Honestly curious- have you experienced bringing an idea on the backburner back to life? I've always felt like if immediate action isn't taken and maintained to move an idea forward it dies.
I'd love to hear your perspective here, I'm interested.
I just brought one back a couple weeks ago (http://eve-language.blogspot.com/). I'd started it 3 weeks before my startup, and then let it die to focus on something that might actually make money, and am now bringing it back as a hobby project.
If you're really passionate about something, it's not going to die just because you spend some time on other stuff.
I think the "strike while the anvil is hot" phenomena is largely because of survivorship bias. Most of the time, if you drop an idea after 2 weeks, you're not going to come back to it. But that's because most ideas that are only 2 weeks old aren't very good and should probably be abandoned anyways. While if you've been turning the idea over in your head for 2-3 years (as Eve had been, before I started working on it), another 18 months isn't going to make much difference.
I've done that a number of times. I have to, because in my life, ideas are constantly jostling for first place, and falling to the side.
I'm blessed with an ability to focus very sharply on one idea and do great things with it, but that blessing is a curse too since while I'm focused, I tend to ignore all the other stuff.
On the other hand, I've also got a bad habit of starting many more things than I can finish. As a result, most of my ideas have been on the backburner for some time. Eventually, they have to become the focus, but being on the backburner doesn't mean they're gone (though some of them certainly do change and evolve and even die while on the backburner... but I don't get too attached to a single idea).
Comments
Honestly curious- have you experienced bringing an idea on the backburner back to life? I've always felt like if immediate action isn't taken and maintained to move an idea forward it dies.
I'd love to hear your perspective here, I'm interested.
I just brought one back a couple weeks ago (http://eve-language.blogspot.com/). I'd started it 3 weeks before my startup, and then let it die to focus on something that might actually make money, and am now bringing it back as a hobby project.
If you're really passionate about something, it's not going to die just because you spend some time on other stuff.
I think the "strike while the anvil is hot" phenomena is largely because of survivorship bias. Most of the time, if you drop an idea after 2 weeks, you're not going to come back to it. But that's because most ideas that are only 2 weeks old aren't very good and should probably be abandoned anyways. While if you've been turning the idea over in your head for 2-3 years (as Eve had been, before I started working on it), another 18 months isn't going to make much difference.
I've done that a number of times. I have to, because in my life, ideas are constantly jostling for first place, and falling to the side.
I'm blessed with an ability to focus very sharply on one idea and do great things with it, but that blessing is a curse too since while I'm focused, I tend to ignore all the other stuff.
On the other hand, I've also got a bad habit of starting many more things than I can finish. As a result, most of my ideas have been on the backburner for some time. Eventually, they have to become the focus, but being on the backburner doesn't mean they're gone (though some of them certainly do change and evolve and even die while on the backburner... but I don't get too attached to a single idea).