You go out in your back yard and turn on the hose. After a while, you realize that your yard is soaked, but most of the actual water is either disappearing into the ground or running off. You’re certainly not getting anything you can swim in.
“I know,” you say. “I just need more water.” You turn the hose up, but strangely, the problem persists.
“Amount of water” wasn’t your problem. You lacked something to give it structure. By itself, water doesn’t have a shape. You need a container – like a pool – to do that. Water is essential to the process (a pool without water is just a hole), but it’s symbiotic.
That’s like ideas. If you have plenty of ideas but they haven’t become action, reward, or change – the thing you need isn’t more ideas.
It’s a structure. A format. Somewhere to put the ideas so they can take shape. The marginal return of each new idea rapidly approaches zero, just like water in a pool; to a certain point it’s great and even necessary, but after that point it’s just flowing over the sides and being wasted.
So if you find yourself having idea after idea but nothing actually happening, stop thinking. Start gathering resources instead, and then using them to obtain something to put it all in.
The Opportunity Machine 