There is a general consensus that as soon as an idea comes to your mind you should start working on it my making more concrete steps and often used sentence is “Putting idea to paper”. Though it leads to making an action, many times people take an illformed idea to paper. Our mind is awesome when it comes to dimensions, any idea we have it is so easy to visualize and develop. Sometimes we have to let the thoughts ruminate and let the idea evolve before finally putting it onto paper.

Why should it be that way? Because we are not so good at expressing what is in our head either in words or picture. Also there is a risk of getting stuck on what we put to paper because of the sunk cost fallacy. Every new idea that comes up will be very very abstract, if we try to channelize energy in capturing it then it won’t be something that is easily actionable. Very few people will be able to represent on paper what they had in mind, like artists but they rely on their ability to iterate on paper or discard their work if not going in the right direction as they thought about it.

When ideas come out in our mind, it makes sense to capture what the idea is but not the details just in case those ideas come as shower thoughts and can quickly melt away. Once the idea gets planted in our mind, it has to take shape. This is where we jump the gun and try to put it to paper and many times let it slip away.

I have observed ideas to be shaping up in my mind like a bell curve. It usually gets more evolved when I run thought experiments but after a while if I don’t put it to paper it disappears, so I had to put it to concrete plans at the right time else it is of no use. People may argue that this is procrastination and it is encouraging people to postpone their work.

We are very poor in putting a well known idea to paper. Read about this experiment where people were asked to draw a bicycle from memory. It looks like most people who have ridden a bicycle all their life will not be able to draw one even to some degree of making a working prototype out of it.

Any idea is worth putting into iterations inside our great brain which can evolve it in multiple dimensions before it can be put to paper. All we need to know is the right time to put idea to action else it will not take off because of analysis paralysis.