You Could Do Anything. That’s the Problem.
Present Principle 030. The Dizziness of Freedom: On having too many ideas, and the courage to pick one
There is a page in my Notion with more than a hundred ideas. Essays, videos, products, whole projects. I collect them the way other people collect records. Each one might be something. And I can’t bring myself to delete a single one.
You would think that’s a luxury. Some days it feels like drowning.
Because when I open that page, I don’t feel inspired. I feel dizzy. A hundred doors, all slightly open, and I’m standing in the hallway, paralyzed by choice.
There is real science behind that feeling. In a famous experiment from 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a jam tasting in a supermarket. With 24 jams on the table, more people stopped to look, but only 3 percent bought one. With just 6 jams, 30 percent did. Ten times more. Barry Schwartz later gave the pattern a name: the paradox of choice.
I believe we live in the best time in history to make things. The tools are democratised. Anyone can publish, record, build, launch. AI can be both a great assistant and another layer of overwhelm. Added weight. More people, more noise, more possibilities. We could do almost anything. So we end up doing nothing fully.
This feeling has a name too, and it’s much older than the internet. In 1844, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called anxiety the dizziness of freedom. He described a man standing at the edge of a cliff. The man is afraid, but not only of falling. What truly makes him dizzy is realising that he is free to jump. The fear doesn’t come from the abyss. It comes from his own freedom.
That’s us, every morning. In front of the open laptop, the blank canvas, the empty page. The dizziness is the price of being free, and it’s old. Kierkegaard saw it 180 years ago. We just have a lot more doors now.
For a Modern Maker, the trap has a specific shape. A hundred meaningful things you could do today. They all feel urgent, they all feel important. So you spread yourself thin, you lose your focus, and slowly the creativity gets buried under admin. All those ideas, and none of them gets enough of you to become real.
My friend and Present Issue 2 contributor Anne-Laure Le Cunff put her finger on the mechanism in her recent letter: “the best version of any project is the one you haven’t started yet.” An idea that lives only in your imagination is flawless, because reality hasn’t touched it. Commit to it, and it becomes one real, imperfect thing with constraints and flaws. The new idea only looks better because it’s still a fantasy.
I hate untapped potential. Talent wasted. Ideas unrealized. The Thing unpursued.
Potentially great projects never given the room to become anything.
But we need your ideas, we need you and your Thing.
After twenty years of collecting and making and shipping, the only way out I’ve found is a radical reset. The courage to stop, put everything down, and start again. To take the time to reflect deeply. On your actual Why, and on what you truly want.
And reflection doesn’t mean only being still. Mine can be both still and active. The clearest answers usually come mid-motion, while making, while experimenting.
Invest the work and energy it takes to gain deeper clarity. Not another tool, not more discipline. Clarity about the one Thing that deserves the room right now.
Gary Keller built a whole book around a single focusing question, and I keep coming back to my version of it:
What’s the One Thing you can do today that would make everything else easier, or unnecessary?
I ask it even smaller. Of everything I could do, what's the smallest possible action that would actually move the needle? Not forever. Just for now.
The vertigo comes from trying to hold every door open at once. Clarity is choosing one, walking through it, and letting the others wait. They’re not going anywhere.
I’ll be honest, picking is only half of it. Even with one door chosen, staying is a battle. I challenge myself every day to stay present with the one task as long as I can, and Resistance keeps whispering that I should really take care of all the other things first. Of course it does. Resistance hates it when I focus on something that’s good for me, whatever is bringing me a little closer to my Thing.
PS: We just arrived in Sardinia for our first real summer holidays in a while. I will try my best to practice the Art of Not Doing The Thing
PPS: For a moment I thought about saying I had scheduled this post in advance. To seem more…normal(?) The truth: I’m sending it from a pine forest just behind the beach. I took a walk and decided to finalise and send this email. Maybe I “should” put the phone away. But that’s who I am, and I’m tired of hiding it. So here we are. I’ll talk to you soon. But now I’m actually going to do the most important Thing now: going for a swim🌞
PPPS: The book in my beach bag right now is Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist. I just hit this line: “The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying.” He wrote that fourteen years ago. Consider today’s title stolen like an artist, Austin<3
This Present Principle is part of the upcoming framework and book I’m writing to help as many people as possible. It’s called Stop Postponing Yourself: Do The Thing. A Modern Maker Manifesto and is now available for pre-ordering. There are still a few spots left for the Early Bird Offer.
Seele baumeln in sardinien 🐬 profitez