By Tanner Christensen
What’s the craziest idea you’ve ever had?
What made the idea feel so crazy to
you? Was the idea too before it’s time? Too ambitious? Was it something far out
of reach or something others wouldn’t understand?
If you’re like most people, you left the idea
behind somewhere, didn’t you? You abandoned it once you realized just how crazy
it seemed. We all abandon ideas that seem too crazy. But how often do you
reflect on what makes these types of ideas crazy to begin with? More often than
not, when faced with an idea we feel is too radical or too distant, we abandon
it. Of course once the idea is gone, there’s no way to prove or disprove the
craziness of it.
Without pursuing these ideas, we must face the
possibility that our expectations and reservations about them may very well be
unfounded. Wrong, even. What we believe to be crazy, out of reach, or
impossible, may feel so only because we haven’t tried to make them anything but
out of reach, impossible, and crazy.
Here’s the thing: most crazy ideas are rarely as
unrealistic or unachievable as we make them out to be.
Some ideas, the ones that come mostly from imagination
with little foundation in reality, are obviously too wild to become a reality
(you can’t invent a machine to instantly zap you across outer space because the
technology and knowledge to do so simply isn’t up to the task, yet). But other
ideas, the ones we dream up in the middle of the night, or after a long
conversation with a close friend, or when we feel defeated after a long day of
school or work, those ideas are typically within our reach, despite our
inclination of them being too crazy.
All it takes to shift a crazy idea into being a
good one is a bit of energy, ambition, and continued curiosity. We must explore the map of our ideas if we’re to understand
where they might take us.
I’m talking about those times when we find
ourselves asking “What if?” Or when we stumble on an idea by accident only to
say “This could never work.” We owe it to ourselves to get answers, to pursue
the what-ifs, and to see if our ideas could work. If not for a definitive
answer, then at-least for the energy of living a life well lived, well
explored. When we pursue our ideas we discover things about ourselves and life
we otherwise may never have stumbled on.
Selling your art in an online store, opening a
real storefront in your favorite city, selling everything and traveling the
world, whatever your crazy idea is: odds are it’s not as crazy as you might
think. It only feels crazy because you’ve never pushed through it. A yellow
watermelon seems like a crazy idea until you try it and realize it tastes like
a normal watermelon, it’s just colored yellow. Supporting yourself through your
creations or ideas can seem crazy, but what if it works? Would you take the
risk and benefit from fulfilling the idea or gaining new knowledge around it?
We can’t expect to know whether or not an idea is
absurd without first exploring it, because we simply don’t know what we don’t
know.
When confronted with the crazy idea of using a
hot air balloon to race around the globe, which no one had ever done before,
Virgin founder Richard Branson used his personal mantra of “Screw it, let’s do
it” and ended up setting a world record. (Branson’s life seems to be a series
of acting on crazy ideas instead of running away from them, as he explains in
his short biography of the apt title Screw It, Let’s Do It.)
Elon Musk, when faced with the crazy idea of
creating a commercial company that would launch rockets into space, didn’t let
anything stand in his way. The company he founded as a result of his pursuit,
SpaceX, is one of the leading space companies in the world. To get here, Musk
had to be willing to pursue the crazy. As explained in Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by
Ashlee Vance: “Musk has his version of the truth, and it’s not always the
version of the truth that the rest of the world shares.”
Of course your crazy ideas don’t have to be as
ambitious as breaking records or changing the future of the world. Even the
small, crazy ideas can be immensely valuable if pursued.
The problem with many of our fears around “crazy”
ideas is that the fears often come from only what we know, never what we don’t
know. To live a more creative life we must not abandon our craziest ideas, but
instead lunge forward with them tightly in our grasp. As Steve Jobs once
famously said:
“When you grow up you tend to get told that the
world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the
world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life,
have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much
broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call
life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change
it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
Here’s to the crazy ones.
Imagine Someone
Else With Your Ideas In Order To See Them Through — Tanner Christensen
By Tanner Christensen
Your challenge is this: the next time you find
yourself faced with an idea — wondering “what if?” — go ahead and imagine what
might happen if someone else approached you with the same idea, in its final
form. Imagine them showing you exactly what you were going to do. How might you
react? Would you be jealous? Frustrated with yourself? Is the feeling of seeing
someone else build your idea enough to motivate you to carry the idea forward
yourself?
Finding the motivation to see our creative ideas
come to fruition can often be daunting, particularly when the idea is something
we’ve never tried before. But if we can change our perspective and imagine a
world where someone else took the risk, and what might happen when they do,
that can be just enough to get us moving on the idea. Enough to take a small
risk, or plan out next steps, anything to push the idea toward reality.
Imagining the idea as belonging to someone else
also frees us up to envision how they might create it differently. Maybe they
have more resources available than we do, in which case we can get a signal for
what things we might need in order to really push the idea through. Or maybe
the person we envision moving the idea forward does something more bold than
we’d be comfortable with. Seeing the idea come to fruition — and whether or not
it’s successful in our eyes — might be enough to help motivate us to see it through,
and it also helps us better understand the potential of our idea.
Now think of that solution this other person
showed you. What do you think of it?
If you find it interesting, but otherwise
useless, that’s a good sign the idea needs more thought and attention to make
it useful.
If it’s something you would cherish or enjoy and
really feel connected to, that’s a good sign the idea is worthwhile.
If the idea is something that you, even alone,
would honestly be interested in—even if it came from another person—at least
then you know that pursuing the idea can do something for yourself. That alone
can be fulfilling, but it’s also likely that it will be appealing to others
too.
If you struggle to imagine anyone else coming up
with your idea, an easy way to see what it might be like is to ask a friend to
present the idea to you. Ask them to present it as though they had come up with
the idea in the first place and followed it through, to make it a reality. Not
only will doing so help you envision what the idea might feel like in reality,
it can also help spur a new understanding of the idea itself, as your friend is
likely to add their own twists and perspectives to it when they present it to
you.
More often than not, we believe that ideas are
ours, unique to us, and that imagining them coming from anyone else can feel
like a betrayal. That isn’t true, and sounds silly when we think of it that
way, but the notion of our unique ideas coming from anyone else can be just
enough to block us from moving them through the idea stage to the execution
one.
As a result: we sit by idly daydreaming about
what could be, what we might be able to accomplish, or whether or not our ideas
are worthwhile. But imagining someone else coming up with and executing on your
idea first can help overcome that initial stage of stickiness.
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