Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck
Have you ever taken an idea that was abstract and acted upon it?
An idea of merit comes from the ethos. One moment it was not there, and in the next it has appeared.
It may have sparked from myriad variables. Something you heard, saw, experienced, watched or sometimes from literally out of nowhere.
When it appears, it may only last in your mind for seconds, and if something distracting arrives in similar time period, your idea may disappear as quickly as it arrived, never to be thought of again.
To Steinbeck’s point (tell me about the rabbits, John), once you learn how to take an idea from concept into implementation, it becomes truly contagious. There is an internal incomparable satisfaction in seeing an idea that manifested from your mind into reality. It is both empowering as well as stimulating to know that something that was no more than a passing thought, is now a tangible reality for others to experience.
These are expressed in trillions of disparate ways through food, art, literature, media, architecture, and countless other physical representations of someone’s initial brainstorm.
Some are driven to accomplish this out of a need for immortality. A desire to be remembered long after they have walked the earth. Others do it just because it is there. While others feel a burning need inside to take these ideas and ensure their survival through whatever external actions are necessary to express them.
Once you get started on such a path, it does become addicting. What was once just a glimmer of a concept is now a stack of papers of notes, thoughts, supplemental ideas and additions to your original premise.
The joy of having that “aha moment,” is unquestionably indescribable to ones who are not spending their time in such pursuits. Almost everyone has some of these ideas, yet a much smaller percentage are willing to act upon a majority of them. To most it is just a thought in passing. To others, it is the means to a living. A cause to kick their heels out of bed on a daily basis and to fuel their deepest desires to dream, create and execute on plan.
If you have not spent a chunk of your life in such a pursuit, I would highly recommend that when you have your next spark of genius, act on it. Take it one step further. That first effort can be intoxicating and drive your internal passion. Which, in actuality, is a great thing, because a few more steps down the road, you will most likely hit an obstacle and at that point, it is going to be that initial intoxication that will force you to overcome whatever obstacle is starting to impede your progress and deliver you the perseverance to continue past the obstacle into open territory again.
Happy Tuesday!
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