Ideas obvious but unrealised

Yesterday I listened to a podcast about Helsinki, which Monocle magazine named as its 'World's Most Livable City'. 

One of the many great things about Helsinki is its small size.  The entire population of Finland is only 5.5 million and I was especially taken with an interview with a young Finnish architect named Tuomas Toivonen* who expressed a very specific sentiment that you only get from small countries: -

If you don't do it probably no one else will

This is such a change from the breathless urgency with which most of the world approaches a project: -

Do it now before someone beats you to it

I've long been plagued by this sense that life is a kind of zero-sum gold rush.  The sense that whilst there's certainly success to be had, there isn't enough to go around.  More than that, if I don't capitalise immediately on that cool idea I had this morning then it'll just float back into the ether and settle on some more deserving soul.

The idea that the muses are both jealous and capricious is as old as literature.  The trouble these days is that thanks to the internet I get to watch in real time as Calliope favours some other creative type who followed through on the very same concept I had six months ago but parked on a To Do List.  As the modern marketplace of ideas only really rewards the first, then the best, of any sort of offering it's easy to beat myself up over dropped opportunities.  It feels very much like plagiarism but of course I'm the victim of nothing more than my own inertia.

There's no solution to this.  You can't follow through on every idle thought that occurs in the morning shower, that way madness lies.  The best anyone can do is choose the project that interests you the most and execute it in a way that only you can.  Then it becomes the thing that only you can do; if you don't do it no one else will.

The best ideas are obvious but unrealised.  The ones sitting right on the cusp of the adjacent possible.  What they crave is time, money and (especially) attention and they're just going to keep floating around out there until someone gives them what they want.

* And there's nothing Tyler Brûlé's team loves more than a young Nordic architect / designer...