Wednesday, November 19, 2008

An idea a day

I used to work for the Standard Oil company that was pumping the North Slope of Alaska that was 50% controlled by British Petroleum. And at one point we had some of the BP senior managers breeze thru and i spent a lunch talking to a guy who was paid a lot o money to work in strategic planning. "Our job is to come up with one good idea a day|. At first i was really enchanted by this idea.

When i lived in Brno i actually tried to do it for a time. I got a small journal and really worked at coming up with something new and useful each day. But it was quickly exhausting. Not so much because i could not come up with the ideas, but because the ideas once hatched would call for attention and ultimately there was too much to do.

I have this feeling here in Am*dam. Like i am overwhelmed by the possibilities. And i have happily given up trying to focus. And am just bathing in the impossible number of options. My current favs are:

3 comments:

Encounters of Joe said...

I recently got sick of my years-long cowardly streak and decided to *do one brave thing* a day. Small brave things allowed, but doing nothing brave, not allowed.

Anonymous said...

Just one idea a day? ;) the main issue with having new ideas so frequently is priorities. Which ones are really important to pursue, and which aren't? Also, what do you do with the ideas that you like, but you don't really want to work on? We should share them :) Anyway, it is a great exercise... and if you have the right mindset, ideas just come. It is all about creating the right circumstances...

Angie said...

i can certainly empathize. every day it seems there is a new wonderful idea or project, and i simply can't work on them all myself, and in fact only about 10% of them i would actually be effective with.

it seems like SiD needs to be the next big project on the slate, let's get these ideas out there, cause if we aren't going to do sky dry (and the dozen other things from the past few months) someone else certainly will. that gives me hope.