Tibetan Buddhists have this tradition of crafting mandalas out of crushed and dyed stones. They spend weeks drawing out very specific geometric measurements for the mandala and then, starting from the center and moving outwards, a team of monks create intricate designs and patterns one section at a time using the simplest tools.

To any onlookers unfamiliar with the practice, the entire process can seem painful, monotonous, drawn out, but the end result is breathtaking. So breathtaking that surely the monks would move the design to a sacred place where later generations can admire its detail and stand in awe of its magnificence.

But that’s not what they do. They dismantle it piece by piece and dump it in a river. The point of a sand mandala isn’t so much its creation, but its destruction. That despite the amount of time put into making it and the beauty of the end result, it’s not meant to last forever. It had its time and now its gone. It’s a lesson in detachment.

The Worship of Bad Ideas

Detachment is a lesson anyone who dreams about earning a living online would benefit from learning. Aspiring bloggers, internet marketers and entrepreneurs all suffer from Idea Idolatry. They become so infatuated and attached to their ‘babies’ that they choose to keep their ideas alive even when they aren’t working out. They’d much rather own their failure than admit their mistake. But coming up with beautiful ideas isn’t what makes you succeed online. As Glenn Allsopp put it in his post at Smart Passive Income, “Instead of looking for some genius idea or a secret that it seemed everyone was keeping from me, it finally clicked that maybe, just maybe, it was the actions I took rather than the knowledge I seeked that would allow me to finally make money online.”

Chances are if something hasn’t worked out for you, it’s not because you didn’t work hard or because you just weren’t meant to be successful. It’s because you bought into an inherently shitty idea and then didn’t let go. If you want to succeed online (and in life in general), you have to know when to dismantle your idea.

The Necessity of Agility

If you’ve ever given it any serious thought, the idea of being agile is really negative. It either means saying ‘No’ or quitting outright. Agility is having the ability to stop and change directions and guess what? It’s absolutely necessary for succeeding on the web.

The web is evolving every day. It looks different now than it will in six months and different then than it will in a year. If you want to succeed on the web, you have to follow trends and react to them. If the idea you have now doesn’t jive with current trends, you fail. If whatever it is you’re trying to implement isn’t working, there’s a really good chance it’s not going to work.

You have to be able to throw away your ideas as soon as you see they aren’t getting any results. You don’t hold on to them for the sake of holding on to them. You don’t keep doing what doesn’t work just because you spent weeks planning it or because you think it’s the most beautiful and perfect plan.

You have to let go.

In the last few weeks, I’ve designed and built four separate websites for my company, Idea Anarchy. What we found out in the last few days, though, is that the things we had originally planned had stopped being relevant to our overall mission.

This meant that I spent at least 40 hours creating beautiful designs that I loved and implementing them within WordPress just to delete them. My business partner, Mike, spent weeks stressing out and creating content for these sites. By the time he had finished, everything he created had become completely irrelevant.

That’s just the way it goes. Neither of us feel particularly sad about what we’ve lost because we know what we’ve gained. We’re yet another step closer to our ultimate goal and we’ve aligned the business even more with our personal philosophies.

Not only that, the business has started growing because of what we cut loose. We were able to focus on the core and grow something we’re proud of.

If you worship your ideas, you fail. Learn what it means to dismantle them. Learn what it means to let them go.

Photo by Mai Le

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2. How to Succeed Online without a Business Plan
3. The Non-Conformist’s Secret Weapon – or – How To Fuck Up Like A Winner
4. All It Takes Is Persistence
5. Lessons We Can Learn from Failed Products