Help! I Have Too Many Ideas!
Take It or Leave It Creative Advice
This week, we’re tackling some of the most common creative struggles, and I’m also sharing a mood board inspired by the muses that have been fueling me lately. It’s a little all over the place, but it’s an honest look at where my head is and where I want to take Create.Repeat next.
Two questions kept coming up in our DMs: one about feeling overwhelmed by too many ideas, and the other about perfection and the anxiety that tags along with it.
If you’ve ever felt paralyzed by the pressure to do everything or frozen by the fear of not doing it perfectly, this one’s for you. We’re talking flow state, momentum, creative self-sabotage, and how to break through the noise in your head that keeps you from starting… or finishing.
Let’s get into it.
Hi @imiplacesaalerg,
Welcome to the curse of being creative. Most of us wrestle with this, I know I do. Almost every day, I catch myself getting excited about too many things at once, only to lose steam when the high of the new idea fades and I run out of momentum. And once that momentum’s gone, it gets harder and harder to access the thing that actually makes the work feel good… flow.
A few years ago, I read The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler. It was all about flow state and how it’s not some magical or random burst of energy, it’s something you can train yourself to tap into. According to Kotler, flow happens when you combine challenge, focus, and purpose. It’s about going deep, not wide. But when your attention is scattered across five projects, a dozen ideas, and a running list of things you “should” be doing, you never go deep enough to hit that state. You stay stuck in the shallow end.
So, now we kinda understand how flow works, but how does that help with prioritizing?
Let’s take a cue from an unlikely source: Dave Ramsey.
If you’re not familiar, Dave Ramsey is a personal finance author and radio host who’s helped a lot of people get out of debt. I don’t align with all of his views, but one idea stuck with me when I read The Total Money Makeover. It’s called the Debt Snowball. And I think it applies to creative work just as much as it does to finances.
Here’s how it works: you list all your debts from smallest to largest, and pay off the smallest one first, regardless of the interest rate. You make minimum payments on the rest. The idea is to get a quick win, then roll the money from that first debt into the next one, and then the next, building momentum like a snowball picking up speed downhill. It’s not the most mathematically efficient way to pay off debt, but it’s incredibly effective because it builds belief. Ramsey’s philosophy is that personal finance is mostly about behavior, not knowledge, and small wins keep people motivated.
I think the same rule applies to your creative life.
Most of us sit down wanting to slay the dragon. We want to write the book. Make the movie. Launch the brand. We aim straight for the magnum opus. But the second we put all that pressure on it, our brain starts looking for an escape hatch. Suddenly, every other idea seems more exciting, more doable, more urgent. That’s not laziness, it’s self-protection. You’ve made the project so big in your head that starting it feels like failure is guaranteed.
There’s nothing wrong with new ideas, they might even be great. But sometimes they’re distractions dressed up as inspiration. So here’s what I recommend…
Take 30 minutes and write down every single idea you have. Dig through your Notes app, your voice memos, your old journals. Dump it all into one list. Then split that list into two columns: fun, dumb & easy, and challenging & rewarding.
Now, forget about the big stuff for a second. For the next month, I want you to focus only on the fun, dumb & easy column. Pick the ones that light you up and feel doable in a short amount of time. Your only job is to finish as many as you can. No perfection. No pressure. Just finish.
Because right now, all you’re looking for is momentum.
When you finish one thing, even if it’s small, it shifts something inside you. You start trusting yourself again. You prove to your brain that you can follow through. That’s your creative snowball. And once it starts rolling, that big project, the one that used to scare you, starts looking less like a mountain and more like the next logical step.
Creating becomes a habit and a rhythm. You stop chasing motivation and start showing up no matter what. And that’s when the real magic happens. Create. Repeat.
Don’t create for the outcome. Create for the process. You’ve been given this gift, not to hoard it, but to use it.
Now let’s dig a little deeper.
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