![\"Mind](\"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/images\/mindmap.jpg\" "\\"Mind")
It’s easy to come up with an idea and keep it tucked away safely in your head.<\/p>\nIt’s easy to come up with an idea and keep it tucked away safely in your head.<\/p>\n
Tell no one; you have this thing that cannot be touched or criticized by others. You can idealize it–make it into more than it might even be.<\/p>\n
It is all yours, a precious thing that you know is perfect. And you can keep it there–in your mind forever–untainted.<\/p>\n
For awhile, now, I’ve followed Laura Mills’s blog, The Blank Page<\/a>. Laura is…well, I hate calling her a teenage writer because she’s crossed the threshold of 18, and if someone called me a teenager at 18, I would have probably told them where they could stuff their “teenager.” So…young adult. Laura is a young adult who’s had insight in her truly teen years that I didn’t stumble upon until my mid 20s or so.<\/p>\n She wrote a good entry about expectation vs. reality<\/a>. I won’t spoil it because it’s worth the read, but the gist: what we build up in our mind often seems better than reality. But what matters is the work, and Laura gets that.<\/p>\n I’ve known a lot of people who, once I got them talking, confessed there were all kinds of things they wanted to do. They wanted to start a business, pursue an art, or just do something cool for the sake of doing it because they liked the thought. When asked why they never tried any of those things, they said one of two things:<\/p>\n I can–right now–think of several cool things that were not in my head 10 minutes ago. In 10 more minutes, I can build those things into something perfect. The only problem: it only seems<\/em> perfect in the safety of my mind. My mind has not done the work; my mind has inflated a mere idea into something I can carry, a secret perfection only I know about.<\/p>\n That does me no good. That does nobody <\/em>any good. I’ve seriously heard people who have seen a movie, read a book, or seen a product offered for sale get angry because, “I thought of that first!”<\/p>\n So what? Lots of other people probably did, too. And you probably really didn’t think of it like the person or people who made it real<\/em>. (In fact, you didn’t think of it for real because you idealized it in your mind, instead of making it a thing others can actually see.)<\/p>\nThe [Safe] Bubble<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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The Safety of the Mind (Hiding in Your Head)<\/strong><\/h2>\n