Someone recently came to me for help on an quick design project. I realized while I was helping them with it how much I loved it. I loved that someone had this great big idea that I never would have thought of and instead of dismissing it because they didn’t have the skill set to make it they got help so that it could be created.

Our ideas often overshot our skill set, and that is an amazing thing for multiple reasons, it gives us room to grow and it gives us room to collaborate.

My friend came to me with a collaboration and together we were able to make it a thing. She had no interest in the process just the finished product, which is fine, because the finished product was amazing and important. Sometimes that’s about as much skin as we want in the game, we just want to see the idea realized. I had as much fun making it as she did creating it and in the end we could both be proud of something, but there is also something to say about creating something yourself that you don’t have the skills for yet.

I wrote my first novel at fourteen. It was really good… for a fourteen year old, meaning that it impressed people then but reading it now makes me cringe hard. The idea is still golden, though it need a lot of work and rewriting to get the kind of novel it deserves to have. Does that mean that I shouldn’t have written it in high school? Absolutely not. That novel was my first novel in a line of novels that thought me how to become a better writer. If I never worked with ideas that were beyond my reach skill wise I would have never gathered the skills needed to move forward.

It’s kind of like when you’re learning to read you need to keep getting harder and harder books because it’s the only way to learn. My elementary school librarian wouldn’t let you check out books beyond your reading level and my mom still complains about it when talking about school librarians to this day- how are you ever supposed to learn like that? You can’t. You need to be changed to grow- so don’t let a big idea throw you off track, chase it, either by yourself or with somebody else!