One of the things my friends make fun of me for most is my love of mandarin oranges.
When it comes to mandarins, my appetite knows no bounds. On a good day, I can eat through 10, 15, even 20 of them and wake up ready to do it again the next day. And the next day. And the next day. And you get the idea…
Yes, I know, eating that many mandarins in a day might seem excessive (it almost certainly is), but there’s reason behind my obsession.
Growing up on the prairies in Canada, mandarins were only available for a few short weeks a year, right around Christmas. They would first hit the shelves sometime around the start of December, and then, almost like clockwork, disappear as soon as the New Year rolled around. To this day, I still refer to them as “Christmas Oranges” more often than their proper name due to the seasonal correlation of my childhood.
This limited availability meant that if you loved mandarins as I did, you had only a short window of opportunity to make the absolute most of that limited availability… and stuff your face accordingly.
For all the things I love about mandarins, however–the ease of peeling, the satisfying feel of how they rest in your hand, and of course the perfectly bite-sized segments bursting with juicy flavour–mandarins have one glaring flaw.
The problem is that they can be wildly inconsistent in quality. What’s more, from the outside, it’s almost impossible to know what type of orange you’re going to get. You can examine them from every angle, pick what you think is the perfect orange, and get home (or out to the parking lot if we’re being honest) to discover that it’s too sour, or dry, or even rotting on the inside.
It struck me this week, as I was at the market sorting through the bin of mandarins, trying to find the absolute best of the bunch, that in this way, mandarins are a lot like ideas.
The challenge with ideas is not so much finding them, but sorting through and choosing the best of the bunch to bite into, based on the limited information available to us from the outside.
Developing Your Discernment
We’d all like to think we can spot the good ideas from the bad, and to some extent, we can.
Even if they don’t taste great, most mandarins will offer you sustenance after all. It’s just a matter of what you have to eat through or around in order to get it.
Ideas, I think, are the same. Most of them could work, at least for someone. The question, then, is not whether an idea is a good one, but whether it’s the best one for you to bite into at this moment.
Unlike mandarins, however, where I’ve proven it’s possible to eat through 20 or more in a day, developing an idea to the point where it brings us some kind of return is a long-term commitment. We might, even, only be able to fully devote ourselves to one single idea at a time.
This means that we have to be incredibly selective with the ideas we commit to in the first place.
This means expanding our selection criteria beyond simply “Is this a good idea?” or “Could this idea work?” and probe deeper, asking questions like, “Is this a good idea for me, right now?” and “Is this the type of idea I want to eat through, and if so, how long will it take to reach the other side?”
This requires a level of discernment that takes work to acquire.
Even Fantastic Ideas Can Be Wrong
I was recently looking into expanding our service offerings at Counterweight Creative to include a much more in-depth podcast production and management support package. It’s an offer I know would appeal to a higher level of client than we currently serve, there are other companies successfully selling similar offerings, and I know exactly how I would set it up and pitch it.
From the outside, it sounded like a home run of an idea. In fact I spent many weeks so excited about it that I would frequently wake up in the middle of the night to write down new ideas and flesh it out further.
But then I started to peel back the skin of the idea and take a closer look.
As I pulled back the outer layer, I realized that building out this package wasn’t quite so simple as I imagined it would be. I would need to hire and train new team members, set up extensive new systems, and would require a large ongoing time-investment from me, probably for a year or two until the team was built out and the system had been tested and perfected.
The idea was clearly doable, and very likely to be profitable, even. It seemed from the outside to be not just a good idea, but a fantastic one. And yet, despite this fact, after looking closer, I realized that this wasn’t the type of idea I wanted to be eating through for the next two years.
Ultimately, I want to spend more time writing and creating, and even though this idea was good, it would take me further away from my true destination.
In this case, I was lucky enough to be working through this process with my girlfriend, Kelly, who facilitates brand strategy discussions like this for her clients, and could guide my interrogation of the idea to push me beyond the shiny, exciting outer layer. But often, it’s not until we bite into the idea and start chewing that we realize we’ve made a mistake.
The good news is that we can improve our idea discernment over time.
Improving Your Discernment One Bite At A Time
When you’re new to the art (yes, art) of mandarins, you’re likely going to get home and discover a mixed bag.
Sure, it’s easy enough to avoid those that are obviously green, fuzzy, and rotten, but although you might pick out a bunch of oranges that are visually appealing, the flavour and consistency are likely to be hit or miss once you peel them open and sink your teeth into them. This inconsistency in selection is likely to persist, at least for a time.
When you’ve eaten as many mandarins as I have, however, somewhere along the line, something, somehow shifts.
Subtle clues begin to present themselves more clearly while you’re in the store picking them out. You notice something, almost on a subconscious level about the texture or the look, or firmness or most likely the combination of all three that differentiates a perfectly sweet and juicy mandarin from an average one.
You might not be able to put into words why this orange is likely to be a good one and that one isn’t, but you’ve developed some internal compass that guides you to the right choice more often than not.
Sure, you’ll still be fooled into picking up the occasional sour, bitter, or dry orange. Sometimes you’ll grab a straight-up lemon. But the more mandarins you eat the better your discernment becomes, and the higher the quality of your average orange.
The better your discernment becomes, the better the quality of oranges you eat, which in turn makes the process of eating them ever more enjoyable.
The same is true for ideas.
As with mandarins, we often have to bite into dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of ideas before we begin to develop the ability to differentiate which ideas are worth biting into in the first place and which are best left for someone else, perhaps someone with completely different taste preferences than us.
It can feel like an onerous task at times, the thought of chewing through a pile of hit-or-miss ideas in order to improve our discernment. I think it’s worth remembering, however, that just because we don’t always know whether an idea will be worth pursuing at the start, it doesn’t mean we won’t learn something new or grow, or enjoy the process, even if we abandon the idea after the first mouthful.
As with mandarins, there’s no reason to eat through the whole idea if the first bite ends up being different than expected. Toss it in the compost heap and bite into the next one. It might take some time to pick the right ones at first but the more you eat, the better your discernment will become.
And besides, I can think of worse ways to pass my time than eating through a pile of mandarins in search of the perfect one.
If you dug this, give me a shout on Twitter @iamjeremyenns and let me know. I’d love to connect 🙂
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This article originally appeared in my weekly Listen Up Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
Fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.
Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilderness of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
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