Let Your Ideas F*ck
The #1 tip for original ideas.
Recently, I learned about James Altucher.
He’s an entrepreneur who made millions then went broke. Twice. He’s great at chess, intelligent, funny, a 2024 presidential candidate, a writer… I think I’m falling in love… He has an original way of thinking. You hear it in his voice, you see it in his words. He’s unique.
On an Instagram live video, he shared his secret.
He lets his ideas get naughty.
I’ve recently been designing a piece of writing software. I’ve also been analyzing mental health apps and studying their effectiveness.
Let’s pretend I’m also creating a mental health app, something to track your mood — which I began designing until further research made me question the effectiveness of such an app and goose the project.
Yes, I said goose the project. Goosing a project is when you just let the idea swim around in your head until you find a use for it.
Let it goose until you find a use.
For further context, up your goose research and check out this baby goose swimming in a pool.
Since that project is goosed, I need to find a use. I can do this by setting up my ideas on a blind date.
I can take those two ideas and, right now, let them get frisky.
Writing software + mental health app = ?
This is where the fun begins.
With these ideas, I can make something that tracks the sentiment of your stories, tracks the moods of characters as their stories unfold, matches how you feel on a certain day to a numerical word output… I can do a lot.
When we take two ideas and put them together, we get a bunch of little idea babies.
We just had some babies! Let’s celebrate and paint some graffiti!
Wow, maybe we celebrated a little too much.
Let’s clean up.
Ah, that’s better.
Let’s say we have a blank canvas, and we don’t know what we want to create. All we know is that we want to create something great, something original. Well, Altucher has another method. It involves a minimalistic level of brute force.
Every day, write down 10 ideas.
Take 10 minutes, a little more or a little less, and write.
You know how people say there’s more fish in the sea? Yeah, I do too, bud. Hang in there. The sea of your mind is full of ideas. I’m not gonna compare an idea to a fish, but essentially what I’m trying to say is if you want some new original idea, you need to add to that supply of ideas and let them clash together like asteroids.
10 ideas a week is 70 ideas.
After a year, that’s 3560 ideas!
All ideas are seeds. When they sit in your mind, they grow. They spread, they intertwine, they reach new heights.
You know who likes seeds?
Geese.
Those projects that were just goosing around, swimming like Dory in your mind, well those projects love latching onto seeds.
Altucher goes into further detail about his process on his blog post titled The Ultimate Guide for Becoming an Idea Machine.
It’s longer form and has a whole goose egg for its goose word count, but his content is always worth it.
And remember, if you ever want to add a little spice to one of your ideas — a little dash of originality — you can always just take that idea and introduce it to all the other ones in your head.
Let your ideas f*ck.
