about ideas
I believe that everyone can come up with awesome and cool and successful ideas.
I don't think that some people are innately good or bad at ideas. I like to think we all have a built in idea success rate (e.g. 0.5%). Some people are lucky and hit on a good idea quickly. Others need to keep plugging away for a while before they hit gold. If you haven't been successful yet you aren't rubbish at ideas.
To increase your chances
- Have many many ideas! Write them down so they get out of your head and make way for new thoughts. I use Notion, OneNote, Google Keep, post it notes, bits of printer paper (A3 for big ideas), school style exercise books, the backs of envelopes, the margin of important letters, normal notebooks, and sometimes even the back of my son's drawings (the ones that aren't masterpieces) 😳.
- Side note - he is almost 2 and given a stack of paper and some crayons he can generate artwork at an alarming rate. So inevitably some of the less brilliant ones end up as shopping lists or note paper... ♻
- Read back over them every so often. I just read some scribbles on the back of a Socitm report from 2022 that gave me an idea for a totally unrelated project... 🤔
- Read (and listen to and watch and talk about) all sorts of gubbins about anything remotely related to stuff that interests you. Reading interesting things is like putting compost on your thoughts 🌱.
- In the spirit of this I will try and start collating lists of such stuff under the tag things i looked at
- Make things. Whether it's following tutorials, taking a class or just pottering about. Make lots of things in different ways. You may not end up needing to use woodworking or hat-making skills in your day job. But every skill gives you another tool you can use to make thoughts into things.
And that underlying skill of translating thoughts into real things is a really important pattern to learn, exercise and practice. It's so important I've made it into a little diagram:
It's a mermaid diagram 🧜♀️ - find out more and have a go in the live editor or check out the docs
Unfortunately, either Bear blog can't render Mermaid from a markdown codeblock, or I can't work out how to do it 🥴, so the preview above is from the Mermaid live editor and here's the actual code:
flowchart LR
A(have a thought 🤔 💡) --> B(be able to translate the thought <br>into the structure of a thing)
B --> C(build the thing 🛠)
C --> D(the thought has become<br> a real thing! 🌟)
E(have knowledge of<br> how things can be made)--> B
F(have experience and skill<br> building things)--> B
Recent posts with tag "things i looked at":