As a person who loves to learn something new every day, I tend to spend a lot of time thinking and brainstorming new ideas. I’m especially fond of brainstorming while walking or exercising, and also really enjoy brainstorming with colleagues. Often when I’m excited about a good idea, I send myself multiple voice messages to capture my thoughts so I can mull them over later.
My fondness for brainstorming results in frequent new ideas—which is great! And many of those ideas are pursued to fruition. But sometimes I am so enamored with a particular idea, concept, phrase, or title that I find it difficult to let go of it—especially if I’ve put time and energy into creating it. Once I’m invested in something, I don’t want to give it up—even if something bigger and better comes along to replace it.
In a short blog post a number of years ago, best-selling author and speaker Seth Godin talked about a similar tendency among organizations:
“I find that it’s almost essential to fall in love with an idea [in order] to invest the time it takes to make it good and worth sharing. And then, the hard part: deleting that idea when it’s just not what it could be. Too often, organizations are good at the first part, but struggle with the second. And so we defend expired business models, support the status quo and have a knee-jerk inclination to preserve what we’ve got.”
Sometimes we’ve got something great that is worth hanging onto and fighting for. And sometimes what we have is good or ‘okay,’ but we should be willing to let it go in favor of something better. It takes flexibility, humility, and wisdom to know the difference.
How about you, are you willing to let go when you need to? What’s something that you’ve invested in and are hanging on to that might need to be given up in favor of something better?
To read the full post by Seth Godin, please click here.
