What is stopping you to realise your ideas?
Have you ever had ideas you want to execute? How many of your ideas did you implement?
I hear lots of brilliant ideas from friends and colleagues. I also have some ideas that I’d like to make happen. However, most ideas somehow stay in our heads or on a piece of papers and never get around to implement. Why?
I often hear (and also tell myself):
- I don’t have time
- I don’t have money to start off
- I don’t have anyone to help me
- I don’t know where to start
- I am not interested in this any more
- I lost my momentum
- It’s not a good time to for this because… (your reasons)
Sounds familiar?
We get excited with ideas and saw opportunities at the beginning. Then, we stumble across the obstacles, lose interests or motivations. We start looking for reasons not to continue to work on our ideas.
Why?
We are afraid of failures and worried about how others think about ideas. We get overwhelmed by the amount of work we need to put into after looking into details. I tend to be optimistic and aim for high quality without considering my knowledge, skills and experience. So, as you expect, after exploring my ideas for a while, I get overwhelmed by the gap I need to fill and lose motivations. It feels like I am at the foot of Mt. Everest trying to climb with slippers and pyjamas on.
Different Creativities, Different Approaches
While developing my creativity (if you are curious about what I have done, you can find it here), I came across the concept of big and small C. C stands for Creativity. Psychology and creative thinking scholars have discussed the differences between them and their impacts on our creative process.
In short, big C is the breakthrough, game-changing ideas that most of us often learn from articles, books etc. Examples are the aeroplane invented by Orville & Wilbur Wright and the General Theory of Relativity found by Einstein. Small C is the ideas that enhance and enrich our lives. It could be creating new recipes, finding a better layout for your room, or an efficient way of running operations in business. The big C is a big bang change, whereas the small C is continuous incremental improvement.
We tend to focus on the big Cs as they give us fame, a sense of making big impacts and achievements. I admit I gravitated towards the rewards big Cs could provide. However, the big Cs don’t come by easily. I felt frustrated with the slow progress, lack of outcomes and tired of chasing big Cs. So, I stepped back and thought about how I could do differently. One day, I recalled one of my ex-colleagues mottos “Take a baby step”. I have been working in the IT industry and I used to write codes. He was a talented programmer and he always told me to take a baby step — start small and build on gradually. I realised that this could work for our ideas too.
My Approach to Make it Happen (and keep peace in my mind)
FFirst, I looked at my ideas and applied divergent thinking (I touched on divergent thinking in my previous article) to narrow down to a few ideas, as I tend to have too many things I’d like to do. It became obvious that I don’t have time to explore all my ideas. I categorised my ideas into a few groups based on my criteria and chose a few ideas to focus on. One of them was to create visual art to advocate the importance of the natural environment.
I found my baby step by chance. I have started to draw every day since August 2020 when I was introduced to creative habits (I briefly explained creative habits in my previous article). I was also looking for something to take my mind off of pandemic. I committed to spending 10 minutes every day so that it is easier to fit in my schedule. I gradually cultivated a sense of achievement every day feeling more appreciative with a small continuous effort.
Interestingly, as I have continued drawing, daily drawing became easier and my desire to improve techniques and skills grew. Setting up accessible small drawing space at the dining table also helped me stick with my daily routine.
As my sketchbooks filled with drawings, I saw tangible progress. This visual cue still keeps me motivated and make me want to improve further. Small actions stimulate my mind and bring more ideas for my drawing. It has been an enjoyable experience, and I started to believe in small Cs. I feel that I am moving towards somewhere as I see steady progress. It might look slow, but it is a lot better than nothing.
Continuous incremental improvement reminds us of kaizen — the Japanese improvement practice. It looks for ways to increase efficiency, reduce waste and improve our performance. Continuous, small and incremental changes add up to huge improvements over time. I realised that small Cs were a creative version of kaizen, and these small, accumulated creative effort would lead to big Cs. Our surroundings, such as the people we talk to, the places we go, the things we read etc., inspire small creativities. These accumulated inspirations help to direct towards big Cs.
What can you do to make your ideas real?
When you are trouble getting started with your ideas, why not write them down and have a good look?
Once you select a few ideas to focus on, you break them down into small ideas that you can start working on right away and complete in a short time (day or week rather than month or year). If you come up with reasons not to take actions, have a closer look at them — you may be a bit uncomfortable. Think about the way to turn them into something workable for you. You may realise you procrastinate because your sketchbook is at the very bottom of your drawer. Maybe you place the sketchbook on your desk so you can use it when you want to. It could be simply rearranging your workspace or house and build your activities into your daily routine by blocking time.
I found that creating something small but tangible every day helps you motivated — it could be simply making a mark on your calendar when you completed your task. These methods enable you to embed your creative activities in your daily routine to accumulate your small Cs.
The reason I am writing about creativity is to bring more ideas out of our heads. When we share our creativity, we inspire and stimulate each other like chemical reactions, and I am sure great things will happen.
Creativity is one of the abilities that separate us from the machine and AI. It is inevitable to live with machines and AI as you see now. What and how would you live with them when most of the tasks are carried out by them? This thought motivated me to explore human creativity and help us to be at our best. I believe creativity becomes more important than ever to live your life in a highly automated, AI-enhanced world.
