Some ideas fade the moment you let them go. Others do not. They keep showing back up, in different rooms, months apart, like they have nowhere else to go. That is not a parking lot idea. That is something else entirely, and this episode names exactly what it costs you to keep dismissing it.

Last week's episode covered how to capture and release the ideas that flicker and disappear. This week flips that completely. Jess walks through the difference between a distraction and a direction, using the origin story of Big Ideas Made Simple itself as the example. She thought of the name over a year before the show existed and kept putting it back down, not because the name was wrong, but because saying yes to it meant admitting an identity shift she was not ready to make yet.

This episode gives you the three questions Jess actually uses to tell a distraction from a direction, walked through slowly enough to apply to something in your own life right now. It also reframes Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic for a practical, high-output audience that tends to dismiss it as too soft.

In This Episode

• Why some ideas go quiet after release and others do not
• The full origin story of Big Ideas Made Simple, and why it sat unclaimed for over a year
• Why the holdup was never about the name, it was about claiming an identity
• Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, reframed without the mysticism for a practical audience
• Why you mislabel your own best ideas as distractions
• The three-question filter: does it return, does it expand you, what is actually stopping you
• A live example: the book project Jess is currently building, and why this time is different
• Why claiming an identity is a habit, not a single decision

The Big Idea

Not every idea you dismiss is noise. The ones that keep returning across unrelated contexts, that ask you to expand instead of shrink, and that you resist for reasons rooted in identity rather than logistics, those are not distractions. You have been mislabeling a direction.

Memorable Lines from This Episode

"A distraction pulls you away from who you are and what you've already defined for yourself. A direction pulls you towards the person you're becoming."

"Saying yes to Big Ideas Made Simple meant admitting that I was done showing up as the identity of the integrator."

"If the pull genuinely makes you feel more like you, more whole, more honest, more authentic, that is expansion. And that is never a distraction."

"The idea was never really the problem. You were the obstacle."

"Stop asking whether your idea is good enough. Start asking whether you're ready to be the person who builds it."

Resources

Book: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert — https://amzn.to/4gk1UcN

Your One Thing This Week

Pick the idea you have been pushing away the longest. Run it through all three questions together. Has it returned across unrelated contexts, not just once? Does it expand you instead of asking you to perform or shrink? And when you trace the resistance to its root, is it really about logistics, or is it about the identity you would have to step into to build it? If it traces back to identity, stop treating it like a maybe.

Connect with Jess

If this one landed, come find me at BigIdeasMadeSimple.com. That is where the newsletter lives, where everything I am building is taking shape, and where you can connect directly. One idea in your inbox every week, nothing else. And if you know someone who has been sitting on the same idea for way too long, send them this one. The right idea at the right time changes everything.

Follow Jess: @thejesswebber on Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook

Key Themes

• Distraction versus direction
• Identity decisions disguised as branding decisions
• Recurring ideas as signal, not noise
• Mislabeling your own best ideas
• The three-question filter: return, expansion, root resistance
• Claiming identity as a repeatable habit, not a one-time event

Hey there, I'm Jess Webber, and this is Big Ideas Made Simple, the show that connects you

with the things you need to build a life that's actually yours.

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Last week I talked a lot about capturing ideas that flicker and can disappear.

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And we landed on something important in that episode.

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Not every idea is meant to be acted on.

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Some just need to be recognized and released or put in a parking lot.

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And so if you haven't listened to that episode, I would challenge you to go back and do

that before diving into this one.

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But this week, I want to flip the script and talk about what happens when an idea doesn't

behave like that at all.

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So this is the type of one that you've pushed away for weeks or months or even years, and

it keeps showing up like a bad habit where it has nowhere else to go.

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That's not.

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a parking lot idea.

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That is the thing that I want to talk about today because there's something that it costs

you if you keep dismissing it, and there's a way to be able to tell the difference that I

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think we need to explore.

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So not

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Every idea that you release into the world or put in your parking lot is noise.

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Some of those are signals that you might not have been ready to receive quite yet.

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And so here's the distinction that this episode is built on.

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A distraction pulls you away from who you are and what you've already defined for

yourself.

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A direction pulls you towards the person you're becoming.

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They might feel identical in the moment, especially to a brain that is generating ideas

constantly and has been trained to be suspicious of its own enthusiasm.

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But one fades when you shelve it and the other doesn't.

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It sits around waiting.

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And that matters for this episode specifically because we've spent a lot of time in past

episodes talking about this concept of mislabeling, especially being mislabeled by others.

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This episode is a little bit quieter version of that, because sometimes you are the one

doing the mislabeling.

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You call your own best idea a distraction because believing it that it is a distraction

would require something of you that you might not be ready to give the moment that you

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have it.

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A great example of this is my entire podcast and brand.

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So Big Ideas Made Simple was something that I thought of well over a year before this show

ever existed.

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I remember the first time I had that moment, uh, that light bulb.

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I I mean it landed well, but I let it go because I had already branded myself another way

that didn't work out.

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And I completely shut that down after six months of using it.

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And I wasn't in a space where I trusted my own instincts enough to bet on a second brand

and identity.

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Because I honestly probably hadn't fully released the failure of the first one.

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And if I'm honest now, I realized that it probably was never really about the name.

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It was more about the downstream of the much bigger thing that I personally hadn't worked

through yet.

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That previous brand was built around the identity that I was somebody else's integrator,

second in command, and

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I was good at it and I wanted to serve others in that space.

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I was valuable and respected, just like they probably were.

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But when I started building that, now in hindsight, I realized that it wasn't fully mine.

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And I was building something on a rocky foundation because everything else was built for

someone else.

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And so I had to stop that.

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Habit or that behavior of building for others and figure out what I wanted to own for me,

not because somebody else told me to.

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And that is way bigger and more scary than picking a podcast theme.

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So when you choose and define the identity and have clarity on it, naming the thing is

really easy.

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And so this idea, Big Ideas Made Simple, sat for quite a while.

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But it's funny because it kept showing up again and again.

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I'd think about it, I'd feel good about it, I'd even test it with somebody, but then I'd

kind of put it back down.

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And it happened repeatedly.

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Not because there was some big dramatic, no, you can't use that, or no, that's dumb, like

my previous brand and my husband, but it was spread out.

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As something that happened for over a year, and each thing being a recurring slight yes

from the universe saying, Hey, you're on the right track.

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When you're ready, you can pick this up and actually run with this idea.

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And it's funny because what finally changed wasn't that I suddenly.

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had a new big light bulb or I fell in love with it that much more, it truly was the

evolution of the clarity on who I wanted to be on my own terms without somebody else

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telling me what I who what it was or who I was or anything like that.

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And once that identity piece was settled, the label wasn't even a problem anymore.

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It fit.

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Big ideas made simple wasn't a rebrand.

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It was the naming of the identity that I was stepping into.

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Once I stopped performing somebody else's version of me.

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Elizabeth Gilbert's book is called Big Magic.

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And in it, she talks about ideas that behave like they are alive.

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They show up and they ask you to work with them.

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And if you say no enough times, they don't just vanish out of spite.

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What she says is they go find somebody else who is going to say yes to them.

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And I know there's a lot of people that might not have read Big Magic that listen to this

show often because, you know, her body of work like Eat Pray Love or Big Magic feels a

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little woo-woo.

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But if you take the mysticism out of it, there is real truth underneath.

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Ideas that keep returning aren't doing it randomly.

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They're returning because some part of you keeps recognizing them as yours.

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even while the rest of you is finding excuses that it's not the right time.

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So ideas that get placed in the idea parking lot and fade after a thought or two were

never the ones you were truly attached to in the first place.

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But the ones that keep waking you up, that show back up in the shower or at 3 a.m in the

middle of some other conversation entirely, those are the ones that we're talking about

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here.

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Those are the ones that you need to take seriously.

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So before we get into the action of this episode, I want to name what's actually happening

here because it's not random and it's not a character flaw.

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You don't dismiss a real direction because it's a bad idea.

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You typically dismiss it because saying yes means admitting something about who you are

that you haven't even fully accepted yet.

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So for me, saying yes to big ideas made simple meant admitting that I was done showing up

as the identity of the integrator.

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Not because I can't integrate or not because I quit doing that, but because it was not the

core identity of who I am that I wanted to own.

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And that is not a branding decision, it's an identity choice.

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So, this is where that parking lot conversation from last week really splits off.

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A parked idea is going to go quiet once you release it.

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This kind doesn't.

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It's the kind that keeps nagging, not because your concept is unfinished, but because the

part of you that's waiting for permission to exist out loud is still waiting for that

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permission.

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how do you know?

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in the moment, whether or not you're sitting on an idea that's a distraction or direction.

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And so I think it's important to use these three filtering questions with a level of

intentionality because, you know, that's always the point of the show is to give you

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something easy and actionable you can walk away with.

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But I'm gonna walk through each one a little bit slowly, not because they're difficult,

but because the value is in the way that you apply them.

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So let's start with question one.

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Is this idea that keeps showing up something that has returned repeatedly?

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Is it something that returns?

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That is the question here.

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So a distraction is loud for the day but gone by the weekend.

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You get excited, you can tell somebody, but a month later you don't even remember it

existed.

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Direction doesn't behave the same way.

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It keeps coming back uninvited in different contexts at different times without you

intentionally looking for it.

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So here's how to run this.

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Don't just ask yourself if you've thought of the idea more than once.

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Ask yourself, how long has this been showing up?

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And where is it showing up?

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And are they different contexts?

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An idea that surfaces once during a single brainstorming session is not the same as

something that surfaces during a week work meeting, then on a drive, and then when you're

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half asleep.

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If you find yourself saying, my gosh, I should really do that about the same thing in

different contexts, that is the big deal.

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That's that's persistence doing the talking, and that is your evidence right there.

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Once you've determined whether or not it's something that keeps recurring or returning in

your world, the second question then comes into play.

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Does this expand me?

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Or does it expand what I'm building?

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um A real distraction is usually asking you to perform for somebody else or chase a result

that was never part of your main quest to begin with.

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A real direction asks you to stop hiding something and to keep going on the journey you've

already named.

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So here's how to apply this.

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Think about the thing that you keep getting pulled towards.

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Maybe it's teaching or coaching or speaking or writing or building something else entirely

different than your current day job.

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Ask yourself honestly, when you imagine doing this thing, does it make you feel more like

yourself, or do you feel more like you're performing for somebody else's approval?

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That difference right there is the whole thing.

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It's the test.

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Expansion is going to feel like relief, even if it's a little scary.

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Performance is going to feel like pressure, even if there's excitement.

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m If the pull

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genuinely makes you feel more like you, more whole, more honest, more authentic.

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That is expansion.

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And that is never a distraction.

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That's the version of yourself that has been waiting for this permission the whole dang

time.

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Once you figure out if it's something that keeps showing up and it expands you, then the

third question becomes the easiest one here.

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What is actually getting in the way?

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What is stopping you from making this happen?

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This is the one that tells you the truth the fastest.

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And it's honestly the one that most people skip because of the fact that it requires

depth, not just surface level analysis.

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So sit with that resistance and figure out where it is really coming from.

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Is it the idea itself that feels wrong?

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Is it the timing, the logistics, your bandwidth?

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Or is it about your identity and the person you have to become?

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The things you have to stop being in order to execute it?

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If it is a logistics question, you might genuinely have a distraction on your hands.

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And it's totally fine if you let that go without guilt.

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Not everything that resurfaces is meant for you immediately.

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And I totally respect that bandwidth constraints are real.

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I have them myself.

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But if you circle back and it becomes an identity question, then the idea was never really

the problem.

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You were the obstacle.

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And no amount of better timing is ever going to fix it because timing was not the problem.

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That's not the thing you were waiting on.

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So when you can run the same idea through all three questions together, remember if it

keeps returning across unrelated contexts, if it expands who you're becoming, and the

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resistance traces back to your identity, not just logistical excuses, that thing is not a

distraction.

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And you've been m mislabeling something that is a direction.

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I want to push.

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On this, just a little bit further because patterns don't stop once you finally say yes to

one idea.

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This will show up in your world again and again because claiming your identity is not a

singular decision.

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It is going to become something that is habit that you have to keep building and

exercising and understand that new versions of you are going to have to be claimed.

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So, of course, new ideas are going to come with it.

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Something that keeps showing up for me right now is the research I'm doing for a book of

my own.

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And it's funny because I've said for years, I my favorite thing is to tell Uber drivers,

right?

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That I have had three or four full book premises in my head sitting there, but I didn't

execute on them because I didn't have.

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the clarity of where that book would sit in the market or who it would serve or how I

wanted to structure it the way that I have the one I'm currently working on now.

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And none of that showed up because some publisher handed me a deadline.

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It showed up because I stopped treating this idea like a maybe and started focusing on it

as something I wanted to execute.

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Same pattern, different name, different decade.

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So I want to push you.

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If you are sitting on something that keeps resurfacing, pay attention to it, whatever it

is, because it's probably something you need and it's not something you're imagining.

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Stop asking whether your idea is good enough.

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Start asking whether you're ready to be the person who builds it.

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So if there is something that you've been pushing away for a year or two or even longer,

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I want you to tell me about it.

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Find me any of my socials.

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I'm the Jess Webber across all platforms, double S, Double B.

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And do me a favor and tell me what your big idea is.

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The one that keeps coming back to you.

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Also, if this episode hit, please follow the show, leave a review, or share it with

somebody who you know has been sitting on the same idea for way too long.

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As always, I'm Jess, and this has been Big Ideas Made Simple.

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I'll see you next episode and thanks for listening.