How Long Does It Take to Grow An Idea?
I read on a productivity blog somewhere that if you can’t get started on a new idea within a week you need to let it go.
A week?!?
I don’t know about you, but my Idea Cycle is a little longer than that. Depending on the idea, getting started can take me months. Sometimes it can take me years.
And my Manifestation phase — where the idea finally becomes an actual, reach-out-and-touch-it thing — well, let’s just say that part is considerably longer.
Am I just really slow?
Or are my best ideas like elephant babies, naturally in need of a long incubation?
Ideas come to me all the time, most typically when I’m working on other ideas. They’ll show up when I’m writing in my Morning Pages journal, for example, in between my whining about the weather and my whining about the fact that I’m getting nothing done but wow, I’m filling up those Morning Pages. If I remember to do it, I’ll make a little notation in the margin so when I flip back through the pages I’ll know that I had a bona fide Idea in there amid all the twaddle.
Other ideas get scribbled on scraps of notepad, or doodled, because sometimes a little line drawing works better than words to convey an idea.
Every now and then I’ll gather my scraps and go through them, just to see what ideas I might have had that merit further exploration.
Not many of them do.
But occasionally, I’ll get a persistent thought, like when I wanted to turn my garage into my art studio. Or when I thought I’d like to open an art gallery. Or when I came up with the idea to write my unschooling manifesto. Those ideas were tenacious. They all became actual, reach-out-and-touch-it things.
Did I act on them within a week?
Hell, no. It took me three years to clear enough space in my garage to allow me to make art out there. And I still can’t in good conscience call it a studio.
The gallery came into being after a couple years of mulling. And in case you might be thinking a long gestation means a more sustainable idea, I opened and closed that space within a year. Some ideas are tenacious for all the wrong reasons. (And I’ll have more to say about that in Friday’s post, which I know you’ll like because it’s one of those how-I-trainwrecked-two-friendships-and-my-bank-account stories that we all secretly — or not so secretly — love to read. As long as they’re not about us. Don’t apologize. I understand completely.)
Where was I?
Right. Acting on ideas.
So the unschooling manifesto came about a little quicker, but even so, several months passed from the first notation I made about it in the margins of my journal to the day I finally sat down and began to write.
And my motivation for finally starting that project? It wasn’t exactly lofty. I had a Significant Birthday on the horizon, and I was simply not going to let it pass without my having published at least one book.
Plus a friend of mine had just published a book and I was jealous.
Right now I have an Idea on my desk, with a deadline attached (only six weeks from now, Dear Reader) that I haven’t even begun to work on. I have another Idea that my Morning Pages moodling suggests might be something worth getting to sooner rather than later, but I’ve barely wrapped words around the concept, much less begun to think about how it might actually happen.
And I have a canvas to paint that’s due in three weeks and is at this point only an image floating somewhere within my brain, waiting to coalesce into a reach-out-and-touch-it thing worth sharing with others.
A week to start a new idea, or into the bin it goes? Not for me. I favor the decidedly un-hasty approach to getting things done. The Ripe Fruit approach, where every idea is from a different tree, and sweetens in its own time.
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