Just do it.

I’ve spent the last two years thinking about doing these two projects, and the actual effort to bring them into existence only took two weekends.

Cloud-painted piano
Slanted shelves in a closet with various books on them. A little girl wearing a toy space helmet sits in one of the shelves.

I arrived at an important insight: if you find yourself frequently revisiting an idea you have kicking around in your head, do your best to translate those thoughts into action as soon as humanly possible. It will be a far more efficient use of creative energy to simply execute instead of spending endless brain cycles pondering the idea.

Now obviously it takes time for ideas to form, and it’s good to give them time to percolate. But in my experience, too much thinking leads to overthinking. I always seem to get caught up in how much time and effort a thing is going to take, and that I’ll need to do a ton of preparation, and I’ll need to have things just right, and on and on. That thinking does nothing but talk me out of doing creative work.

But! I’ve been working on noticing myself cycling over things too much, and have made a deliberate effort to try to quickly translate the excitement of an idea into into an actual reality. I see this as a new muscle I’ve just discovered and am excited to start building.

So if you have an idea you keep coming back to in your head, just do it.