Josh Sherman
If you’re like me, you get excited about your ideas. You go from “TO THE MOON!” to “meh, that was so yesterday” in less time than it takes Napalm Death to play a song. That doesn’t mean we have bad ideas; actually, it probably does. It also may mean what we weren’t truly passionate about the idea to begin with.
Maybe we have no interest in the space. Perhaps we’re only excited about the bajillion dollar market cap. Could it be fear of failure and/or success that helps us lose interest?
As I’ve previously discussed, my daily ritual includes writing three morning pages. Some days (a lot of days) I just ramble on about the prior day. How I’m feeling, what I have to do today, “Dear diary” type stuff. I recently started to notice a trend; I am regularly writing about the ideas floating around in my head.
I write about the potential customers, technology options, revenue models and the like. I may write about an idea today and never revisit it. I may write about an idea for two or three days before my interest fizzles out. What happens if I end up writing about an idea every day for a month?
This act of writing out my ideas is inadvertently allowing me to vet my own level of interest in the idea. It gives me a personal outlet for my fleeting excitement instead of going all Chicken Little and yelling it from the rooftops! I’d rather not be considered that flighty guy that never excutes on the ideas he’s so eager to tell everyone about.
I know what you’re thinking, “you’ll know if you are passionate IMMEDIATELY”. You probably tell your wife it was love at first sight, amirite? The thing is, even bad ideas can seem great at first. If you give them a bit of time to marinate, you may end up feeling differently about it. Hell, the divorce rate in the United States (40-50%) backs up this claim ;)
This probably isn’t the right approach for you; I’m not entirely sure it’s the right approach for me. Maybe we all could write about it a bit more and explore the possibilities.
