I used to regret not writing down ideas for posts that came to me at night. I wanted to hold on to every flash of insight. Even back then, rationally, I knew most of my ideas wouldn’t be great, but I thought, “Hey, if I don’t ship all of them, how will I ever find out which ones resonate with people?”
There is one problem with that approach: Trying to realize all of your ideas is exhausting. Even in an arena like writing blog posts, where you can ship a lot and do it quickly, you’ll never be able to do everything, so no matter how hard you try, you’ll always come up short. And if you’re a designer, video maker, or data analyst? Forget about it. You’ll have to choose carefully from the start.
Once I accepted that I’d never be able to publish everything, most individual ideas seemed to matter a lot less. Now, it doesn’t matter whether I post this draft or that one. What matters is that posts go out every day. Ironically, this turned out to be a better filter for good ideas than hoping the market would decide for me. Whatever I can’t publish for a while, will I come back to it organically? Does it pop into my head again unannounced? If I forgot the idea as soon as I woke up the next morning, it can’t have been that important, can it?
Will I lose some good, perhaps even some great ideas by not scribbling every stray thought onto a piece of paper? Probably. But I will skip a lot more bad ones I’ll never have to think about again, let alone turn them into paper planes which’ll never take flight.
Don’t be afraid to let go of the unassessed. Important ideas will come back to you—and the ones you’re truly meant to share won’t leave you alone until destiny is satisfied.