Are you addicted to an idea?
So you start with an idea, and you think it might be a great idea. Maybe it’s the idea for your bestselling novel that you haven’t written or for the app that you haven’t made that will change the world. You build on this idea in your head and it becomes more and more complex. Soon you are sure It’s your best ever idea idea, but you realize that any work that you do to try to get it out into the real world cannot possibly live up to the idea in your head. So instead of actually doing the thing, you continue to think about the idea. If this sounds familiar, you, like many creative thinkers before you, might be addicted to an idea.
In response to my post You might not have great ideas until you start writing, Verna wrote:
“I love to write about my ideas --so much so that I often lose my enthusiasm for carrying them out. I know from experience that if I do take the next step of work/action , that all my thinking and writing did not "complete" my idea
Internet video pioneer Ze Frank talks about this problem in a 2006 episode of The Show. He calls it “brain crack.”
“If you never want to run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do them right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas - that you’ll get to later.”
The problem with “brain crack” is that the addiction to the idea itself prevents you from carrying out whatever the idea was supposed to be in the first place. I have also heard this problem described as “idea paralysis.” The solution is to get the idea out of your head and into reality before you get addicted to the idea.
I find that if I talk about ideas with artwork with people before acting on them, they tend to lose their sparkle. So now I try not to go into much detail about future projects with people.
For me writing is a way of getting ideas out of my head and into the real world, but if for you the process of writing is an extension of your brain and still doesn’t help you complete the ideas, maybe you shouldn’t write “about” them. I notice that you say “write about my ideas” rather than to write the ideas themselves. I would argue that you should still write ideas down but don’t go into detail. Just write enough so that you will remember the key part of the idea and then just do the thing itself immediately.