why having more ideas stops you making progress

The racing mind is one that keeps you energised. You feel alive, buzzing with creativity, seeing connections between disparate spheres, exercising your combinational creativity and dreaming up incredible futures for yourself.

The problem is the plurality. Futures.

The omnidirectional mind is a beautiful thing. The problem is, it’s an easily distracted one.

I’ve been staying in this coliving place for 3 weeks now. The hosts are a delightful pair of Swedish siblings, running the space together while working on their own initiatives.

One is a writer and has written a couple of books that are as yet unpublished. The other is learning Portuguese through an online class, building out a secret website that he won’t show anyone and dreaming up another. To be fair, he seems to be making the most progress out of all of us.

We’re ideas people, talking about things we’d like to do or just thought about. He comes upstairs in the morning, buzzing with ideas for his next project. I often gush about my own ideas, talking about how this would be amazing. Or that. Or that or that or that.

I read a short book by a guy called AJ Leon the other evening. He seems to have lived the dream, quitting his finance job to embark on a series of adventures while creating all sorts of disparate projects and endeavours, working all over the world.

He says,

One of the greatest threats to launching new ideas is quite simply more ideas.

I have ideas constantly. I write them down, put them in my notes app, sometimes gather information on them. I write blog post ideas and do the same, collating notes, making collections and finding examples. Most of them remain just that, notes somewhere in the ether, unexplored and undiscovered by anyone.

AJ Leon ships his work. His site says ‘making things happen’. The thing with ideas is they need to begin in earnest, be stress tested by the world, not left to wither in the dusty morass of the back of your notes app.

Hopefully these ideas will coalesce and make some incredible whole, everything pulling together like the threads in a story, like Dantes’ plot for revenge or Kanye’s seemingly unrelated samples.

Until then, maybe it’s best to finish one thing at a time.