Five years ago this week, a small team of people started working on a prototype of the service that we now know as Twitter. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the first Tweet.

#numbers – Twitter Blog

That’s a week between starting the first prototype, and sending out the first tweet.

If they dropped the idea of Twitter right then and there but kept up that pace, they would have been prototyping a new idea every week of the year.

52 potentially world changing ideas.

With all the work that starting a project requires: Working on it daily, learning new skills, relearning old ones, not knowing how long it’ll take to complete, facing the risk that it might fail… the reasons to not start add up quickly.

But what if you committed to an idea for just one week, and then after seven days gave yourself the permission to drop it and start something else.

If that became your routine, then in one year you could initiate 52 different projects. You would certainly fail more, but eventually one of those initiatives will gain traction, and maybe you’ll start something that you stick with for five years and that changes the world.

Even if you think of it as a numbers game, 52 initiatives a year is bound to pay off sooner or later. Sooner than the people who aren’t initiating anyways.