Why You Need To Act On Your Ideas NOW
There are countless people who are paralysed by one strange feeling: They have “so many ideas” that they can’t pick one and stick to it.
They also don’t want to try anything that isn’t their “great idea” because they know that there’s a better idea within them.
Or, they don’t act because they’ve got an idea that’s so good that it’ll wait until tomorrow.
Pretty much everyone wants to succeed in life on their own terms… few people ever do.
If you’re the type of person that reads the above and says, “Yeah, I’m going to be one of the ones that succeeds in the future!” then this article is definitely for you.
The Value Of An Unrealised Idea Is Zero
There are currently three-hundred and fifty-billion people sat at home with a great idea in their head.
If you asked a few random people on the street whether they’ve ever had a great business idea on the street, 90% of them would say they had, but they’d have some outside factor that’d always stopped them from making that idea reality.
Some of those reasons for not pursuing an idea are solid reasons. I’m not going to act like a life coach and say “Everyone can do it if they just believe!” or whatever idiot thing those guys say. Some of the reasons people give are, however, merely excuses. If there’s something holding you back, you’ll need to figure that one out. However, one thing is true of everyone.
The ideas in your head are all worth exactly the same: precisely zero.
If some hypothetical guy worked out a legitimate cure for aging whilst lounging on a beach, but then got distracted by a hot girl in a bikini or a Komodo dragon running towards him, that world-changing revelation would be worth absolutely nothing.
Your ideas, left unrealised, are going to be replaced by something else in your life. They might kick around in your mind for a while, but without action, they are worth exactly the same as the decision of what to eat for breakfast the next day.
Is it time to act? Probably. Or you could read on.
Ideas Are Subject To Inflation
There’s a famous phrase; “Don’t reinvent the wheel.”
The world turns pretty quickly. One thing remains the same though; there are always going to be people who say, “I wish I’d have thought of that first!”
Ideas are subject to inflation more so than any other currency. I don’t know all that much about finance, but let’s say the rate of inflation for the change in your pocket is 2% a year.
So if you just leave that change in your pocket, you effectively lose two pence for every pound, every year. (Forgive my simplifications here… nerds.)
Let’s say though, that sometime in 2008 you had an idea to crowdsource (anything) carpooling.
You essentially thought of Uber before it existed.
That idea was worth potentially billions in 2008.
If you woke up in 2016 and had the same idea… it’s a different story.
Obviously, nobody here is going for the billionaire VC thing (if so, I imagine there are better people to follow, but feel free to hire me in the future,) but the idea inflation principle applies at all levels.
There are businesses popping up every day in the market you want to conquer. There are hardworking people dedicating more of their lives to your hobbies than you are.
The novel ideas you have today, if acted upon today, are worth great things.
Acted upon tomorrow, they’re worth slightly less.
Wait… did someone say, “acted upon”?
Your Great Idea Needs To Be Built Like A Sword In A Forge
We’ve established that ideas are worth absolutely nothing if not acted upon. Yet we’ve also discovered that ideas are worth less tomorrow than they are today. How can both be true?
In terms of a physics analogy, an idea is a store of potential energy. When you have an idea, you’re turning potential energy into kinetic energy. That’s our analogy.
Even if you have the best idea in the world, it’s going to need work. Maybe you’ve got a tech business that has higher computing requirements than you anticipate. Maybe your charitable endeavour to fix Africa’s drought situation ends up with a single rusty pipe in the Sahara. Or, perhaps your new drone prototype ends up crashing into the side of your house before catching fire.
Those things are part of the process, though hopefully not in a literal sense. It’s the adaptation to errors which make an idea strong.
Your idea, as good as it might be to start, needs to grow.
Every Great Idea Is Like A Tree – Acorns Aren’t 50 Feet Tall
Let’s add all of the above analogies, metaphors and other assorted comparisons and throw them in the cauldron with a final further one: Your idea is a seed.
Seeds need time to grow. They need sustenance to help them grow, and they need resistance in order to become resilient.
None of this can happen if the seed is left in a vacuum.
The same is true of ideas. Left alone, bouncing around your head, they’ll remain weird mental artefacts of no consequence.
However, if you feed them with action, forge them through experience and subject them to things that test them, you’ll find that they can be something huge and awesome.