What to Do When You Can’t Think of What to Do
On What it Means to be Prolific
Admission
I’m going to preface this article by admitting I think this is my worst writing.
It’s certainly my laziest.
But the ideas are valuable and you may not have been exposed to them yet.
And the ideas are more important than my lack of talent.
So…
Onward
Today, I couldn’t think of what to write for this blog.
Two hours I spent watching clips of 30 Rock, drinking a little wine, playing online solitaire, pacing, watching bloopers of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and finally playing online solitaire WHILST LISTENING to clips of 30 Rock.
I have a whole list of topics to discuss for this blog and not one of them was igniting any sort of idea.
So what did I do? Obviously, the thing everyone does when they want to know the answer to something: I Googled it.
The funny thing is, I didn’t even read any of the results.
Rather, just the act of doing SOMETHING jogged my memory into recalling all the things I’ve ever read or watched about how to handle this paralyzing feeling.
So that’s what I’ll do here — take a note from the Chicken Soup for the Soul guys and consolidate other people’s ideas on this matter.
Seth Godin
On Bad Ideas
“Your problem isn’t that you don’t have enough good ideas. Your problem might be that you don’t have enough bad ideas.” — Seth Godin
Miles Davis
On Time
“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”― Miles Davis
Miles recorded 51 studio albums and many more live albums, compilation albums, and other projects.
Most people have never heard of them.
But Kind of Blue? It’s one of the most iconic jazz albums of all time and known culturally amongst jazz fans and non-jazz fans alike.
And it was written in 72 hours.
Do you think he could have have achieved that without all his previous work?
Chuck Close
On Inspiration
“Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. Every great idea I ever had grew out of work itself.” — Chuck Close
Tim Ferriss
On Small Goals
“My quota is two crappy pages per day. I keep it really low so I’m not so intimidated that I never get started.” — Tim Ferriss
Tim has authored 5 #1 New York Times / Wall Street Journal bestsellers.
His book, The 4-Hour Workweek changed my life by changing how I thought, which is — and I say this with the full awareness of how pretentious it sounds — what I hope to do for my readers with this blog.
Ira Glass
On Taste
“All of us who do creative work get into it because we have good taste. But there’s this gap. The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap.” — Ira Glass
Isaac Asimov
On How to Be Prolific
One of the most famous science fiction writers, he wrote AND published over 400 books.
How? He woke up at 6:30am and wrote until noon. Every day.
Start with that before you judge your talent.
Earl Nightingale
On Ideas
“Try for five ideas every morning and write them down and stay with those sheets of paper in a special idea file. Many, perhaps most of your ideas will be worthless but some of them will be very good. A few will be excellent and every once in a while you’ll come up with something really outstanding.
“You see five ideas a day is 25 a week if you don’t think on weekends. Now that’s more than a thousand ideas a year. One idea can get you to that income you’re shooting for. The law of averages rings so far in your favor you just can’t miss. Try to develop a sense of expectancy, that is trying to hold the feeling that the goal you’re shooting for is a sure thing. And it is only a matter of time before it’s realized.”— From The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale
Steven King
On Process
“I work every day — 3, 4 hours — and I try to get those 6 pages and I try to get em fairly clean. So if the manuscript is, let’s say, 360 pages long, that’s basically 2 months work.” — Steven King
Me
On This Blog
I started the 30-Day Fishbowl Series as a way to express my ideas, to hopefully help people by exposing them to ideas they may not have heard or thought of that have literally changed my life by changing my perspective, and as a coping mechanism for dealing with an abundance of free time.
There are two points of pressure built into this project: 1) a deadline and 2) if I write in order to help people, then I don’t want to write about generic subjects that you can get from a hundred self-help “gurus”.
So what do I do when I can’t think of anything good or original?
I just try to do something.
Today it was going to Google. Tomorrow, I have no clue.
I just have to sit and start and accept that it will probably be bad…and maybe generic.
But the more I do bad work, the more likely it is I’ll create something that’s worth reading and — if I’m really lucky — worth remembering.
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Other quarantine-related articles:
When You Can’t Do Anything, Do Nothing
How to Complete Your Goals When You Have TOO Much Time
This article is Day 9 of the 30-Day Fishbowl Series
You can start the series by clicking HERE.
