“What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.”
Pablo Picasso
I have been doing a lot of thinking and brainstorming lately about everything from startup ideas and how existing companies could change or improve to how to optimize my routines and be more productive. And while coming up with new ideas is a great thing, I always worry about my think and do balance. Am I spending too much time thinking and not enough time acting? (The other side of that coin exists as well: too much doing and not enough thinking about it)
I started writing on this blog for precisely that reason; to work through ideas and present them. Though it does not consist of doing that idea, for me it is a clear action and ensures I am taking the idea seriously.
I have also tried to develop a bias to action to supplement my thinking, which I was able to put into practice recently. My roommate and I tend to spend Saturdays working at a coffee shop and last week we had a brainstorming session to come up with 10 new ideas in 30 minutes. The session went great, and we talked through a number of ideas. The real magic though wasn't in the ideas from the session, it was the space that it put our minds in. Later that night we were joking around and all of a sudden had developed a concept for a series of videos, a website and possibly an app. Here we had something that was much more immediately actionable than some of the other ideas we had discussed earlier, so we pulled the trigger and decided that we have to do it. We got to work right away and have already written preliminary scripts and started getting the pieces together.
Now, doing isn't necessarily shipping, and shipping is crucial. But doing is on the path to shipping and it marks the crucial transition from ideation to action. While I don't want to prevent myself from dreaming and coming up with new ideas, I also want to make sure I am always acting on some of those ideas.