I spend a fair amount of time thinking up ideas. I have a hope and a goal to develop a kind of muse business, one that I can set up and let run, that will contribute to my family’s financial security. I want to explore new topics with postgraduate researchers, and to do what I already do with them better. And, as you can tell from this blog and my books, I want to write more books for postgraduate researchers (and possibly for other audiences too).
A big problem, one that I’ve carried over from my PhD days, is procrastination – well, not exactly. It’s a bit of procrastination, a bit of Imposter Syndrome, a bit of “what-if-this-doesn’t-work-out?” I worry. The key of it all is thinking: “What if this idea is not right?”
This is a perennial problem for me, but something that has helped a lot recently has been re-reading Poke The Box by Seth Godin, which I mentioned in a recent post. Previously, I would build up an idea, then stop, stop short of going through with it. What if it wasn’t right? I’ve had an idea for a new book – actually, for a series of books – and I thought that it was good. Great actually, if it’s OK for someone to say that about their own ideas!
And yet… What if it wasn’t right?