How to collect ideas and stop copying everyone around you
Short instruction for the ones who always concerns about everything
Social media shows us pictures of a better life every single day. All those super mamas, business owners and sports girls, you name it. Faster results, they say to me. Stronger body, they scream at me. Better food, they whisper from all corners. Harder work-hours, far away trips, updated equipment. I wouldn’t worry if only… this would be my dream.
I had an article recently about slowing down and this one is kind of a sequel. But, unlike that article, here I touch on external causes of the same problem: we live our lives too fast, not having a life for ourselves. The reasons we do this or that are very often imposed by the society and ‘a girl who has tonnes of followers on Insta’. Do we really want a life like that? Me — definitely not.
I heard once that if you don’t have a plan for your day, month, year, decade — you’re gonna follow someone else’s plan. This applies well to copying (or imagining as you copy it) another’s life from social media. You do not have your own dreams and wishes, you just look for popular ideas and start to envision them for yourself. A very dark scenario, right? But wait, there’s a way out of this. Here’s few ideas.
Plan
This is always a good start. Plan shopping, meals, and travel. Plan your house repairs, birthday party, pet’s training. Plan your dreams to avoid thinking about something unnecessary. The more you think about your own stuff, the less you think of what people say.
Real-life example:
I am not the fastest employee, if you know what I mean. I often have difficulties focusing, take too many projects on at once and overthink the results. I know, I know — I’m working on it. The first step for me is — yes! — to plan. I put in my calendar time spots for each activity/project I would like to perform during the day. I also write down a result for each project — something I want to see in the end. This is my way to plan my work; I use pretty much the same method for planning my trips, home improvement or shopping.
Ideas
You will never avoid influence completely. So why wouldn’t you turn them into ideas! Saw a fine birthday poster, great apartment, perfect hair cut — save it for later, for inspirational reasons. I like the Pinterest platform better than Instagram for this process, but you never know where the muse appears. I collect ideas and then use them in my own life. With only one change: they came from my interests, I changed them according to my needs and now they fit my life and my style completely.
Real-life example:
I like meal prep as an idea for faster cooking (and actually having meals at home), but I am not that organised and often can’t get myself to make a proper preparation as I saw on YouTube and Pinterest. But I took a part of the whole idea and implemented it to my life: I chop veggies for later all at one time, keep them in a plastic container and have a fresh salad in a minute when I need it. The next level for me would be actually preparing meals for a week for my family. I’m working on it.
Research
Oh, this is my favourite. There’re so many good people you can speak to for improving your life. Copying is easy, but you will not remember it for long and the result would be often unpredictable. Ask a specialist, read a book, go for a master-class. Implementing ideas into your routine will return someone else’s experience to your own skills. Which will serve you throughout your entire life.
Real-life example:
There’s a book called ‘Steal like an artist’, this is a good start for rethinking the copy-paste method of everything in your life. This works not only for creative work, but for exercising, parenting, gardening, writing and more.
Bottomline
I’m not saying that copying is bad — not at all. By copying you explore your resources and skills. My point is that blindly copying everything and everyone around is not a good thing for your personality, your life, and your self-identity. Use your imagination to watch, collect, rethink and implement. The world around is too good to waste it for just copying others. You are the world, tell yourself the same!
