Be A Crow, Not A Puppy
Do y'all remember the news story that came out several years ago about little girl who would leave food for crows and they would bring her little shiny trinkets? (Google "girl who gets gifts from birds".)
I think about that all the time.
Being creative is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we're rarely short of ideas. On the other, our ideas can keep us from finishing what we started.
Being pulled around by the creative impulse like this is often called Shiny Object Syndrome.
Shiny Object Syndrome can show up as boredom with your current projects when new ones present themselves.
This relationship to ideas prevents us from finishing what we've started.
Shiny Object Syndrome can also show up as mistaking new ideas for work orders that all have the same urgency and priority level.
Everything is number one and must be tended to immediately.
This relationship to ideas causes overwhelm and burnout.
Be a crow, not a puppy.
Be a Shiny Object Collector, not a shiny object chaser.
Be provident. Save ideas in your back pocket.
Build a library of ideas to pull from as needed.
Capture them. Categorize them. Organize them. Make them easy to find.
Be discerning. Curate your gallery of ideas.
You don't need to showcase them all at once.
Edit some of them out altogether; let them go.
Be generous. Give them away.
There's plenty to go around.