Have you ever thought of a nice idea, like a story for a book, and stopped by executing it because someone else was first?

I surely did. And I also knew that ideas alone are of no value, yet it blocked me anyway.

In my mind I thought I was simply adding repetition to the world, nothing new. We like “new” ideas. We like being first in something and that’s probably one of the reasons I stopped pursuing that idea.

Let’s take the idea for the book I told you before. It was about a different outcome in WW2.
Can you imagine how many stories on this topic have been made? Even a tv series.

They didn’t stop and it was the right choice.

An idea by itself is not enough to be neither interesting nor revolutionary. An idea can be a nice concept, but alone is worthless.

It’s what you put into the recipe that makes the difference. It the things around the idea, the execution, your take on a problem, that makes it different.

Take on ideas that you like even if they are already present in the world. Think basecamp, nobody thought it would succeed this way.
There will be many ideas that will produce failure, but that shouldn’t stop you unless you absolutely need to have them succeed.

In some cases success is simply being able to express the idea in its glory.