You can learn to give up things. You can learn to give up commitments. You can even learn to give up people that keep you from living the simple life that you dream of. But a skill you need to learn is that of giving up ideas.
Why would you ever want to give up ideas?
After all, it’s not as though ideas take up physical space. They do take up mental space and time, though. Your mind is an incredible thing, but too many thoughts and ideas simply overload you, and keep you from your goals. Too many ideas, too many goals, too many plans – these don’t help you live a simple life.
Many of my readers are budding entrepreneurs, with the goal of working for themselves full-time. Done right, working for yourself is a brilliant way to live simply. There are only so many hours in each day, though. And you don’t want to work every single one of them, so something must give. Learn to let go of ideas.
One Brilliant Idea
Pick one brilliant idea, the best one you have, and put your full energy behind it. Though you may not think so, that’s the easy part. The hard part is taking the rest of your good ideas and killing them off. You may even consider giving them away. Have a good idea for a business venture, but don’t want to overload yourself? Freely give the idea to a friend. Write a post about it. Put it out there for anyone to run with, and forget about it.
You’ll be free of a burden, and there’s a good chance you’ll help someone else. Your focus will be sharpened immensely once you give these ideas away. Less mental clutter means more focus on the things that remain. So try it – give up on one of your ideas, right now. You deserve it.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
While it’s a good point to give up on ideas that are really going nowhere, maybe just jotting them down in an Idea Journal to keep for future reference/use would do the trick instead of letting go completely.
I’m the type of person who needs a lot of stimulation before hitting on the right path to take. And even if the idea is stupid, or wrong, it might jog my memory for something else.
But I’ve kept them all (mostly on scrap pieces of paper before transferring them to my organizer) so that I can reference them & maybe come up with an even better idea.
Keeping a journal / idea log is not a bad idea, if theres’ a chance those ideas will be useful one day. Just getting them on paper and out of your head will probably do the trick.
For me, I almost feel like I’d rather share those ideas – if I write about them, then someone else can run with an idea that otherwise would have gone unused. If I ever need to reference that idea in the future, I can simply see it online.