My Mind Loves Ideas. But Is It A Good Idea to Act On Them? Learn 8 Strategies to Choose the Right Ones!

My mind produces ideas. Nonstop. Ideas on how to improve processes, how to build a business, how to bring something to life. And my mind loves the new, the exploration, the excitement of new tools it can use to stack its ideas together. But shall I let my mind do that? Every single time? What happens when I let it do that? Where do I end up? In this article I want to explore with you why its great to have an active mind, but also why it is important to not let it hijack your life.

Let’s dive into that exact moment right now

I am sitting at my desk at home. Yesterday I wrote down a list of items that I want to do today. I put down not only what I want to do, but I gave the activities timeframes. It looked liked this:

• 7 am: Waking up and getting ready for sports

• 7:30–9:00am: Outdoor Bootcamp and Taking a Shower

• 9:30–11am: Writing the article you are currently reading

• 11am-1pm: Book Translation (I am currently writing a book)

• 1–2pm: Break, Lunch (Avocado, Potatoes, Eggplant, Checkpeas)

• 2–4pm: Book Translation

• 4:15–6:15pm: Book Translation

• 6:15–6:45pm: Food

• 7–8:30pm: Admin stuff and publishing the English book version

• 8:30–10:30pm: Tennis training

I finished my sport, checked messages, changed my day slightly by adding a client meeting at 5:45pm, made myself a cup of tea and thought: “oh, wow, I was quick, I can start with the article earlier”.

Well. That did not work. The moment I sat on my computer, I saw that I had this tab open with a tool someone told me about yesterday: Framer. You can build websites with it. And I got super duper excited. I wanted to test it and check if it is an alternative to me currently creating websites with Wordpress and a design plugin. And so, while I prepared myself to write the article, I instead went back to Framer and played around with the tool.

And then I wanted to check how it works to connect an email form with it and what types of email programs you can out-of-the-box connect it to. And I read about a tool I never heard of before, loops, and wanted to know more about that tool. And then I saw a tool that I recently tried out for user authentication and realized that this might be an exciting tech stack to use for digital businesses.

And I started opening tabs on my computer for various articles on how to write smooth emails, what DNS really means, and what the ideal tech stack for a startup SaaS business should be in 2023. While I opened all these tabs and they are loading up, I turned my head around and saw two business cards I found in my living room sidebar this morning. I printed them a while ago and almost forgot that I did. I was surprised that they included much of what I love doing and was ideating about yesterday.

The business card’s front page content was “every change beings with a first step — are you ready to take it?” and the back page content was two-fold, as these were two different business cards. On both of them the header text was “Futureproof your business” and the text below: “call me and I help you with:” but then the content was VERY different. For one of the cards, the content was “with your change management, the roll-out of new tools, a digital mindset, joy for change and growth through innovation” and the other one’s content was “with your client relationships, your communication, your revenue, your sales strategy, your visibility and branding”. Well. After I read both cards, I checked with ta business card I created yesterday for a new idea I had “Unleash Your Creative Confidence” and my mind thought: “Oh, maybe I can combine that! Maybe there is a way to write something like”Future Proof your Professional Life!”, or “Bring your Ideas to Life!”. And I checked the business card I created in Canva and saw that the topics I wrote down how I can help clients are: “Corporate Branding, Digital Product Creation, Creative Strategy, Intuitive Strength, Business Building, Client Care & Compassion”. With that altogether, I wrote down some words, that popped up into my head “Skills, Minds, Creation, AI, Tech, Automations, Creativity”. And then?

I saw the clock ticking

I checked the clock on my computer. 9:20am. 9:26am. 9:30am. Oh no, it was time to write the article. “But this is so exciting, can I not play a bit more?” did my mind ask. “Yes, you can. But later”, would I answer. And at 9:36am, I was finally able to move myself out of the excitement of ideation and back into the real world. Producing something tangible. Something I love.

What are these Ideas?

My mind loves ideas. In these 10–15 minutes, it created a huge stream of thoughts, of interconnections and ideas that flowed out of my brain. From simply reading all that you were reading with right now, you can like create 20 businesses and 10 hobbies and 50 books and 4 lifetimes of work. Some of the ideas are great, some are questionable. But it is as if the mind is running into full exploration mode. Not stopping. Not focusing. It is like a flow that runs from one topic to the next, back and forth and trying to bring ideas and data points and tools and information pieces together and forming a big one synergetic construct in its mind. A construct that is malleable. Every time a new information comes in, it changes the construct and network slightly. It got new information that it tries to synthesis with the old.

A superpower turned black dark matter

I sometimes call it a superpower. It is fast. It has a lot of ideas. It connects various elements rather quickly. But a superpower on one hand can also turn into the opposite. It loves to connet any kind of information. So if it is in idea mode, it is all about future ideas, innovation, growth and excitement. But it is also quick to connect ideas that may be nihilistic, anxious-enhancing and fear-inducing. And what then? When I act upon them, what happens then?

Shall I only follow the good ideas. The great ones? But which ones are these? How can I tell? I would follow them all. Trying to find the perfect concept, the perfect connection of all those ideas that are running around in my mind. But I realized that there is one key ingredient missing when ideating and coming up with ideas and trying to figuring out which one to follow and where to go with them. An that is intuition. It is feeling. It is flow.

Why we need connection to our inner self to decide what to do

My mind loves those ideas. It can find the best ones. It can let me get super excited about any kind of idea and opportunity and new tool. But do I really need to act on all of them? And how can I decipher which ones are the best to follow?

It is not on my mind to decide. Because if it does, it finds an idea super exciting, loves the idea of it, and then, a day, or two, or maybe a week later, it finds something else that is as exciting as the previous one. And re-constructs its internal network to make sense of it all and connects the dots in a new way to create that internal consistency.

This is an ever ongoing loop of idea generation, acting upon that idea, connecting it with all there is the brain can find in that moment, coming up with beautiful new connections, creating business plans and marketing models and pricing strategies and building websites, and talking to people about it and then, after some days, learning about something new, and re-creating everything into a new idea, a new project, a new excitement. You can call it learning. But constant learning lacks one key ingredient. Progress. Growth. Being proud of what you create. To see development.

And this is what our mind cannot create for us. It cannot tell us how we feel, what a new idea does to us. Does it excite us? Does it let us be proud? Does it bring us forward? Or is it distracting us from something that we love doing already? That we try to find distractions from?

I realized when I run into my idea generation mode, I lose track of time. And that is beautiful. But if I follow that fleating excitement, I am not producing anything tangible. I am not writing an article for example and can be proud of that article. Instead I learn so much that my brain is lost in all of that new information during a day. And it needs to rest afterwards and than it synthesizes all of that information again. And that it gets sad when it realizes that the information os not fitting enough yet.

How to counterbalance that

I realized that there are some ways for me to counterbalance that loop of idea-spinning.

Feeling My Body’s Reaction

One is to feel. I lay my hand on my stomach and feel into my being and body. And then I talk to my body: “Is that feeling good right now? Is that something that let you sparkle? Does that excite you enough for not one day but two or three?” And if that idea sounds great on paper, perfectly well-thought-out, but not so well in my body feeling, I let it go.

Having an Ideas List

What also helps me is to have an ideas list. Whenever I have an idea of improving something, checking something out, a new business concept or a new way of doing things, I put them in lists. For later. In that way, the idea is not gone, I kind of acted upon it, but not that I invest and take time that I could alternatively use for a project that already got some traction.

Planning my day with time-frames

What I shared with you at the beginning of the article is one of the methods I use to keep myself accountable for the projects I am curently working on. When I only have a todo list, it is very difficult for me to keep track. But combining that with time blocks allows me to put in the time needed to bring my projects to life and even more important, to finish them. I also started to track times in mini-steps. For the book, I am currently translating, I counted the number of pages I can translate within an hour to get a clear understanding of how quick I am to do that and how much time I need to plan in to finish that.

Focus on one key project at a time

My time-frame planning helps me with this one: the focus on one key project at a time. I tended to wanting to do too many projects at the same time. I find it all exciting, why not do them all? I am impatient sometimes as they are all these projects and products and ideas waiting for me to bring to life. But when I put them all into my calendar at the same time, shortly after I will be lost in the sea of all the work I have to do. And as a result I would have several unfinished projects laying around. None of them brought to fruition, because I would feel overwhelmed. For that reason, I allow myself to only work on one or two major projects at the same time. And they are not allowed to be in the same category. This means, that for example, I cannot write two books at the same time. First finishing one, and then I can start with the next one.

Ideas and Projects become experiments

In addition to these focus projects, I sometimes build in some experimental projects. These are smaller ones and help me keep excited about the things I love like learning, experimenting and exploration. I would give those projects a timeframe of two weeks and a dedicated time during the day. If this work gives me pleasure and I would love to do more of it, I would move those experiments to longer-term projects and potentially into a focus project. But through these two-week time-frames I am not over-committing myself to them, but first try out if they have the potential to become more important or not.

Feeling the Joy

It is not necessarily a new strategy I use but a combination of some of those from above. But it helps me to figure out if what I do gives me joy or if it drains me. Do I love what I do? Does it feel good? Is it something I am passionate about? Sometimes though, as I have many things that excite me, I combine this with an additional internal check-in:

Does it tie back to my values and what I care about

I would check in and see if what I do ties back to what I truly value and what I want to achieve in life. These are not necessarily goals, but more guidelines and directions of what a good life looks like for me. And if an activity gives me both, joy and that value-related proudness and care, then this is a strong indicator that I should keep that activity and project in my day-to-day.

And last, but not least:

What kind of feeling do I get from it after I finished it?

When I finished a project, when I completed a day, when I ended an experiment, I would check in of how that experience felt and what happened to me in the meantime. Did the activity feel great? Was it draining? Did it suck out energy? And what about the end result? Am I happy? Am I proud of myself? Have I been all there and in the weed? Or did I feel detached from it? How would I tell others about it? Would my eyes spark or would I tell a story that wasn’t mine, expressionless and cold? Depending on my analysis, I would then adapt and change or keep going with what I enjoy so deeply.

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We all have our superpowers. And they all bring us joy. But do they move us forward? Do they make us proud? Some methods, some strategies can help. And I hope that some of those that I found for myself may help you too.

Please share your experiences, I would love to hear about them.