You have an idea you keep pushing away, and it keeps coming back. You call it a distraction, shelve it, and feel good about the discipline, until it shows up again. Jess sat on the name Big Ideas Made Simple for over a year, putting it down again and again, until the clarity on who she wanted to be on her own terms settled. This check runs the idea you keep pushing away through the three questions from the episode, so you can see whether you have been mislabeling a direction as a distraction.
Name the idea
Pick the idea you have been pushing away the longest. One idea, one run through the check.
Question 1: Has it returned repeatedly?
Do not just ask if you have thought of it more than once. Ask how long it has been showing up, where it shows up, and whether the contexts are different. A distraction is loud for a day and gone by the weekend. A direction keeps coming back uninvited.
How long has it been showing up?No sightings logged yet. Pick where it showed up, then log it.
0 sightings across 0 different contexts.
Question 2: Does it expand you?
When you imagine doing this thing, does it make you feel more like yourself, or more like you are performing for somebody else's approval? Expansion feels like relief, even if it is a little scary. Performance feels like pressure, even if there is excitement. Move the slider to where it honestly sits.
Question 3: What is actually getting in the way?
This is the one that tells the truth fastest, and the one most people skip, because it requires depth. Sit with the resistance and check everything that rings true.
Logistics and timing
Something else
Identity
Claiming an identity is not a singular decision. It is a habit you keep building, and new versions of you will have to be claimed as you go. When the next idea starts showing up uninvited, run it through the same three questions.
FAQ
What is the difference between a distraction and a direction?
A distraction pulls you away from who you are and what you have already defined for yourself. A direction pulls you toward the person you are becoming. They can feel identical in the moment, especially to a brain that generates ideas constantly and has been trained to be suspicious of its own enthusiasm. The difference shows up when you shelve them. One fades. The other sits around waiting.
Why do I keep dismissing my own best ideas?
Because sometimes you are the one doing the mislabeling. You call your own best idea a distraction because believing it is a direction would require something of you that you might not be ready to give. You do not dismiss a real direction because it is a bad idea. You dismiss it because saying yes means admitting something about who you are that you have not fully accepted yet.
What does Big Magic have to do with it?
In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about ideas that behave like they are alive. They show up and ask you to work with them, and if you say no enough times, they go find somebody else who will say yes. Jess knows the book can feel a little woo-woo. Take the mysticism out and the truth underneath holds: ideas that keep returning are returning because some part of you keeps recognizing them as yours, even while the rest of you finds excuses about timing.
How is this different from the parking lot?
Episode 22 built the parking lot: capture the idea, release it, let it go quiet. A parked idea goes quiet once you release it. This kind does not. It keeps nagging, and the nagging is not about an unfinished concept. It is the part of you that is waiting for permission to exist out loud, still waiting.
What if the resistance really is logistics?
Then it might genuinely be a distraction, and it is fine to let it go without guilt. Bandwidth constraints are real, and not everything that resurfaces is meant for you immediately. The third question is the one that tells the truth fastest: sit with the resistance and figure out where it actually comes from. If it circles back to identity, timing was never the problem, and no amount of better timing will fix it.
What happened with Big Ideas Made Simple itself?
It is the episode's own example of a direction mislabeled as a distraction. Jess thought of the name well over a year before the show existed and kept putting it down. She had already branded herself another way, built around being somebody else's integrator, and shut that down after six months. She did not trust her own instincts enough to bet on a second brand, and she had not fully released the failure of the first one. The idea kept showing up in small recurring yeses spread over a year. Once the clarity on who she wanted to be on her own terms settled, the name fit, and the show named the identity she was stepping into.
Go deeper
In Episode 23, Jess flips the parking lot conversation from the week before and names the quieter kind of mislabeling: the kind you do to yourself. She tells the full origin story of Big Ideas Made Simple, reframes Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic without the mysticism, and walks through the three filtering questions slowly, because the value is in how you apply them. She closes with a live example from her own world right now: the book research she has carried for years, three or four full premises she used to tell Uber drivers about, now moving because she stopped treating the idea like a maybe and started focusing on it as something she wanted to execute. Same pattern, different name, different decade. The tool above runs the three questions for you. The episode tells you why claiming an identity is a habit, not a single decision.
Listen to Ep 23: The Idea You Keep Pushing Away? It's Trying to Tell You Something
Book referenced: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
"Stop asking whether your idea is good enough. Start asking whether you're ready to be the person who builds it."
Related
- Episode 22: Your Brain Isn't A Filing Cabinet (So Stop Expecting It To Store Everything) The parking lot episode: capture it fast and messy, release it, and watch which ideas go quiet and which ones keep nagging.
- Episode 28: You're Not Behind (You're Just Waiting for Permission) The part of you waiting for permission to exist out loud, and the one-word test that tells stalling from a real season.
- Episode 13: Everything You Built Before the Question (The BEAT Method) Brake first. The BEAT Method starts with stopping long enough to ask whether what you built was yours, or handed to you.
Big Ideas Made Simple is a weekly podcast for entrepreneurs and fast thinkers building a business around who they are and how they operate. Hosted by Jess Webber. New episodes Mondays at bigideasmadesimple.captivate.fm.
Get the next one
Got your result? Get the next idea like it each week.
Three steps. About 20 minutes. Type everything on your mind, answer two questions about each one, and see what to keep, hand off, protect, and drop this week. You get the sheet right away, plus my weekly email afterwards.
