Sparks to light your wild idea
Taming a Wild Idea | A Pox Upon Perfection
Taming a Wild Idea, Step One One of the most challenging aspects to taming a wild idea is moving it from the ever-so-tasty place where you can love it from a distance to diving in to make it real. There's something truly delicious about allowing grand ideas to stay wild. They're always perfect when they live in the edges of our imaginations. They can dance there, sparkling and undulating, and we never have to worry about discovering that they have really bad breath. Or unclipped toenails. Or that they actually have the rhythm of a particularly ungraceful warthog. It is so [...]
Meet Your Fear Monster: Name & Tame What Scares You
Meet Your Fear Monster: Name and Tame What Scares You Naming and Taming Fear As I talk with people about their wild ideas, fear comes up a lot. Whether they're just beginning to dare to say them in their heads. Or out loud anywhere other than in the middle of the night, alone. Or whether they're midstream in bringing their idea to life and looking to dream them further. And even when they're a serial wild dreamer, as they embark on the next one. So, I'm going to talk about it a lot. I don't think fear ever goes away when [...]
A Herd of Words: Frivolous and Frivolously Defined
A Herd of Words One of the wild ideas I'm working on is shaping a section of my doctoral dissertation. I wrote on frivolity, and the point of pointlessness (because, dissertation in mythology!). My dissertation was a wild idea itself, in many ways. I was both embracing and whacking away at the ideas of academic seriousness. As a result, I included a variety of elements you don't usually find in dissertations. My thesis advisor convinced me that a 'fun with footnotes' section was too much. As was the game where you write messages on random pages like you did when you [...]
Friends Help Bring Wild Ideas to Life: First Thoughts
Friends Help Bring Wild Ideas to Life The Solitude of Our Imaginations We dream big, wild, wonderful ideas in the solitude of our own imaginations. (Most of the time, at least.) It's a pretty glorious thing to ride what philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls 'the voyage into the land of the infinite.' The seas can be as wide and deep as we wish, and the voyage as truly infinite as we'll allow ourselves, with no one injecting deadly practicality into the mix. Infinity can be so intoxicating, such a marvelous ride. But there's a point in that voyage (the vanishing point, maybe?) [...]
Beautiful Thugs: Gardening Your Wild Idea
"Je sais aussi, dit Candide, qu'il faut cultiver notre jardin." - Voltaire, Candide Cultivating My Own Garden Last week, I wrote about the power of getting to those pesky tasks that can bog us down fast, when we think of them, to get them out of the way. This week, because I am a contrarian (and continue to learn that the process of chasing and taming wild ideas is inherently contrarian in many ways!), I didn't follow my own advice. I didn't get the post done for this week's email on Tuesday, my self-imposed 'day of sending.' An effort, [...]
Doing: When You Think of a Task, Do It
When You Think of a Task, Do It When you think of a task, do it as it occurs to you. Here’s the logic behind this thought. There are going to be more things that you are going to need to do per day by a factor of a number with more zeroes than I know how to pronounce, and I can last until about a kajillion. (Or was that bazillion?) Anyway, lots. And lots. And a lot of them are just bits of things that you need to do to keep momentum towards making your wild idea come to life. [...]
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