Why can other people come up with brilliant ideas for your projects that you hadn’t been able to think of?

Why can you come up with great ideas for someone else’s project that they hadn’t thought of?

Why is it so hard to come up with big, brilliant ideas for our own projects?

Other than the obvious benefit of being detached and not feeling constrained by possible roadblocks, I think there is similar but distinct factor at play: we are constrained by our knowledge of our own ability to execute.

We naturally only come up with ideas we know we can accomplish with the time and resources we have. This is why it’s important to step away from projects or, better yet, imagine someone else has to do the work.

Once you are no longer constrained by your own capacity, you can be truly brilliant.