It's not about ideas

With January come and gone, it's time for me to check in and see how I'm doing on my theme for this year: learning.

Learning to do. Doing. Making. Not just thinking. It feels like I've been doing too little thinking and definitely too little doing. Doing frightens the life out of me. And I suspect that goes for most people. Ideas are wonderful, I love them, I have lots of them, I get quite a kick out of them. But they're not real. Not until I make them real. And sometimes I do, but most of the time I don't. So I've been thinking why not. Why don't the vast majority of my ideas see the daylight outside the narrow confines of my head? Why do they float around, get written down occasionally, discussed and debated with friends, but rarely materalise?

I think there's a couple of explanations. Firstly, I'm scared. Scared of doing. Scared that it won't ever be as good in real life as it will inside my head. Scared that if an idea becomes real, people will make fun of it, or won't like it, or worse even, that I won't like it. As long as an idea is just a few atoms floating around in my brain, it doesn't really matter.

Secondly, doing and making is hard. We don't get taught to do an make in schools much beyond kindergarten stage. At least I wasn't. My education has been very verbal and written, but hardly visual and creative in the sense of creating physical objects. I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't know how to make anymore. I live in my head. Like most of us professionals do, making is what others do after I've done the thinking. Also, education doesn't stimulate failing, it stimulates success. No one gives you high marks for trying something and failing; part of making and doing is failing however. You can't do or make without occasionally failing. So I'm going through some remedial training at the moment to think more visually and to stimulate myself to fail. Better to have tried and failed, than not to have tried at all.

One of the reasons I love my MADS course is that it forces me to do. We get encouraged to think, and research, and to use a physical artefact in that research. I hadn't thought about this much in my first year, but now that I'm working on my final project, it's becoming something I think about more and more. How very clever and well thought out that we should use something physical to engage people in a conversation about our ideas. A physical thing makes conversation that much easier.

I was reminded of doing and making (the two for me are intimately linked) by listening to a video clip of Bruce Nussbaum interviewing Tim Brown of IDEO today, where Tim emphasizes the importance of getting thoughts in the physical realm. Make it real.

Some learning-to-do inspiration
99% conference: It's not about ideas. It's about making ideas happen. (and talking about making things happen :-)

'Things our friends have written on the Internet': Really Interesting Group and Ben's write up (happy to report I've got one of the 1,000 copies!)

Papercamp and a great write-up here.

I saw that Tim Whirledge also wrote on making ideas happen, seen from an agency perspective.

This post is dedicated to my partner in learning-to-do crime: Farhan

Comments

[Farhan Lalji]

Wow. The most frightening things are almost always the ones worth most. Only academics are paid to think - and even then they need to do research, to do lessons and to do consulting and other things. Doing is definitely tough, but worth it in the end. jump.

[T Vu]

Darling you may try and fail but you'll never ever be a failure, I am sure of that. I envy the fact that you have these great sparks that are more than just a few atoms whirling around, I can hardly ever get an idea into my head. Like Farhan said, JUMP!

And yes, I know that telling you to do it is easier than doing it myself.