The Secret to Bringing Your Idea to Life

Get started!

Okay, I know that may seem overly simple, but it’s true. Getting started is almost always the hardest part, and you can’t experiment, or revise your idea if you don’t start.

Start simple

What is the smallest, simplest version of your idea? For example, I was working on making images for the book, The Ice Cream Mill, and I knew that I would need to make images with ice cream, but I didn’t know what I wanted them to look like. So, grabbed a pile of computer paper and a marker, and started quickly drawing as many simple versions of ice cream cones as I could think of.

Some looked like ice cream cones, others more like cupcakes, and some looked a bit more like snow cones. AND, that was okay. I was getting a better understanding of my idea, and how to bring it to life.

Start small

When you start working on an idea, you don’t need to spend 5 hours, and if you think that you do, you’ll never start. Instead, give yourself 15 minutes and see what you create. When the stakes are low, it’s much easier to start, and often, you’ll discover that you’ll spend more than 15 minutes working.

Once I had a lot of sketches of ice cream cones, I knew that I didn’t want the cones to be black and white. So I decided to grab scraps of painted paper, my scissors and glue, and see how many ice cream cones I could quickly create by making a few cuts and gluing them onto the paper.

I ended up spending more than 15 minutes and made a PILE of these as I ended up having so much fun. Once I let go of perfection and leaned into playful experimentation, some fun results emerged.

What’s something that you’ve wanted to do, create, or write?

What’s the smallest version of that thing? Create that.

Set a timer for 15 minutes and work on doing, creating, or writing, and see what happens. Bonus points if you do it every day.