Elliot Swan

Project Evolution: Ideas, Execution and Finding a Proper Balance 2:07 pm

People love to argue over what’s more important, the idea or the execution. Fact is, without one, the other’s worthless.

The Problem With Generating Ideas

Ideas are great, and you really need one of these before you can even start with the execution part. We generate ideas through brainstorming, plotting, business planning, and all that other pre-execution stuff.

But therein lies the problem–sometimes we worry so much about getting the perfect idea before we start developing that we never actually move onto developing. Eventually, the idea just gets scrapped because nothing ever happened with it. Somewhere along the line, somebody’s gotta start actually developing the thing.

The Problem With Execution

Another fact: You’ll just about always make new discoveries once you start developing your original idea, and these discoveries will often sidetrack and distract you from that. However, you need to be open to these, because these new discoveries could possibly be worth much more than your original, well thought-out idea.

The original idea still remains a very important aspect, but the idea doesn’t have to stay 100% the same throughout development. By all means, have that business plan. But don’t hold your idea in such high regard that you forfeit execution. Because without the execution, your idea is worth absolutely nothing. The important thing is that you start working with an idea, that you start executing something–even if it’s not what you will eventually end up with.

Let your idea inspire you to start executing, then let your execution continue to inspire your ideas.

Finding the Balance

Obviously, if we keep getting sidetracked and distracted by new discoveries and ideas, we will still never get anywhere. We still need to evaluate all of these and decide whether or not they lead to a direction we want to take our current project.

If it is, go for it. If not, save it to kickstart the next one.