Count Your Ideas
I was recently chatting with a bestselling author, currently ~160 hours into his ninth book, about his creative process. “I usually don’t know what the next book is about until I put around ~175 hours in. So I carry my notebook everywhere.
My wife’s like, ‘Do you really need to bring it to our daughter’s water polo practice?’ But of course I do! It’s how I keep track of ideas.”
What did he mean by keep track of ideas?
“I don’t know where I’ll use them, but I’m always writing new ideas down. Maybe in a talk, maybe in a piece of dialogue in a book… I’ve had 476 ideas this year. How do I know? Because what you just told me — what I just wrote down — was #476.”
It seems so unnecessary to carry around a notebook, fastidiously recording bits of dialogue and inspiration, but knowledge workers deal in ideas! Of course we should keep track of them! Creators throughout history (I love this example of Victor Hugo) have had the discipline to capture inspiration, so much so that you might say that without a habit of capture, a creative practice is almost destined to mediocrity.
And what about idea #476? I loved that! Keeping an actual record is an under-appreciated strategy. Mr. Beast recently talked at length about his creative process, and of the spreadsheet of 200-300 ideas for videos that his team has going at any time.
The vast majority of students I interact with have no idea how many ideas they’re coming up with. That’s a shame, because it’s awfully hard to know if you’re improving if you aren’t measuring something. Are you becoming a better runner? Just look at your mile time! Are you becoming more creative? How many ideas do you have?
It may seem overly simplistic, but our ideas — or rather, our ability to generate lots of potential solutions to any given problem — are one of the simplest ways we can track creative progress. We should count them.
Related: Carry A Notebook
Related: Capture Inspiration
Related: Flex Your Idea Muscle
Related: Gather Lunatics
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The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.