"Finally!"  Sarah smiles. She’s got it: the perfect idea.

After an afternoon of brainstorming with her group, Sarah’s come up with dozens of brilliant ideas, but one in particular resonates with her.

Something about the idea just makes sense; it has tons of money making potential (after crunching the numbers, it works, no question about it), and it energizes her just thinking about it (so she knows she’s passionate about it).

And even better, after hours of thrashing, she’s managed to come up with a solid plan of attack.

She backward-plans from her ship date and comes up with specific dates for keystone events (finalize the document, write the copy, connect with affiliates, put up the splash page, and so on).

After a long (and productive!) day, Sarah puts the pen and paper down, shuts off the netbook, and decides to relax for the rest of the night.  She’ll start tomorrow, she says to herself.  She deserves it.

Tomorrow begins with a rush; Sarah’s alarm doesn't go off and now she’s going to be late; she races to work but a car accident causes a traffic jam and she can’t get around it; when she finally gets to work, her 8 bosses let her know about her TPS report cover sheet mistake; she needs to skip lunch to catch up on work because her team member, who is on vacation, forgot to finish his part; after several meetings and a pep talk about standards from one of her bosses, Sarah is finally ready to leave for the day.

When she gets home, Sarah realizes how messy everything is and starts cleaning; as she cleans, she sees that the pantry needs to be reorganized; as she reorganizes the pantry, she makes a list of items she needs to buy at the store (might as well multitask and kill a few birds with one stone, right?); as she’s writing her list, she remembers she still needs to pay her utility bill; Sarah hops on the computer but gets sidetracked by Facebook;  while surfing, she makes dinner; after another hour of clicking links, she yawns and realizes how tired she is.  Sarah gets ready for bed and makes a mental note to finish cleaning and organizing.  Oh, and the project; she’ll get to that tomorrow when she has some time and energy.

But tomorrow evening she has a dinner date, and the day after that book club, and the upcoming weekend a wedding…

In three months, Sarah happens upon an old pile of notes tucked into a magazine left on the coffee table.  She scans some of the things she wrote down and sees the “perfect idea” she came up with and the deadlines she had set.  Sarah looks at the calendar and realizes she should be shipping the product to market next weekend.

It was just a silly idea anyway and probably wouldn't have worked, Sarah says to herself.  She was busy doing important real life things anyway.  It probably would have been a waste of time and she recognizes that the idea doesn't really motivate her anymore (not to mention the money making potential seems exaggerated at best).

Sarah’s job isn't so bad, she lives in a nice place, and the weather outside is great.  She’s happy, she thinks to herself - her chest slightly tightens and releases.  She just barely notices.  Sarah puts the notes into a binder on her bookshelf.

Sarah’s proud of her ideas from that brainstorming session three months ago, even if it never got off the ground.  That’s part of the process, isn't it?  Eventually, she says to herself, it will be worth doing another brainstorming session to come up with the right idea – something she can really put all her energy behind.  No rush; she’ll have even more life experience and knowledge the next time she starts.  She’ll get around to a better idea soon and that’ll be the one that works out.

Sarah gets a call from her best friend and remembers she has plans to go out tonight.  As she talks to her friend, Sarah forgets what she was thinking about and starts to get ready.

The enemy is happy; another battle won; more territory gained...

The enemy is in no threat of losing this war...

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