I read this thought-provoking post by Paul Graham of Y-Combinator fame this morning (thanks to John Gruber of Daring Fireball for the link) and shared it with several friends. It’s a simple premise: We tend to have a ‘top idea’ that takes up a lot of our primary thinking energy. Paul identifies your current top idea as what you think about when you’re taking a shower.

The kicker here is how we let lesser ideas inhabit this space when we should in fact be focusing on the most important thing we need to work on. His example is the entrepreneur who is trying to raise money and how that act of raising money supercedes the act of making their business work to the point where the business becomes secondary. They have lost focus. Money is often one of these distracting ideas as are emotional situations, stress, etc.

When you are able to make your passion your top idea you are telling your subconscious to let loose and run with all kinds of related ideas. I think that if you are doing a start-up or starting anything new, one test of your passion is whether that idea can stick as your top idea. If it can’t or you are constantly fighting off reasons why it won’t work then maybe it is not your passion.

I like going through mental what-ifs and problem-solving with 24PageBooks. It is literally a pleasure to have time to think through aspects of the project (it’s a ‘project’ until we launch in September- only then do we find out if it is a ‘business’).