Are You Hoarding Your Best Ideas?

After inspiration strikes and a brilliant idea is sparked in your mind, do you share it with the world or hide it away? Hoarding ideas isn’t good for you and it isn’t good for the rest of the world.

When you hoard ideas you just end up with a big pile of sticky notes or journals full of scribbled descriptions, or a folder on your desktop filled with Word docs. Your hidden stockpile of half-baked ideas isn’t benefiting anyone.

Squirreling away your ideas is actually a bit selfish.
If you’re not planning to put those ideas into action, it means you’re not planning to do anything with them at all. You don’t win anything if you die with the most ideas. People won’t even remember your name because it’s likely that whomever is in charge of clearing out your house will probably just pitch all those secret idea hoarding notebooks into the dumpster.

Make an appointment with yourself to go through your cache of creative ideas.
Half of them are probably outdated beyond value or someone else has already come along with the similar idea. With the ideas that remain, look for a few that you’re ready to put into action now that some time has passed or more resources are available. Decide which ideas you’re going to focus on first and schedule time on your calendar to work on them. Take the ideas that remain and think about individuals and organizations that might have an interest in taking your idea and running with it.

Many of those ideas you came up with so long ago were actually ideas that would specifically benefit a particular industry or group of people. Why not gift them with your idea and let them consider putting it into action themselves?

Seeing someone else make a success of your idea is a lot more rewarding than staring at a shelf of notebooks filled with scribbles of potential genius and wondering if any of those ideas were actually any good.