My inner critic woke up with me this morning. I hadn’t noticed his noxious voice until I started journaling. Until I had an idea for a blog post, in fact.

The more I wrote, the more I heard his voice. This isn’t any good. Where’s the beef? You’re just wasting your time here–why not leave this for the professionals?

Maybe you’ve heard his voice too. He’s critical, dismissive in fact, of anything that’s not original, that’s not novel.

He roars about the excellence of others and, by inference, your own lack. He serves them up just to get you down. Never mind that there’s “nothing new under the sun” as King Soloman put it (Ecclesiastes 1:9). If it’s not new, it’s not needed.

But here’s what’s really needed: Fresh. Fresh trumps novelty.

You get fresh when you invest something of yourself in an idea. Fresh appears when an idea is invigorated because you’ve paid enough attention to it to make it better.

So many ideas. So little time. And so many of them languishing; starved for something from you. They may not be new, the kind your inner critic demands, but they can be fresh. All it takes is a bit more of you.

What ideas have you shelved merely because they’re not new?