Ideas Come With Expiry Dates

Once you understand that, you’ll be forced to take action

Ideas are essential for entrepreneurs, writers, and creators. We often need just one idea to kickstart a business or write that viral article.

If you’re an idea hoarder like me, you'd have your Notes filled with article ideas and your journals filled with future business ideas, and some random ideas you’d never use in life.

Now, collecting all these ideas is an essential and integral part of the creative process, but after storing pictures for months, I learned that most of these ideas are not relevant after a few months or even a few weeks.

Ideas come with expiry dates. I am not talking about the timeless classic ideas but the ones that we get while walking our dog, reading an article, or scrolling through Twitter.

Ideas have an expiry date.

When we get an idea, we get excited. We jot them down in a convenient place and promise ourselves to come back to it soon. It happens to me all the time while reading or consuming any form of content.

I previously used to write these ideas in my Notes App, but I learned that I never actually go to my notes and re-read what once had hijacked my mind within a few months. So I began writing them in my Medium drafts. Now, I am sitting with 150+ unfinished drafts with some amazing ideas waiting to see the daylight.

This weekend I decided to go through all of them and see how many of them still sound exciting. To my surprise, 70% of them felt stale, and I couldn’t manage to connect with them like before. I can convert almost all of them in a thousand-word article, but I don’t see that oomph I had got them.

If I had written those articles when the idea stuck in my mind, the energy and the devotedness would be completely different. But with time we get ripened, the idea starts to stale.

Our perspective gets altered. We understand the market better.

I remember I wanted to write about how Clubhouse was an inefficient platform when launched, but I have seen its impact on listeners and creators over the last few months.

Our environment gets changed. We learn new things and developing our idea into another one. With time and further information, it doesn’t remain the same.

If we don’t take action on an idea now, we’ll never be able to share it with the world.

Out of all the ideas I jot down to write stories on Medium, I trash 90% of them because they get expired by the time I start working on them. Most of them sound ridiculous after sitting around in my drafts for weeks with tons of potential but don’t see the daylight due to procrastination and indecisiveness.

And an idea is all we need to transform our business, life but also ourselves.

To make sure you’re not letting go of a substantial idea

• Don't sit on it for more than a couple of days.
• If you’re not sure about it, test the idea on Twitter.
• Write a short post about it immediately before you spend weeks on research. Once you find it noteworthy, take your time to convert it into a long-form piece of content.
• Note that not all your ideas can change your life, but one among them is enough to do so. Therefore, documenting them is important.

If we take our ideas seriously and start working on them, we’ll gain a lot of clarity and a reservoir of content to go through in the future.

Holding them back because we think it’s not a great idea or it’s not fully developed, we allow it to escape, and once it leaves the periphery of our mind or mixes with a new or old idea, it loses its freshness.

The next time you put an amazing idea on hold, remember that you might be the only person who had that idea, and if it comes to you, it’s your responsibility to share it with the world.

It doesn’t matter if it’s fully developed or not, by sharing it you may find someone who can help you develop it.

Don’t let an idea with the potential to impact lives expire. Take action.

“There Is One Thing Stronger Than All The Armies In The World, And That Is An Idea Whose Time Has Come.” — Victor Hugo