There is such a thing as having too many ideas. In the world of business and entrepreneurship there is an analysis procedure just for this sort of things. You could analyze risks and benefits, business environment, your ability to execute each idea and choose to focus on the best overall prospect. When you treat yourself as your business project, you could probably follow a similar path. Let us discuss how.
- Prepare a list of ideas. I have spreadsheets in Google doc where I add some of he ideas I want to pursue one day. Each time I want something to happen, I just add it to the list. The list is quite long, but when a chance comes I am prepared to use it. Once in a while we get new opportunities: meet new people, get job offers, our time frees up because we become more efficient in what we do or finish long projects. Fast reaction time may optimize our ability to use these opportunities.
- Focusing on one thing at a time. People who need several activities to stay focused are extremely rare, probably 2% of population. It is normal and reasonable to treat one activity at a time. You select the most promising activity and try to solve it, then you move on. Choosing just one activity at a time, requires sorting through all available ideas, and focusing the resources on the idea that looks best at the time. Whether we fail or succeed, we do review the priorities periodically and may focus on doing something else.
- Return on investment. When we choose an idea to focus on, we should be able to evaluate the resources required to execute the idea vs the impact it will have on our lives. Suppose you really hate running, and you know that running 20 min each day for 50 years will make you live on average 5 years longer. Let us do the simple math: (5*365*3600)/(20*50*356)=18.4. E.g. for each minute of running you get 18 minutes of life. Is it worth the effort for you? For me probably not, but if I replace running with swimming it may be really worthwhile. You can make similar computations for the money you save, the time you spend etc.
- Longterm trends. The future is usually here, it is simply unevenly distributed. By noticing what exceptional people are excited about [e.g. reading blogs and networking], we can anticipate some of the changes that may sweep the world. By communicating with people who are slightly older than us, we can anticipate the changes that will happen to us. If something is about to happen, it is best to be prepared for it. Time and energy spent acquiring the relevant tools may be extremely valuable due to perfect timing.
- Happy, healthy, and rich. Most people want to be happy, healthy and rich. These goals do not always agree with each other. When you analyze a new idea, try to think to which extent it will promote you in each of these areas. Some people prefer to use more dimensions for their decision-making. Do focus only on what is important to you now, a year from now and 10 years from now.
- Ability to execute. Some ideas are great, we simply do not have the resources to execute them. Resources include knowledge, experience, social support, time, money, energy/focus, motivation and some other things. If we choose an idea we do not have enough resources for, we will start to procrastinate. It may be best to build a growth path, where the resources build up as we progress. Our superlearner classes are built this way: you need to control one level of skills in order to access the next level of skills. This is not unique to our method, and many complex achievements could be modeled this way.
We could outline more ideas, and we may actually do this in the future. Let us summarize this post. You can probably treat yourself as an ongoing project, focusing on the best thing to improve at each given time point. Record the ideas instead of acting impulsively, and choose the best from the ideas you record. Do one thing at a time. Calculate the return on your investment. Monitor longterm trends since perfect timing is very valuable. Evaluate each of your ideas in multiple dimensions and time scales. If you procrastinate, you might lack the abilities to execute. Maybe you need to achieve something else before you can proceed with the original idea.
Once you have chosen a winning idea, do not procrastinate and act upon it. If you do start to procrastinate, try to understand
