I’ve written about this a thousand times before, yet I like to document my thoughts as they come naturally. This way, the doctors at my eventual psychiatric ward can understand my inner workings and have one of those “it all makes sense” moments.
Anyway, no matter what I do every day, I keep ending up in the same place. Every single time I get a free moment to allow myself to create a thought, it gets flooded with ideas of “what can I do next?” It’s clear that it has become a sickness, but I can’t imagine anything curing this disease other than…well, finding something.
Until now, most of my conversations in my head go like this:
Me: Oliver, I have so many things I’d like to do, but I can’t think of one actual path.
Me: Mario, you should probably explain to people why you refer to your other voice as Oliver.
Me: In time, Oliver.
End of conversation.
But lately, I’ve made more concerted efforts to try to hone my thoughts and actually create ideas that are possible. To my surprise (shock, really), it actually, kinda, sorta worked. I started focusing on what I, an average internet-goer, would enjoy, and took some notes. I had a few plans (of course, formulated mainly in the car or shower), and waited until I had some time in front of the computer to actually flush them out.
In all my years of existence, if I’ve learned nothing at all, I still learned that all of my crazy ideas seem great at first, but always end up being less practical than I assumed. I understand this, and that’s why I now curb my excitement before making any plans. Amazingly, this most recent set of ideas wasn’t instantly squashed by problems like “there is no real demand”, “there is no margin for profit”, or “the berries would rot”. Instead, I got hit by the next hammer of truth.
Everything I want to do has already been done before.
And since I routinely refer to myself as a “Jack of all Trades, Master of None“, nothing that I could personally do would be better than what’s already out there. I haven’t mastered anything. This is, as usual, a big disappointment for me.
At least this most recent effort wasn’t in vain. I was able to find a few new companies that intrigue me, and it is nice to know that some of my ideas (although very basic and obvious) are successful. It helps me think that something cultivated in my mind has a chance to blossom.
More importantly, I’m not so sure that there aren’t a few things out there that I could do better than others (that was almost a triple negative and I don’t even know if the point was properly made…). I’m torn whether to spend my time thinking of ways to improve on existing projects, or finally get ahead of the curve and beat someone to the punch.
Either way, I have to be getting close. No one that spends this much time wracking their brain for sustainable ideas should come away empty-handed. I know there must be other people out there that feel this way, but it makes me sad to think that they already started making something happen, while I sit here and write about it. This is where I would normally dramatically declare that things will change and I will dive into something in an instant! Unfortunately, one simple thing separates me from those entrepreneurs out there.
They have ideas. I just have my thoughts.
And Oliver.