How to avoid killing an idea?

I often take inspiration from interviews of great movie directors, writers and artists. There is so much to learn from their ways of thinking and working.

What fascinates me, is their journey of bringing an idea to life.

You often hear them say, “This movie script was with me for the last 10 years, before I finally had a chance to make it.” This bewilders me. How can someone hold on to an idea for such a long time? Are they not distracted?

In a startup world, things are different. Forget about ideas from 10 years ago, we barely remember our ideas from last week. We move at such a rapid pace that we are always in a race to catch the next tech or design trend. We barely get a chance to hold on to an idea for a long period. But we proudly say, “Just ship it.”

How can we avoid killing an idea and hold onto it more?

I am asking this question as an entrepreneur who is also a creator.

Often you will hear a founder say, “I am working on this cool idea.” And you meet him/her after a few months and ask,”Hye, how is the idea coming up?”. You immediately hear, “Oh, I pivoted. I am working on another cool idea.”

And I am certain that whatever the idea was, it had a premature death. This way of thinking and working is so common in our industry. I strongly feel that we must write down our ideas before we even execute them. Just like a movie script, create a long well thought out script for your idea.

Writing is the first step towards articulating the idea with your selves. It allows you to review your thoughts and take the moment to revise and refine it before you can share it with the world.

But in this age of digital collaboration and connectedness, we are streaming our half baked thoughts on slack channels and social media at an alarming speed. The response to which is often in a form of feeble digital interaction like thumbs up, emoticons and memes.

This stream of thoughts is beaming through our digital devices, like a bright sun, blinding our sight and we are trapped in an infinite scroll of digital content.

No wonder we are killing ideas every second - one after the other. No ideas are getting their due respect but are swiped left and right. Only those ideas that can sustain this speed are adopted while others are deleted - not even archived .

It is important that we write down our ideas, revise them and refine it so that it can be articulated better with the world.

‍The clearer you can communicate your idea, the closer you are at executing them and better at predicting the outcomes.

There should be a space either digital or physical, where you allow your ideas to flourish in a form of neatly composed sentences and paragraphs. You are not writing down just to record it but to understand it better.

I am not referring to writing as in creating a todo list of items. Instead, I want each individual idea to have its own story where it is explored.

So, you have an idea! Imagine yourself writing a Hollywood masterpiece.

And just like a movie script, start with a simple text editor and a blinking cursor.

And start typing…