Thinking of this as 'debt' doesn't seem quite right to me. It's not like someone's going to come and break your kneecaps some day if you don't act on these ideas. You don't owe these ideas to anyone, and you don't have to 'pay them back'. Calling this debt is like calling the hours while we sleep and are not being paid 'income debt', or calling our front lawn 'food debt' because we haven't planted a garden there. How dare we!
I'm as guilty as anyone of amassing ideas and half-baked projects in various files and/or boxes of junk around the house, but I don't think of them as debt. They're all opportunities. Some are good, some are bad, and some have been missed, but they're not debt. I happen to think that some of them have the potential to make me a lot of money should I choose to implement them, but there are no guarantees. There is nobody out there saying, "Here's a check for $20M if you implement that idea right there, and you get to keep half."
'Follow your dreams'...'Do what you love and the money will follow'...'Nothing ventured, nothing gained' these are phrases that all sound great from the other side of success, but when you have a normal life with a family and a mortgage, the decision to pursue your opportunities is not as cut and dried. Having to weigh the consequences of not earning a paycheck to pursue one of these opportunities against food on the table or missing a mortgage payment, or even just not spending those evening free-time hours with your kids changes the equation substantially.
I think the idea is that some people experience them as debt they owe themselves. If you've never felt that way, I can see why this would not make sense to you. (No sarcasm or harshness intended; I mean that straight.) Some of us had to come to this conclusion by a harder route. For myself, I still learned it fairly early, but I do remember learning it. My natural inclination was to finish everything.
As I type that, it occurs to me for the first time that I grew up in an environment where that was explicitly said to me sometimes. Even to this day, my now-retired father can be heard angsting about the projects he has not finished, and he tried his well-meaning best to pass that on to me. Perhaps this stems from the problems of leaving the physical projects he primarily works on half-done; a half-done remodeling is an ugly thing. A half-done car restoration takes up a lot of space and gets worse over time if you don't work on it as it basically rots. But creative projects have different rules. I've got at most a few hundred kilobytes of old programs lying in my sentimental directory... who cares? Who even knows? It's so tiny I tend to even forget it exists.
> 'Follow your dreams'...'Do what you love and the money will follow'...'Nothing ventured, nothing gained' these are phrases that all sound great from the other side of success, but when you have a normal life with a family and a mortgage, the decision to pursue your opportunities is not as cut and dried. Having to weigh the consequences of not earning a paycheck to pursue one of these opportunities against food on the table or missing a mortgage payment, or even just not spending those evening free-time hours with your kids changes the equation substantially.
It's so refreshing to see someone else on the other side of start-up culture. I enjoy my current position including the people that I work with, but deep down, I would love nothing more than the option to do nothing all day if I wish. That always triggers the influx of, "Start your own business!" comments followed by, "Tons of people just quit, bootstrap and succeed!"
They ignore all of the failures. They ignore all of the people who ruined their family stability, who lost assets, or who gave up weeks/months/years of family time to chase a dream that didn't pan out. I'm not some curmudgeon who believes that chasing dreams is for suckers; I feel like it's very reasonable to want to set yourself up for continued stability (much like a 3-6 month emergency fund) if you're gambling your family's financial and mental well-being on your dream.
>'Follow your dreams'...'Do what you love and the money will follow'...'Nothing ventured, nothing gained' these are phrases that all sound great from the other side of success, but when you have a normal life with a family and a mortgage, the decision to pursue your opportunities is not as cut and dried.
I agree with your point but I don't think that "taking entrepreneurial risks" is the emphasis of the author.
Instead, her theme seems to be more similar to these soundbites:
- he talks a big game but doesn't follow through with anything
- he has grandiose ideas but doesn't take any action
- he's stuck on "analysis paralysis"
Those ideas can be applied to other goals besides business execution. Goals like programming an ambitious open-source Facebook clone, learning ten foreign languages, climbing Mt Everest, etc.
It's debt for the same reason that when you keep borrowing money, things just pile up and you feel overwhelmed. While no one will repo my car for not following through on an idea, it also means that the things in my "want to do" list grows and it becomes apparent that I'm stressing myself over what to do, which to do, when to do, etc. It's the same as taking on too much monetary debt; you feel overwhelmed and your limited resource starts to spread thinner and thinner. Same with idea debt; your time (resource) is spread thinner and thinner.
While 'debt' might be inaccurate, keeping lots of ideas in head definitely cripples you in my experience. They force you to always consider them as an option every time something new comes up and that quickly leads to decision fatigue.
It's debt in that we pay interest on it. Resources that could be spent on the here and now instead go to maintaining the idea that's not getting paid off.
But as jerf said, it doesn't have to be that way. It's just an idea file, not debt, unless you pay interest on it. If it saps your emotional, mental, or physical energy, then it's debt. And that may depend on your personality, not just on having "that kind of thing" laying around.
Oh, sure. I have a zillion ideas. Most, I ignore. Some, I pay interest. This article prompted me to finally stop paying interest on The Tragedy of Obi-Wan Kenobi - admitting I'll never get around to writing and producing it. It'd be lots of fun - a retelling of Star Wars as a revenge story, with Obi-Wan Kenobi as the ruthless villain (nothing actually changes except perspective), done as a comedy musical that also explores my personal history and the relationship of art, artist, and audience (with questions of ownership addressed).
Great idea. Not gonna do it. So I should stop doing any work on it.
I'm as guilty as anyone of amassing ideas and half-baked projects in various files and/or boxes of junk around the house, but I don't think of them as debt. They're all opportunities. Some are good, some are bad, and some have been missed, but they're not debt. I happen to think that some of them have the potential to make me a lot of money should I choose to implement them, but there are no guarantees. There is nobody out there saying, "Here's a check for $20M if you implement that idea right there, and you get to keep half."
'Follow your dreams'...'Do what you love and the money will follow'...'Nothing ventured, nothing gained' these are phrases that all sound great from the other side of success, but when you have a normal life with a family and a mortgage, the decision to pursue your opportunities is not as cut and dried. Having to weigh the consequences of not earning a paycheck to pursue one of these opportunities against food on the table or missing a mortgage payment, or even just not spending those evening free-time hours with your kids changes the equation substantially.