The concept of Idea Debt

A couple of days before, I was perusing through my Feedly as part of my daily routine and an article about Idea Debt came up through Hacker News. It was a rather 3-4 minute read article that I put off and it lay there as a tab not to be returned to until today. I’ve had this habit of opening tabs of articles from different sources only to determine that they’re pretty long for me to read at that moment, only to be Pocket-ed and stowed away forever. In addition, there are a bunch of videos/articles/interesting posts that are lying in my Facebook saved list. These await the return of their master who’ve let them rot forever in the Interwebs. And the fact that I stumbled upon the concept of Idea Debt was purely coincidental but I doubt if it was true.

The article about Idea Debt hit me really hard. As part of my journal, I also maintain a bunch of projects/interesting things I want to spend time on. These range from music to computer science with everything in between. All these projects have been merely visuals in my head and they are amazing dopamine sources when I think about how awesome these would be to finally see the light. These projects, the blog posts that I mentioned about in one of my previous posts and my reading list have all turned out to just purely be Idea Debts.

So what’s actually an Idea Debt? If you think about something too much instead of actually doing it, you’re accumulating Idea Debt. The actualization process of Debt to Reality (or Investment) is the hardest part. The article mentions that people with Idea Debt just remain their child selves instead of thinking like a grown-up to break things down into achievable chunks. It’s not something easy to do and it takes practice and perseverance to achieve this. And the follow-up post mentions a way to solve Idea Debt – do one thing!

But what do you do when you have multiple interests?