Potentiality Digest: Ponder on Your Ideas

By Sodeeq Abdulakeem Sulyman

For many years, we have been fascinated with a beautiful world we ought to live, a world of our dreams where respect, recognition and accolades will be flowing like the waves of the ocean. But it is disturbing that all those epiphanies were just a daydream, they are like the breeze of air that can’t withstand or contest with the test of time. Why is it like that, you may ask?

It has been said many times that the foundation of every great, extraordinary achievement is the belief one exhibits towards the ideas he had conceived. As powerful as the human mind is, all it can do is to formulate perceptions and insights. The realisations or manifestations of those insights or perceptions are solely based on the actions one is ready to take and the sacrifices one should make to make one’s idea a reality.

Imagine how meaningless the world would have been or how abject humanity would have been if no one is dwelling on the power of their intuition and pondering on its abstractive products to create something that adds value to the entire humanity? Every second, minutes, hours and days, we all conceived something deep down ourselves. But those things we have conceived will never be realised if we don’t act on them, put them into use.

Henry David Thoreau says, “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavours to live a life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Most people are not successful because they don’t subject their ideas to the test it requires to determine if it is worth working on or what meaning will it give to humanity if it eventually manifests.

No one ever has the full weight, the quality of their idea until they start pondering on it to determine how realistic the idea may become. Even when you feel like the idea is not good enough for the current wave in your environment, you can write it down and work on it later. That’s why someone once said that, “Nothing is more powerful than the idea whose time has come.” It is normal that your ideas don’t fit the current reality. But when you don’t stop working on it, it will later fit a purpose.

At an individual level, we have conceived many ideas that have slipped away from us; we don’t hold on to those ideas, we feel those ideas are not powerful enough to change the cause of human history or sometimes we feel we are not that intelligent to be the one who conceived novel ideas. We have forgotten that we can’t do things right unless we see things differently and Lou Holtz opines that “…the man who complains about the way the ball bounces, is likely to be the one who dropped it!”

Any idea you can conceive is a reflection of the potency of your thoughts and how ready you are to make the world appreciate you is based on the confidence you have developed in yourself and your ability to analyse things till you unravel the clarity attached to them. No idea is perfect in its own sense; what makes ideas to be useful is the will and drive to continuously refine them to serve a desired purpose.

Twyla Tharp affirmed, “Creativity is not a magical act of inspiration. It is the result of hard work and dedication.” Take an inventory of your life and ask yourself the number of ideas you have conceived. How many ideas have become a reality because you refused to give up on them? How has your ideas changed your status because you are resilient in making them work for the benefits of mankind? If you haven’t gotten what you want in life, it means you haven’t birthed the idea that leads to where you want to be.

Keep grinding yourself to conceive the idea that will change your life. The ideas you can conceive are enormous and inexhaustive. It is just that the more you are ready to be idealistic, the more you will realise that the ideas you can give birth to are lying in you in abundance. Charles Schultz affirmed, “Life is a ten-speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use.” For you to be a person of value in life, you must be willing to use more gears of your ideas, you must be devoted to identifying the ways to make your ideas work.

The world you envisioned will never become a reality if you don’t ponder on your ideas. You will never connect with the great men and women of the world if you don’t put those ideas springing in your mind into test. You are not going to create that wealth that ought to flow in the world if you don’t take the bold step to know how wealthy you can become through your ideas. No one will believe in you, recognise your talent if you haven’t identified your talent and believe in yourself.