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As a 'creative' of many years (not all of them public), I have folders and folders of dead ideas I never used, many of which I agonized over for weeks and even
by jarcane 12y ago
As a 'creative' of many years (not all of them public), I have folders and folders of dead ideas I never used, many of which I agonized over for weeks and even months to no actual productive end.
Kurt Vonnegut famously said that the reason he invented Kilgore Trout and his stories was that he loved coming up with the short little SF parables, but that writing them out was just rubbish and usually not as good as the core moral itself.
That said, you can do yourself a lot of harm dwelling on never-finished ideas; at some point you have to learn to buckle down and commit to something. You'll never finish a thing, until you finish your first thing. But once you do, you'll finish another and another, and you'll keep finishing things only as long as you keep finishing them.
- kendallpark 12y agoI have the exact same struggle. I have boxes of unfinished art, folders of unfinished writing, and repos of unfinished programming projects. I read a great quote from Steve Jobs years ago and it has definitely impacted the way I work now: We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. Right now I have one project. It's hard to just have one because I'm constantly bombarded with new ideas I want to pursue. But it's the only way I actually have the chance of finishing something.