Everything comes with an expiration date… even ideas

There’s a reason most novels, business startups, and innovative creative ventures suffer quiet deaths of abandonment.

I don’t suffer from the same misunderstanding as young Calvin, but I do still tend to take expiration dates pretty seriously — especially on dairy products.

And as it turns out, I’m not alone.

A great many people reflexively double check that faded ink on the side of their carton of eggs or container of milk as they pull it from the fridge — ready to reassess their entire culinary ambitions for the day if, by some happening, the “sell by date” has already passed.

Considering the discomfort that can be caused by foods that have “gone off,” such reticence is somewhat understood from a psychological perspective. Practically speaking, however, there is little reason for such anxiety. Those expiry dates aren’t clairvoyant declarations of when a product will turn sour; they’re arbitrary benchmarks to ensure a steady turnover of fresh products on store shelves.

In other words, the only thing commercially printed expiration dates really tell us is something we already know: Perishable goods will, eventually, perish.

But that’s pretty much true about everything. If you let anything sit too long, it will eventually spoil.

I was reminded of this recently when, scrambling to meet my deadline for a writing project, I grabbed my “book of ideas” (yes, it’s a real thing… some would call it “a journal”) to flip through writing concepts I had jotted down over the course of the summer. Page after page I skimmed over quick ideas I had scribbled down while traveling, working on other projects or otherwise too occupied to give them the attention they deserved.

Surely, one of the many concepts I had put on paper for future consideration would rescue me from the Damoclean deadline hanging over me, right?

No such luck.

Indeed, while many of my musings seemed perfectly serviceable creative endeavors, absolutely nothing I came across seemed “appropriate” for the moment. It was as if whatever inspirational spark had encouraged me to write those ideas down in the first place had long since faded into ash and blown away.

(Being the resourceful procrastinator that I am, this didn’t prove to be completely detrimental to my efforts. I was able to ultimately scrounge together a new idea to meet my deadline… but it was close.)

The experience reminded me just how critical it is that we act upon our ideas when we have them, lest they grow stale in waiting. Because, as it turns out, even ideas will go off if left on a shelf for too long.

Intrinsically, anyone who has a half-written novel in their desk or a lingering daydream of starting a business should know this. There’s a reason most books, creative interests, and innovative business ventures suffer quiet deaths of abandonment as they’re left to atrophy in unfinished Word Docs, discarded cocktail napkins or stuffed away (incomplete) in desk drawers somewhere.

Nothing kills an idea more certainly than allowing ourselves time to age beyond it, and all too often we postpone our creative (or professional) pursuits indefinitely as life moves around us in the interim.

It's for this reason, one of my favorite pieces of creative advice — one I continually offer to my clients — has always been to give yourself permission to write badly. As I’ve said before:

It’s actually advice that extends to all forms of creative endeavors. Before you can paint that masterpiece, you must be willing to waste a few artboards on experimentation. Before mastering one of Beethoven’s sonatas, one might just have to learn a childlike rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle.”

But it’s actually more than mere permission to blunder through a few shitty drafts that makes that advice so worthwhile. First and foremost, it’s also an obligation to begin.

Knowing which ideas require immediate pouncing upon, and which might still benefit from a bit of fermentation, however, can be tricky. After all, much of the creative process is understanding that the opposite of a “good” idea can also be a good idea — which means we spend plenty of time ideating, conjecturing and, basically, daydreaming to flesh out which one of our brainstorms deserve our attention.

Bridging the gap from that ideation to actionable first steps is often more difficult than it sounds — as it should be. If we acted upon every impulse the instant it entered our mind (creative or otherwise) our lives would undoubtedly end up “suboptimal.” (A corporate term that, in this instance, means “ruinously fucked up.”)

Some ideas, however, tend to have a bit more staying power than others. And when an idea worms its way deep enough into our mind that we feel obliged to give it serious consideration, it’s worth diverting our energies toward starting it before the fleeting opportunity to make it worthwhile disappears.

More than anything, there’s one question we should ask ourselves before we begin: Are we passionate enough about it to keep pushing forward even after we come to hate it?

And, make no mistake, no matter how attracted to it we might be at the outset, there will be times we hate it. As Kazu Kibuishi illustrated beautifully, the creative process virtually guarantees frustration, depression and pessimistic uncertainty:

Creative process:

1) This is going to be awesome

2) This is hard

3) This is terrible

4) I'm terrible

5) Hey, not bad

6) That was awesome!

Like entrepreneurship, a large part of what it takes to accomplish something creative comes down to a simple stubborn determination to power through those frustrations ladening the process.

As I’ve written before, frustration is an inherent part of creating something — and willingness to withstand such torment is what separates those who create from those who don’t:

Simply put, if you’re not frustrated, you’re likely not pushing yourself to venture into new, uncharted, territory. Do you think the world’s greatest explorers weren’t occasionally frustrated by mountain ranges, ravines and even entire oceans? Feeling the pain of a challenge is how you know you’re working to tackle it — and that’s truly what creativity is about in the end.

It’s this aspect of creative work that keeps me from telling people that I “love” what I do for a living. As an observable fact, I don’t “love” the process of writing — I often consider it to be about as therapeutic as slamming one’s head against a typewriter until something useful comes out. However, having written something is a phenomenal sensation — as are those moments throughout the process when the self-doubt, frustration and homicidal anger melts away as an idea takes shape and the prose on the paper begin to please even the most self-critical writer who haphazardly punched them on the keyboard.

If your vision is worth facing such formidable emotional toils — let alone whatever financial, professional or personal risks are at stake — then it deserves action.

Not tomorrow, but now. Like so much of life, in the end it all boils down to the same dull advice we’ve already heard a million times: Just do the bloody work on the things that “matter.”

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

All too often we believe the work that needs to be done can just as easily be done tomorrow as today. (In fact it’s something I argue is necessary to some degree for creativity.) And what’s worse is that we’re often correct: things usually can wait “one more day”…

Until they can’t. Sooner or later, whether it’s because the idea has grown stale or we get hit by a truck, “tomorrow” will be one day too late.

Tellingly, that tendency to procrastinate is why most professional creatives find deadlines to be the single most effective tool for motivation — in much the same way cattle prods are highly effective ways of motivating livestock. As the metronomic approach of some desperate deadline grows louder, it forces us to blunder into projects we might otherwise have set aside for weeks, months or even years.

As Hunter S. Thompson once quipped, “I couldn’t imagine, and I don’t say this with any pride, but I really couldn’t imagine writing without a deadline.”

What most of us don’t realize, however, is that there is always a deadline — we just don’t always know when it is.

While that deadline might not manifest in the form of some editor demanding a submission or some mid-level manager asking their creative team where the “deliverables” are, there exists a date upon which the veracity and passion of an idea will suddenly no longer be viable, enjoyable or possible — a date beyond which an idea’s opportunity has atrophied.

Everything in this world comes with an expiration date — not least of all our creative impulses, imaginative ambitions or professional pursuits.

And unlike that questionable carton of week-old milk in our refrigerator, those are perishables that are far more difficult to replace.

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Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change.

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