When we dash away from ideas too fast

In the first year of wearing a nametag twenty four seven, there wasn’t single day where quitting didn’t cross my mind.

And yet, something inside told me to stick with it. Not sure why. It just didn’t seem fair to dash away from this idea too quickly. There was just too much juice there.

My experiment needed some room to breathe before it told me what it was supposed to become.

Sure enough, two years into the project, not only did my nametag go viral on campus, it also went viral online. Which transformed my life forever.

That was over twenty years ago. And since then, one of the lessons that still sticks with me is this.

People abandon things far too quickly. And they assume it’s because of impatience, distraction, fear, anxiety, doubt or even discernment. But it’s really just the mathematics of ignorance. The reason people give up because they simply haven’t put in enough time to accrue enough volume to earn enough insight to know how they should proceed.

It’s those old school placements tests. Every few pages, there would be a trick question that went something like this.

A book costs four dollars and a pen cost two dollars. Can the woman buy three of each? Smart test takers would realize, wait a sec, there is no way to tell. It depends how much money the woman has.

Which means the right answer is, not enough information to solve this problem.

This is the key moment in the execution process. Instead of abandoning things too quickly, we stick around and try to collect more data. We try and reach the point of statistical significance in our experiment.

During high school, my english teacher used to joke, you haven’t written enough to know what kind of writer you are.

Meaning, each creator has to keep working toward this thing that is not quite yet a reality. Only through the process of doing will they understand what doing actually means for them.

That how they get enough information to solve this problem.

Look, if you are willing start small and trust the path to illuminate itself, eventually, you will have deeper understanding of the destination.

And so, don’t try to move too quickly, because you’re only new once.

Commit and create, and don’t worry, there will plenty of time to give up on yourself later.

Are you willing to contract a case of the humbles to find where you’re going next?