The Infinite Power Of Ideas
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together. — Georg C. Lichtenberg
There’s a misnomer about creativity that I would like to address.
Creativity is a skill not a talent. Creativity can be taught, it can be trained, and it can be improved.
Of course, different people start out with different baselines of imagination and creativity, but that has nothing to do with what your creativity can grow to.
Creativity forms itself in our minds in the form of idea, and idea generation is a muscle, for it to get stronger you have to exercise it!
How To Exercise Your Idea Muscle
The best exercise I’ve seen for growing your idea muscle comes from James Altucher, who popularized the practice of writing 10 ideas every single day to work your idea muscle
That’s it. Sounds easy, right?
It’s easy to come up with the first 4 to 6 ideas, but when you get up and to the seventh, eighth, and ninth it becomes quite difficult. Your brain starts to sweat and you have to dig deep.
Just like with normal exercise, when you think you’ve reached your limit and you want to quit, you have to push through and finish the exercise. That’s where the growth happens!
Every day that you write down ten jdeas and you move past the part where you hit a wall and you busted that wall, that’s weird you improve your ability to generate ideas everyday.
Idea Generation Compounds
I’ve written about the power of consistency and how consistent effort compounds over time. The image above by James Clear shows the power of improving yourself 1% everyday.
With idea generation you can easily improve your idea muscle by 1% each day. By consistently completing 10 full unique ideas each day you’ll get so much better.
Your ideas are going to be terrible for a while, and that’s okay! You have to sift through the dirt to find the gold, after all.
Over time the ideas that you generate will fuse together and form new ideas.
The Right Fuel Can Rapidly Improve Your Idea Muscle
An infinite number of ideas can be generated with enough time, but this is not efficient at all. Why would you try to think up all the worlds ideas on your own? Hundreds of thousands of people have boiled down their life knowledge into consumable chunks called books.
Books, or the knowledge they contain will be fuel for your idea muscle.
I will advocate for voracious reading in every article I can. It’s that important.
“Libraries were full of ideas — perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.”
― Sarah J. Maas,
The refinement of this knowledge over time will lead to truths. These truths become wisdom, when applied to the real world.
From this wisdom come the most powerful of ideas. These are the ideas you can change your world with.
Thus far we have only covered the knowledge side of idea generation, and not the applicable life experience side of things.
Ideas are useless without action
Once you start writing ten ideas a day don’t stop. Ever.
But like I said, ideas are just half of the equation. Ideas aren’t going to get you anywhere unless you refine them and take action to gain life experience.
I quote Gary Vaynerchuk pretty often with with this particular topic because his famous for saying “ideas are shit without execution.” And it’s true!
Ideas mean nothing without action. Without validating an idea with action, ideas will just wither away, or go off to inspire someone else.
When you take action on an idea, you will learn how refined your idea is. If you fail miserably, you gain both knowledge and experience on that idea! You can then refine further and move closer to the truth of the idea.
In the end, strengthening your idea muscle will dramatically increase your likelihood of success and fulfillment in life.
