Beware the Time-Love Continuum
A few years ago, one of my colleagues introduced me to an idea. Since then, I haven’t been able to get this idea out of my head. He called it The Time-Love Continuum. (Dun dun dunnnnnnn!)
It goes something like this.
The more time you spend with an idea, the more you fall in love with it. Time and familiarity with an idea don’t guarantee the idea will work as you intend. But if you’re aware that our brains work this way, you can avoid the predictable pitfalls.
Risk 1: Creativity and objectivity are compromised
There’s a phrase: “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” What you focus your attention on will gradually fill your entire field of vision. When you think about your idea, you risk losing your ability to evaluate it against other possibilities. You might not even be able to think of other possibilities!
Counteract this tendency by thinking of lots and lots and lots of ideas before picking one. Think of bad ideas. Crazy ideas. Ideas that come out of nowhere. Give yourself options to play with and compare. There’s plenty of time to fall in love with your idea, once you’ve proven it’s actually a good one.
Risk 2: It becomes inevitable in your mind
One of my favorite books is Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray. In it, he shows how our experience and attention lead us to our unique perspectives and conclusions. What is “so obvious” to you—especially as you spend time with an idea—can be gibberish to someone else.
Instead, find someone who doesn’t know what you’ve been working on. Show them your idea. Ask them to describe it back to you. Ask what questions it brings to mind for them. Do this as early as possible. You’ll discover all sorts of things about how your idea does or does not make sense, so you can keep working on it.
Risk 3: Sunk cost thought distortion
Ah, the sunk cost fallacy. This is a thought distortion that leads you to illogically keep chasing something simply because you’ve already put time and money into it.
Although it is categorized as a thought distortion, it’s really an emotional imbalance. As humans, we REALLY don’t like the feeling of losing out on something, so we invent rationalizations for why we should continue—even when the evidence shows this idea won’t bring the results we want.
The antidote to this pitfall is to run lots of little experiments to test the idea along the way. The instant you see a problem or a gap, you can pivot. Doing this early, instead of waiting, will help you stay out of this logical fallacy.