Teaching Tools

👩🏻‍🏫🛠️The importance of starting new projects, even if you don’t finish them.

If you were to look at a list of Playground ideas that I started and haven’t finished yet (or may never finish), it would be a pretty long list. The same goes for Canva and several other tools I use.

I constantly have ideas popping into my head and start building them, often with little intention of finishing them. I blame it on my subconscious mind working overtime while I sleep. My best work seems to come after a night to “sleep on it”.

For me, it’s important to start working on these ideas for a few reasons:

• I have a nagging feeling when I don’t explore these new ideas.

• It’s difficult to see if they are even possible until you start building them.

• Even if the ideas don’t work out I will learn things I can use later.

• The ideas often morph into something completely unexpected and wonderful.

• The Pareto Principle, If I only build one idea, I have an 80% chance of failure, If I build ten ideas then two of them will be good.

For these reasons I have very little guilt while “wasting time” fiddling around with the details of the tools I use (Koala Go, Canva, Wordwall, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Suno and many others). Lately, the real magic seems to happen when combining the tools.

Often while working on one idea or concept I get a cascade of other ideas that may be even better than the original. These are called “rabbit holes” and can suck up several hours if you aren’t careful.

Another handy thing to do is to have co-conspirators to bounce your ideas off of, both to see if they are any good and also to see if they have ideas to add.

The moral of the story is: You never know until you start building, so start building…

Go build something!!