If you’re deluded enough to bring your ideas to form

Every great idea is born twice.

First, as a seed inside our head. Where it’s conceptual, nascent and one dimensional.

And secondly, as a real output in world. Where it’s tangible, living and multifaceted.

Now, not every creator makes it through both stages. Many people’s ideas stay in idea form forever. Which is unfortunate. Because if you have the opportunity to actually execute your creative vision, wow, there’s nothing quite like it.

Watching an idea take shape, piece by piece, a little more with each passing day, it’s profoundly satisfying. After a few weeks or months of seeing the idea coming to life, you step back and think to yourself, holy crap, this is like, a thing now. This is real. There might actually be a valid vision here, not just a hallucination.

Allow me to share case study from my own career. Prolific took about six months to build. The idea itself had been stewing in my brain for a good five years, but the hard core design and development process was much more compressed.

The idea quickly moved from a series of epiphanies to a simple spreadsheet to a sticky note brainstorm to an official creative brief to some rough sketches to a set of wireframes to a working prototype to a minimum viable product, all in about six months.

And during that process, to say that my emotions were fluctuating would be an understatement. That’s the thing nobody tells you about that second birth of your idea. One day you feel like you’re running for high office and poised to change the world, the next day you feel like you might be completely insane and everyone knows it but you.

One day you’re testing your product thinking it’s the greatest thing since sliced beer, the next day you’re certain that not a single goddamn user is ever going to pay money for your piece of shit.

One day you’re fantasizing about the ten year vision for your product, the next day you remember that nobody cares, everybody’s busy, and somebody should probably pull you down off your high horse before you crack a rib.

It’s quite the emotional and existential roller coaster. Launching a product is basically legalized schizophrenia.

And yet, isn’t that better than being numb? Isn’t feeling both the joys and sorrows, both the hopes and fears, at the heart of what it means to be alive and human? What hell else are you going to do all day?

Sure beats not wanting to get out of bed in the morning.

Listen, if you’re willing have and hold big ideas, and if you’re deluded enough to bring them to form, the journey will reward you from every angle.

There ain’t no guarantee of fame, wealth, or fulfillment, but you’ll certainly increase your chances.

Kind of gives new meaning to the term, born again, doesn’t it?