Some ideas are meant to be killed

The Ideas Coffin at Atoms Collide

It was the final Atoms Collide of 2015 yesterday and I decided to ask everyone to bring an idea, as is usually the case. Only this time, I wanted people to bring an idea to kill. At the end of every year I take myself off on a retreat/review/advance to review what I've spent the past 12 months doing and to do some thinking on the next 12 months. I generally end up with a bunch of mindmaps or lists which I glance over every month to remind me of some important goals. By the end of the year, there are always things on that list that haven't been done, for whatever reason.

I thought it would be interesting to explore mine and others ideas that we had planned to do, talked about to others, but just didn't get around to doing. During Atoms Collide I started by sharing my thing that hadn't been done. My thing was making music. Some of you may know that I left school at 16 and pretty much focused on making music for the following 6 years. It had been my dream during my teenage years, and it was all I ever really saw myself doing. By the age of 24 I'd released a few records, signed a major record deal, spent a year making an album and then been dropped by that major record label. It was a rollercoaster for sure.

At that same time, I became a dad, and a lot was changing in my life, it was a massive turning point for me. For those reasons and some others, I stopped making music. To be honest, the business side of that world had drained me and I had lost the love of spending days in a studio making noises.

Ever since then, people that knew me as a musician would ask if I had made any music recently, and a part of me has felt sad that I hadn't and a part wondered if I ever would again. My standard answer would be "no, not recently, but I do plan to". I've now been saying that line for 18 years, and I think it's time to kill the idea I'm going to make music again, or at least kill saying that line.

A whole bunch of other people's ideas went into the ideas coffin as well. I found the discussions we all had around why these ideas hadn't happened very interesting. If anything, I felt more inspired to do a bunch of other things once I'd let go of my idea.

Today, I walked to some woods and set fire to everyones ideas. It felt good.