You’re at concert and the band is playing all your favourite hits. Suddenly, you hear something unfamiliar, and you realize the band is playing a deep cut. Are you disappointed or thrilled to hear a lost gem?

We recently attended a Toto concert and were reminded of the forgotten gem below. After of week of humming it incessantly, I started to think if there were other deep cuts in my life that I dismissed prematurely. Are there ideas that I should revisit? Or were those ideas abandoned for good reason?

The Harvard Business Review article, How Gatorade Invented New Products by Revisiting Old Ones, states:

Innovation isn’t just about discovering shiny, brand-new offerings. It’s about innovating around core products to breathe new like into old offerings.

As the title suggests, the article focuses on how Gatorade reconnected with their core customers, the serious athlete. Gatorade discovered that in addition to the need to hydrate during athletic events, athletes were also loading up on carbohydrates before the event and drinking protein shakes after the event to recover. A new product range incorporating all three was developed and revitalized their core product. Sales increased dramatically.

While this approach worked well for an existing product with a strong core customer base, what about those ideas you’ve been collecting? Nick Douglas in his article, Kill Your Old Ideas So You Can Be More Creative, refers to this as ‘idea debt’:

Idea debt is the pile of ideas you keep revisiting but never finish, or even never begin. It can be a book, an app, a business, any project that grows in your mind but not in reality.

I fall into this camp and the danger of idea debt is that it can feel more impressive than the projects you’re actually working on. The idea debt “metastasizes, threatening to hold up the real projects, or halt them so long that they too become idea debt”.

Douglas doesn’t suggest we simply abandon these old ideas but work to ‘pay down’ the idea debt through a few steps:

• Make It Now: Take one of the big ideas and shrink it down until it can be completed in a day. Not perfected, just done.
• Put It In a Current Project: Incorporate it, even in a small way, in an existing project. It will help you scratch the itch without abandoning your current project.
• Hand It Over: Give your ideas away to a good home. It might be hard to set it free but you’ll feel the pressure evaporate.
• Dump It Out: As the author states, “ideas might feel like pets or children, but they’re not; it’s healthy to abandon most of them”. Do a brain dump and move one.
• Make a Plan: Make a plan to implement those ideas you simply can’t part with.

Of course, the difficulty is deciding which ideas to let go of, much like the old clothes in your closet. Pick up an idea and if you can’t see yourself ‘wearing it’ in the next year, let it go. Or replay those forgotten gems and see which you’re still humming in a week….