Ideas Are Nothing

‘All worthwhile men have good thoughts, good ideas and good intentions—but precious few of them ever translate those into action.’

-John Hancock Field

‘It is good to dream, but it is better to dream and work.  Faith is mighty, but action with faith is mightier.  Desiring is helpful, but work and desire are invincible.’

-Thomas Robert Gaines

Ideas are nothing without action.  Everyone has ideas.  Most don’t take action on their ideas.  What prevents us from taking action?  Let’s focus on two of the big ones.

You want everything to be ‘just right’ before you take action.  Here is the news flash, everything will never be ‘just right’.  You can always have more money in the bank.  You can always fine tune your product before you take it to market.  You will never have enough free time.

Unfortunately, many a life has gone by waiting for everything to be ‘just right’.  Many ideas never had the chance to manifest and benefit the world because things were never ‘just right’.  While we wait for the perfect time to come, our ideas get stagnate and slowly disappear.

You can’t see all of the steps between your current state and the idea.  You will never be able to know all of the steps that you will encounter once you begin taking action.  There will always be uncertainty present.  How is a 300 page book written? One word at a time.  If you need to know the entire story before you begin writing page one, the book will never be written.  

It is helpful to use the analogy of driving a car on the highway at night time before the invention of GPS.  You have the idea of driving from point A to point B, but certainly can’t see all of the potential obstacles, traffic, and signs between point A and point B.  You can only see a few hundred feet in front of your car.  However, you take action and drive anyways.  You turn when you can see the sign tells you to turn.  You slow down when you see a branch that has fallen in the road.  At the end of your drive, you reach point B.  Maybe not exactly how you thought your drive would go, but you arrived.

Have you ever told someone about an idea you had, and they said, ‘great idea, you should do something with that’?  Did you do something with it?

There is no better time than the present to do something about your ideas.  Take action.  Your idea could be great, or nothing could come of it.  But please, don’t always wonder what might have been had you taken action.

Kyle C. Ryan