Ideas don't belong to you until you earn them. In this Creative Peril episode, Wade Skalsky (the Understory Bard) digs into what it actually takes to make a creative project "a thing"—not a napkin outline, not a couple chapters, but real substantial progress. For his Sojourner portal novel, that meant finishing Act One (~32k words and counting); only then did he feel like he owned the idea enough to talk about it in public. He walks through the same lesson from the other side of the ledger: the electrolyte business he built into a real operation—marketing, fulfillment, sales—then shut down once it was a thing, because as a lawyer he couldn't live with the risk of an ingestible product. That "make it a thing" grind is also how he found the physical-product business he's in now. Starting and continuing are different decisions. Get out of what-if land, pick something, push it far enough that you can honestly ask: do I want to keep going? That's the heuristic.