There’s a particular way dreams get crushed. Inaction obviously, but even before that, the dismissal of the idea in the first place.
It usually happens when the gap between where you are and where the idea would take you is too wide to bridge from your perspective. If the thought is bigger than your belief in yourself, there’s an elegant solution available: don’t entertain it. Parse it as a dream and then doggedly ignore it.
Pink Floyd understood this in Time: “plans that either come to naught, or a half a page of scribble lines”. Eminem said it too; “Ooop there goes gravity, back to reality.”
Most of the advice here is clear (and true) and is all about action: Follow your passion, only commitment delivers, massive action gets results — 10X it! Those limiting beliefs are just excuses. All of it is true.
However, it assumes a starting point most people don’t have: existing clarity about what they want, plus fearlessness, doggedness, and a bias to act first. Many people don’t have those in their game at the moment when the idea arrives. It’s a bridge too far. Nobody goes from idea to belief to courage to commitment in one step.
Your mind will not allow to be true concepts that are too far outside of the known memory patterns. It defends the reality it knows, and that defence sounds entirely reasonable. It sounds like why it wouldn’t work. Why now isn’t the time. Why people like you don’t do things like that.
For someone with a lifetime of evidence about their own constraints and limits, the idea has to survive the onslaught of limiting beliefs before anything else gets to happen.
For example, in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov has an idea: that a very small number of superior people ought to be able to operate outside the law of ordinary people, even to kill if, in their enlightened view, the killing was right for society, their extraordinary nature permitting them to judge relative merits of people take extraordinary action for the greater good. When the idea first emerges, he treats it as a high academic social theory, a speculation. Nothing he could countenance. But he lets it exist. He writes a paper about it. He turns it over, starts asking himself; “what if”, how would a person do it, what would one need to do to embark on becoming one of these extraordinary beings? Then tests himself, by way of the premeditated murder of a (deserving) pawnbroker and the unplanned murder of her (undeserving) niece, who had the bad luck to walk in.
Turns out, Raskolnikov was not one of these superior beings. Great book; a brilliant but depressing read.
Point is; see! See what capturing and nurturing an idea can do! 😊
There’s a second lesson in there somewhere about taking care to nurture good ideas. But you take the point.
Nothing happens without action, true!
But sometimes the first action is simply not smothering the thing. Letting it sit in the open where you can look at it. Writing it down so it survives the week, feeding it nurturing it, then take a step towards.
Is there an idea good you’d like to give some airspace to?
Capture, nurture, build.
