Every day you get new ideas. They might come in the shower, while you are taking a walk, driving your car, or perhaps even during a meeting!

Most days you also learn something that you sense could really help you improve or make progress towards one of your goals or objectives. This lesson might come in a formal classroom setting, from a magazine or book you are reading, or from a casual conversation.

Receiving these ideas and lessons is a wonderful gift and a tremendous opportunity. Unfortunately, like unfound diamonds, many of these gems are never polished and made more valuable. Instead they are ignored, forgotten or tossed aside, never to be found again.

What a pity.

While it is certainly important and useful to learn new things and have new ideas, this step alone is far from enough. Individuals, teams and whole organizations consciously or unconsciously make one choice with every new idea and lesson every diamond in the rough they acquire. Those choices are:

Take action
Do nothing
For a variety of reasons most ideas and lessons learned meet the second fate the idea is considered and captured, the best practice is identified or the lesson is learned, but nothing happens.

Have you ever thought, or known someone to say, "I had that idea years ago!" after seeing a new product on the market? The fact is several people or groups had that idea years ago, but only one of them did anything with it. And the only person or group to benefit from the idea is the one who takes action.

Actually both choices (do nothing or take action) are extremely valuable to us and both should be used wisely. The single biggest problem we face with our ideas and new lessons is that we don't consciously make this choice, which implies that by default we are automatically making the choice to do nothing.

So the most important thing to do with all your new ideas is to make an intentional choice. Are we going to pursue this idea or approach or not? It is OK to not take action, most likely you can't apply everything you learn or think of you must prioritize in some way.

The Second Choice

However, once you have intentionally decided to take action you come to the next important choice:

Take a small action
Take massive action
Most people most of the time make the first choice they take small, timid, incremental action. They move forward slowly; deciding to do a small test, form a subcommittee or try the idea in a small market. Sometimes this

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