Stop Squeezing Your Ideas to Death (Do this Instead)

When everyone around us is succeeding now, it’s tempting to try to immediately capitalize on our every idea. This is exactly the wrong approach.

Too often, I think, we misunderstand what we’re holding when it comes to our ideas.

We treat them as difficult nuts to be cracked, subjecting them to pressure, heat, and force as we attempt to get through the hard outer casing to access the interior.

Rather than unlocking creative sustenance, however, more often than not, this approach ends up squeezing our ideas to death.

It’s understandable why we do this.

When it feels like everyone we look up to is succeeding now, we feel pressure to keep up.

And so we then take that pressure and direct it onto our ideas, attempting to accelerate their growth.

But herein lies the problem.

The value of a nut is not in the small amount of short-term sustenance it can supply as food, but in its long-term potential as a seed.

And seeds must be handled very differently from nuts if we want to unlock that potential.