For years, I’ve kept a notebook that I carry with me at all times to record ideas.

At times this book has been a real, paper, physical notebook, and more recently it’s shifted to an app on my phone.

Over the years I’ve written down probably thousands of ideas, from fully mapped out business or product ideas to thoughts, phrases, or even single words that I found interesting at the time.

A lot of the ideas I write down are good, or at least interesting. Almost every blog post I write has its beginnings on this list, as do many of our products and offerings at Counterweight Creative.

But a lot of the ideas — when I revisit them sometimes only a day or a week later — are just bad. Sometimes even entirely nonsensical.

I don’t delete the bad ideas, however.

Occasionally, I’ll go back through my idea list to review and organize everything I’ve written down, and this practice always surprises me. What I’ve found is that often the ideas I thought of as “bad” at one point or another are often not, in fact, bad ideas after all.

Rather, with the perspective of time and different circumstances (sometimes I’ll go back a year or more), I find that while some ideas certainly were bad and are still bad, many of them were simply not a good fit for who I was or where I was at when I first wrote them down.

When revisiting my old notes, many of the ideas I had initially dismissed and passed over have become the projects that I’ve become most excited about going forward.

Bad is subjective. It’s subject to timing, circumstances, present skill set, knowledge, and a host of other variables. If you trust your thought process, it’s worth regularly revisiting those gifts from your subconscious that may have not made sense at the time.

What was a bad idea for you in the past might inspire you in the present, and be just the thing to take you where you’re looking to go in the future.

Every Sunday I publish an exclusive article on my newsletter that hopefully provides a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom.

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https://medium.com/@jeremyenns/ideas-need-leaders-25950eaa90bhttps://medium.com/@jeremyenns/ideas-need-leaders-25950eaa90b