An irony:

As business professionals, we know that ideas are a dime a dozen and
that one of our big jobs is to get focused and stay focused. At the
same time, as business professionals we also have the ability to see
the great opportunities (and fun) in nearly any “good idea” that comes
our way. And so we find ourselves full of ideas that we’re dying to run
with, and dying to get rid of so we can get back to work on our
priorities.

fter years of suffering from this struggle, I came to understand my
mind treated ideas like animate creatures that deserved love and
attention and couldn’t just be dismissed. Therefore, if I was going to
say “goodbye” to idea (or at least au revoir), I needed to do it in a
way that felt good — with a sense that I had acknowledged the idea
completely and then moved it on to a satisfactory place in the universe.

How do I get it done?  Let me count some ways — some mental, some physical; some sweet, some not:

How to Say Goodbye to An Idea

Give it a hug, wish it well, kiss it goodbye.

Pass it along to someone else.

Wrap it up in butcher paper and throw it in the freezer.  (It’ll keep.  You can get it later if you want. )

Give it a nice long walk — think about it. really imagine what it
could turn into. smile at the possibilities of a future in which it
came true (or grimace in horror if you realize that it could turn into
a nightmare). now it’s happy that you’ve given it a walk, and it’s ok
with the idea of being done. now you can walk away.

Give it a ceremonial death — write it down and burn it. enjoy the
fire. know that you’ve “released the energy of the idea back into the
universe.” it didn’t get wasted, it just got converted.

Give it an exorcism (for the really sticky cases) — throw holy water
on it. cast out the demons. make it harmless. grind it into little
bits. then you can walk away. (just don’t turn around or you’ll
reanimate it and you’ll have to start all over again.)

Reductio ad absurdum it — in a variation of the long walk,
think of how this idea could really fail, really stink, and really make
no sense. notice how it doesn’t seem so appealing any more?

Compare it to your known priorities — take a look at what expect to
get if you stay focused on your known priorities. think about what you
won’t get if you drop your priorities and move on with some new idea.
most of the time, I’ll bet that sticking to your existing list will
look like a better move, and that will help you move on. note: if you
discover that sticking to your existing list compares most unfavorably,
you might have to ditch the old idea, not the new one. but you knew
that already, didn’t you?

That’s all for now.  What have you got?

Edward Topsell advised against being
“Penny wise, and pound foolish” with the management of animal feed.
Today, we keep his counsel in avoiding the pursuit of small savings at
the expense of attention to larger costs.

So, too, ought we be careful with other pennies — the “shiny
pennies” of potential revenue (from some just-arrived and poorly define
new opportunity) that distract us from the intentional pursuit of
revenue from sources that we know are worth the chase.

“We need to remind ourselves not to chase every shiny penny that
catches our eye,” said a client of mine not long ago.  They’d recently
grown to $6MM in revenues from ~$1.5MM just three years earlier, in no
small part because they’d kept their focus where it needed to be.  And
they knew how important it was to keep reminding themselves about what
got them there.

Nobody’s perfect. But without proper
perspective, we can often waste a lot of energy beating ourselves up
for not doing as well as we might have.

In his book How Good Do We Have to Be?, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes:

We tend to use the words guilt and shame more or less
interchangeably, as synonyms for feeling bad about ourselves. But
psychologists and anthropologists see them as different emotions.
Basically, they see guilt as feeling bad for what you have done or not
done, while shame is feeling bad for who you are, measured against some
standard of perfection or acceptability. The distinction is crucial,
because we can atone for the things we have done more easily than we
can change who we are. But human nature being what it is, we move so
easily from one to the other. We hear criticism of something we have
done, and translate it into a comment about what sort of person we are.
We assume it is our worth as a person, not just our behavior, that is
being judged and found wanting.

For those of us with ADD, there are extra risks, as well: our speed
at jumping to a conclusion can combine with speed to do or say
something we would later like to change. Imagine: a client questions
one piece of our work, we take it personally, we get angry, and we lash
out with a retaliatory insult. What’s achieved? At best — the need to
backtrack, apologize, and fix our stuff with extra care because we’ve
dug ourselves into a relationship hole. At worst — an alienated client,
a lost job, and a lifetime to regret another episode where we didn’t
manage our impulses.

There’s a reason we ought “count to ten” when we’re pissed. Let’s
just make sure we actually count all ten numbers, instead of just
jumping to the end