Googling Not Required
When you were a child and were living with abandon, you could be racing through your home and pretending you were a super hero and you would get struck with an idea. I want to paint a giraffe, wearing a sombrero, eating a doughnut. And you would stop in your super hero tracks and wonder off to find a blank sheet of paper and some felt tips that hadn’t had the life scrubbed out of them. And you would sit down and you would move that imagined doughnut eating, sombrero wearing giraffe out of your imagination and onto the blank sheet of paper. This is something every child does without any superfluous thinking. The idea is met with open arms and welcomed in and entertained fully and then just like that, a picture is now pride of place on a fridge door held up by a magnet and the superhero has returned to its five year old duties.
Fast forward and that same five year old is inhabiting a 45 year old body and is met with idea after idea and what does the adult version do with all these ideas? They create barrier after barrier between the idea and themselves. Chances are one of the first barriers that will be carried out is the act of Googling. They will Google their idea. Has it been done before? Is there a right way to do it? What will I need to do it? Where can I buy the things that I will need to do it? Is there a book I can buy to show me how it needs to be done, or a podcast I can listen to. Better still is there a course I could buy to show me how to do it? One thing after the other so that by the end of it, there is a nice hefty set of barriers in place between you and your idea.
The great thing about being inside the 5 year olds head is that they think anything is possible and that they are great at everything and the problem with the 45 year olds head is that they think nothing is possible and they are crap at everything. Neither conclusion is true but both sets of thinking are believed. Hence the outcomes speak for themselves. At least the 5 year old will give everything a go with an all out passion. The 45 year old will reason their way out of even beginning.
So how do we change this? We remove all the barriers between the idea and yourself and we go minimalist. We declutter our Google search by not even carrying one out. We just go straight from point A of having the idea to point B of executing on it. So the only thing needed is a blank sheet of paper and a felt tip and with age comes sophistication so you may have upgraded your felt tips to a fine liner and that is cool. Either way the action required to bring an idea into existence is the very same actions that your 5 year old self knew how to do. So nothing has changed there. And before you say you have bills to pay and a job to go to and a 5 year old to raise then please be aware that this is just your adult set of barriers that you have honed to perfection so that you can excuse yourself for not acting on your ideas. Because the truth is the 5 year old may not spend more than 5 minutes transferring the contents of their imagined giraffe to paper, the fact is that they did it. I have seen a child move at warp speed between getting ready for school, eating breakfast, reciting that day’s spellings and drawing all at the same time, the desire to act on their idea being that strong. So even in your adult world with all the elements vying for your attention an idea may only need 5 minutes of your time to begin with and that you can find, no Googling needed.