The Garden Test for Every New Idea
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When I buy plants for my home, I do so with a specific purpose in mind—usually a space I want to embellish. When the plant grows too big for that space, I cultivate it—cutting sections off and repotting it into a smaller container in the hopes that it grows into something beautiful. With the correct watering, food and sunlight, this cycle continues as the plant repeatedly outgrows its home.
I find it easy to get carried away and buy houseplants (I have about 40 in my home) because they immediately lift a space, a corner or an entire room. Ideas are like houseplants. For every beautiful plant I see there are a thousand great ideas I seemingly have. The problem with having too many house plants is that it's difficult to find the time between my job, sleeping, eating, having fun, doing nothing—and looking after them. They do need to be looked after—because they're attention seeking little bastards. They all want the sun, but not too much, watering, but not too much, and feeding but only at certain times of the year.
Great ideas demand similar attention. Without it, they wither as one promising concept is pushed aside for another, as my head, filled with dopamine, enthusiasm and anxiety battles to figure out what to do with all the information I just keep throwing at it.
If I went to a garden centre and somehow managed to bring home 6,000 plants. My wife would probably think I was having some kind of mental breakdown. She'd watch, eyes wide open, as I kept ferrying in one plant after another. “How many more do you have, Karl?” She'd ask. “All of them” I would exclaim. “I got as many as I could get my hands on.”
It's difficult to find an exact number because as you can imagine, it's a hard study to conduct, but the number of ideas we have per day is thought to be between 6,000 and 60,000. It's obviously a ridiculous idea for me to attempt to look after 6,000 plants, but it's not ridiculous for you to have 6,000 ideas jam-packed in your brain all competing for attention?
There's an old analogy to a cup of tea. If you want to drink new tea you have to get rid of the old tea that's in your cup, otherwise your cup just overflows and you get a wet mess. Your head is like that cup. It has a limited capacity and if you want to learn something about the world you should keep your head in order to learn it. It's very easy to spend your whole life swishing old tea around in your cup thinking it's great stuff because you've never really tried anything new, because you could never get it in, because the old stuff prevented its entry, because you were so sure the old stuff was so good, because you never really tried anything new... on and on in an endless circular pattern.
- Robert M. Pirsig
Consider your own experience with ideas and information. There comes a point where your time and attention just can't stretch anymore. It snaps. You might be able to tend to 5 concepts but what about 50, or 100? You just wouldn't have the time or bandwidth and if you did try to look after 100 ‘great’ ideas the care each received would diminish, as would other areas of your life as you attempted to keep up with your insatiable appetite.
Not every idea deserves space in your mental garden. You need to learn to cultivate ideas selectively and discover which conditions each idea thrives in. Some concepts flourish in the spotlight whilst others develop better in reflection. The plant/idea metaphor works because they both follow the same fundamental truth: they both can grow or die depending on how you care for them.
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