. I make lists. But what good is a giant to-do list if you’re not planning on doing any of it?

I’m writing this post because I had an idea last week that I’d really like to try. I should probably just go ahead and do it, but I’m also trying to figure out why I have such a hard time pulling the trigger on so many things—so I’m both analyzing this little character flaw and issuing a disclaimer, of sorts, regarding what I’m planning on doing here next week.

Saying all this in public is also a way to leverage myself into doing something about it—although we all know I’m full of shit when I claim I’m going to do anything on this site. I mean, how many “comebacks” can one guy claim he’s about to make? This time, however, I want to see what happens when I step up and take action on one of these random ideas. In keeping with this week’s theme, this might be a good habit to adopt.


Anyway, discipline week continues. Stay tuned, I guess.