This Idea Will Self-Destruct in 24 Hours

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Ideas aren’t nearly as powerful as most people assume.

Well…that’s not entirely true. They are powerful, sometimes dangerously so. The problem is that their potency has an extremely short half-life. The power dissipates quickly.

You’ve seen this happen, of course. You have an idea that is so mind-blowing it wakes you from a deep, dreamless sleep. You jot it down. The next morning you look at it again over coffee and it’s still awesome. You’re going to change the freaking world with this one. While you’re still excited, you sketch out a rough thumbnail of a plan to make it real and you’re almost giddy.

During stolen moments at work, you flesh out your plan. You spend a couple of late nights doing some research and refining your plan.

After a week, or a month, you stumble across a notebook with your intricately detailed, yet still incomplete plan and think “you know, this still has potential.” One day maybe you’ll get to it. Before you know it, you’re watching the news or see a commercial and BAM, someone is selling your idea… and they’re not doing nearly as good a job as they would have if they’d followed your plan for it…the bastards.

The problem, of course, isn’t that they stole your idea. It isn’t even that you weren’t disciplined enough to complete your plan. It’s that you wasted the precious, game-changing energy of your idea trying to get the plan right. Not only that, but you’ve invested so much effort in your perfect plan, that when the unexpected occurs (and it will) you either won’t be able to recognize it or you won’t have the heart to scrap your plan and start anew.

Not that proper planning is a bad thing; it’s essential to your success. But an idea only has so much power in and of itself, power to create action. Your awesome idea simply can’t sustain itself indefinitely. However, there is a natural feedback loop that can re-energize your idea and spur more action. It’s called accomplishment.

Accomplishment is much more vital to your success than contingency planning. Each step you take toward realizing your idea will fan the flames of your passion for it and make the next step that much easier.

The next time an idea strikes, wake up and write it down. The next morning over coffee, sketch out your rough thumbnail of a plan. Then stop: THAT IS YOUR PLAN. Look at the first stage of your plan, write down 5-7 steps you need to take to make it happen, including one thing you can do today and two more you can do before the week is out. Buy a domain. Build a prototype. Write a rough draft. Develop a color palette. Whatever.

Then get off your ass and make it happen. Period. You have less than 24 hours before the idea loses its potency to prompt you to action, and the clock is ticking.

Take action. If it doesn’t work (and not everything will work), adjust your approach and try again. Repeat until you’ve succeeded. When you complete stage one, celebrate, then write down your action steps for stage two and get going. Push forward, then let the momentum carry you through to the end.

A brutal truth that will take some getting used to: planning is just another form of procrastination. Creation and execution are not pretty. They are tough, messy, unpredictable processes and you have to get your hands dirty and figure it out on the fly.

If your master plan won’t fit on a 3×5 index card, you’ve already wasted too much time and effort on your planning, because something or someone is waiting around the corner with a monkey wrench to toss your way. Personally, I prefer a business card… but I like to travel light.

So take that brilliant idea and start acting on it while it still has the power to excite and inspire you (and others). Okay, I’m done now, so no more stalling.

Go.

(by Danny Thompson)