How 10 Ideas a Day Changed My Life

I have been coming up with 10 ideas a day, off an on, for over a year now. The reason I’m doing this is because I read the book, “Choose Yourself” by James Altucher, a little over a year ago. In the book, James writes about the ‘daily practice’ which he has used to pull himself out from rock bottom to find success several times in his life, as he has been on a roller coaster of ups and downs over the years.

There are four parts of the daily practice: Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. The goal of the daily practice is to try and improve on each of these four parts 1% a day by putting in a little effort into each area every day.

For the mental part of the daily practice, James recommends coming up with 10 ideas a day, every day. Over the past year I’ve been pretty good about it, but not great. I probably came up with 10+ ideas a day for about 250 of the 365 days over the past year. That’s still over 2,500 ideas, which is pretty good.

I keep all of the ideas in an ‘ideas’ folder on my google drive. I can look through them super easily this way, and go back and find something if I need it, but usually I just laugh at the crazy stuff I was thinking six months ago.

But what’s the point of coming up with 10 ideas a day? Do I do anything with ideas? The answer to this question is that you do not have to act on all of the ideas, but you can if you find a good one. The point is to build your ‘idea muscle’ and make your brain sweat. The more ideas you come up with, the better you will become at creating ideas and you will be an ‘idea machine.’

Most of your ideas will be bad, and that is OK. Especially for the first month or so my ideas were really bad. You have to give yourself permission to come up with bad ideas and not stress about it, otherwise you won’t be able to come up with any ideas at all. After a while you will have the ability to just come up with ideas about anything, and can use that ability to come up with some actual good ideas that you can put to good use. Maybe 1 in 10 or 20 of my ideas is a decent idea that could potentially be acted on, while maybe 1 in 500 is a great idea that I need to act on.

So what has coming up with these 10 ideas a day done for me in my life so far? It has led to a lot of projects. Most of them failed, half attempted, or given up on due to lack of passion, however I have seen some of my projects through to completion and even a little bit of success.

Some of the failed projects as a result of my 10 ideas a day were: A children’s book about two kids who have a magic box that allows them to travel around the world in seconds, a ‘holistic’ personal development website for men, a review site for ‘eco-friendly’ products with affiliate links to the products.

My successful projects, of which there are really just two, are: A short eBook on Amazon called, “What to Get When You’re Expecting: How to Save Money, Time, and Stress When Shopping for Your First Baby” and a Choose Yourself Meet Up Group on meetup.com that is creating a local community of people who are inspired by ‘Choose Yourself’ and the daily practice and meet once a month to support each other and share ideas.

The eBook was an idea that came to me in a flash when I was coming up with an idea list of 10 things to write about one day. I found a lot of support through Facebook groups to figure out how to write and promote the book. I was able to get the book downloaded 1,400 times through a free promotion and have 17 reviews out there on the book, which are both pretty good stats. While I feel like I have a good book out there, I am losing passion for the subject that the book is about, and am less interested in promoting it. I’m just not that passionate about baby products. The book is now getting a few sales each day and I make a tiny bit of money on it, but not enough to change my life in any way.

What I am passionate about however, is writing books and self publishing. I’m really grateful that I went through this process and can now call myself a published author. I never would have done this without my 10 ideas a day.

My other successful project, the meet up group, was given to me by fellow Choose Yourselfer and former co-host of the Ask Altucher podcast, Aaron Brabham. Aaron was in the process of starting the meet up group but got too busy starting his new podcast, The Millionare Anywhere, so he asked me to take over the group. This happened because I’m an active member of the Choose Yourself Facebook Group and communicated with Aaron about helping with the meet up in the group. I used my idea muscle to come up with ideas for the meet up and the first meet up went pretty well. I had about 20 people show up and they were all excited to be a part of an awesome community and were very supportive of each other. For the next meet up I’m going to collaborate with a couple of other folks from the group and we’re going to make the next one even better.

If I hadn’t been coming up with 10 ideas a day, at least for most of the days in the last year, I wouldn’t be doing a lot of the great things that I’m involved with. I wouldn’t be a self published author and I wouldn’t be the organizer of an amazing meet up group.

I’m excited to see what will happen if I keep doing this for another year, and then another year after that. One thing I want to do in the next year to give my ideas away to people, and to come up with ideas for other people. Sharing the ideas will grow my network and make my opportunities from the ideas even greater.

Coming up with 10 ideas a day has changed my life, and it will change yours too if you can stick with it and see what happens.

Start by reading “Choose Yourself” by James Altucher, to get inspiration and learn what the daily practice is all about.

Photo Credit: Sean MacEntee

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