Living ideas

All ideas are dead in the beginning.

They are immaterial.

The thought of reading a book doesn’t result in the transmission of any knowledge.

The thought of helping someone doesn’t leave them any better off.

The thought of building something doesn’t leave you with anything built.

As an imaginative creature, it’s easy to be seduced by thought — to have dreams of doing something that are so vivid, you’re convinced that there’s something real about them.

Except they’re not real yet — they’re still thoughts, and they’re still quite dead.

So how do you breathe life into them?

Act on them.

Do something about them.

Read a page, pick up the phone, write a line of code.

Then (and only then) does it become real, only then does it becomes material.

You can point to it, you can share it, you can offer it as a contribution to something or someone.

In the same way your heart keeps you around by beating around the clock, the way to give your most precious ideas life and meaning is to continuously act on them.