The Notes app on my phone is full of entry codes to buildings, shopping lists, information about how to find my car in this or that parking garage, quotes I found interesting, lists of songs to play, and the truly inscrutable (“Dreamed I was schoolmarm to a teenage Jagger and Richards”).

It’s also where ideas go to die.

I’ve had this blog for just over a year, but I’ve been coming up with blog post ideas for much longer — they are all over the place. Not only that, I have a note from May 4, 2015 that says simply, “Daily blog posts.” Why did it take me nearly four years to follow through?

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A friend of mine is investigating a business idea.

In fact, he’s been investigating various business ideas for the past few months. He’s not sure whether the idea he has now will turn out to be a good one.

I wonder if what he’s really asking is, “Will my idea be successful?” And perhaps he would define success as, “Will it yield a profitable business?”

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Whenever I’ve struggled to create something — a song, a piece of writing, a meal — the difficulty is not usually a lack of ideas.

Rather, it is found in the resistance to the ideas I already have. Each one is considered and rejected. I’m dismissing possibilities instead of developing them, and nothing is getting done.

The solution I’ve come to rely on: I just choose one of these ideas, no matter how ugly or ungainly, and move forward with it.

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When I was a kid, I hung onto things. Candies, stickers, little soaps, fancy erasers and pencils, personalized stationery — instead of consuming them or using them up, I would hoard them and relish the perfection of their untouched, unblemished potential. More often than not, they’d be tossed or lost before I did anything with them.

It became the same with ideas. Rather than create the drawing, song, poem, story, or business offering, I would collect ideas for someday. And like my childhood collections, these would languish, unloved, in notebooks and on recordings until they were lost or forgotten.

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What do you do when you run out of ideas?

Seth Godin has written about the nature of writer’s block and the fact that it is invented. It’s designed to let us off the hook when the going gets rough and we’re afraid to make something new – or afraid that we can’t.

It’s amazing the capacity of the human brain to rationalize and make up excuses for why we are the way we are and why we can’t do the things that we need to do, especially when they’re challenging. Indeed, it is the safer thing to do to not write, to not make stuff, to not put our ideas out there.

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