The key to turn ideas into reality

Today I figured out why my blog isn't working. The idea behind it was to create a catalyst for creative work. Because I have too many ideas. I don't know how to pick the best one. My blog was meant to help with this. I didn't (and still don't) care what I am writing about. What mattered was to pick an idea, work on it, write about what I worked on, and repeat this process until I found something I wanted to keep pursuing. This isn't what happened. Instead of picking ideas and working on them, I started to write about how to pick ideas. Instead of being a catalyst, my blog became a place where I wrote about why I wanted to have such a catalyst in the first place. Today I understood that resolving this mismatch isn't about ideas. It's about commitment.

My current writing practice is to sit down every morning and to write one post. I don't have a long-term plan with this. More often than not I only think about what I want to write right before I start writing. Once I have written a post, I never think about it again. This was the idea behind my daily blog. I'm using it to practice finishing what I'm working on. But it didn't bring me closer to an idea I wanted to commit to long-term.

There is no magical bullet to learn how to commit to something. You just have to start doing it. So, just like the myriads of times before, I started to brainstorm what idea I wanted to commit to. I quickly found some ideas I liked. But they weren't new. They were ideas I had had before, sometimes a very long time ago. This reinforced the feeling that what I needed to do wasn't dependent on finding a new idea. I needed a better filter. While I thought about this, I remembered my Buffet 2-List.

A professional makes a promise and keeps it. This is the most important thing for me to internalise right now. The Buffet 2-List is a promise to myself. But I hadn't looked at it for at least three weeks. The items on this list are things I want to do, but don't feel as shiny as whatever comes up in the moment. But a commitment isn't about how shiny the idea currently feels. A commitment is about keeping the promise. I don't need to find the next idea I want to work on. I just have to work on the ideas I already promised myself to work on. This sounds simple. But it's the hardest thing I never did. And it's the only way forward.