Waiting Is Risky

I’m a note-taker and a list-maker. I have lists of books I want to read and movies I want to watch, but most of my lists are for collecting ideas. They include ideas for blog posts, websites, businesses, open-source code, video games, books, and other kinds of projects.

Some of these ideas, the really good ones, have been gestating for years. I find myself returning to them often to add details as I think of them, continually fleshing them out, and refining them. Some have pages of notes by this point. I tell myself that when the time is right for a new post, project, business or book, I can pick up the idea and run with it.

Sometimes it works pretty well. Both Gridmaster and Music Box Fun were long-gestating project ideas that I built and launched when the time was right.

But I’ve also learned that waiting for the right time is risky.

For one, sometimes the world changes, and your idea no longer makes sense.

I once drafted a blog post about some quirky behaviors in npm, but by the time I came back to refine it, the behaviors had been fixed. Another time, I had an idea for a podcast, only to watch somebody else create it (they did a great job). Most recently, I’ve found that several of my project ideas can be replaced by a simple AI prompt (like, “Generate some lorem ipsum text in the style of Dr. Seuss”).

But the other reason that waiting is risky, is that you change.

I’ve got several ideas for children’s books, but I can feel my interest in them waning as my kids get older. Several of the business ideas I added grew out of pain points that I no longer have. And when I look at some of the more ambitious projects, I wonder if I even still have the appetite to take a swing at them.

Maybe it’s good that I didn’t waste my time building some niche thing only to have it replaced by AI. Maybe I dodged a bullet by not committing to a business I would have grown out of.

But when I look at my freshest, most exciting ideas—it pains me to know that if I don’t build them now, I might never do it, because I’ll never feel as passionate about them as I do today.