Number Your Ideas
When Jon Acuff was ~160 hours into his ninth book, he told me something shocking about his creative process.
“I usually don’t know what the next book is about until I put around ~175 hours in. So I carry my notebook everywhere. My wife’s like, ‘Do you really need to bring it to our daughter’s water polo practice?’ But of course I do! It’s how I keep track of ideas.”
What did he mean by keep track of ideas?
“I don’t know where I’ll use them, but I’m always writing new ideas down. Maybe in a talk, maybe in a piece of dialogue in a book… I’ve had 476 ideas this year. How do I know? Because what you just told me — what I just wrote down — was #476.”
You might think, “That’s all well and good for an author, but I work a white collar job in an office,” or “But I’m a teacher…”
It might seem unnecessary in your context to carry around a notebook like Jon Acuff, fastidiously recording bits of dialogue and inspiration, but don’t forget: knowledge workers deal in ideas! Of course we should keep track of them! Creators throughout history (I love this example of Victor Hugo) have had the discipline to capture inspiration, so much so that you might say that without a habit of capture, a creative practice is almost destined to mediocrity.
And what about idea #476, actually numbering one’s ideas? I loved that! Weeks later, when I caught up with Jon again, I asked about his idea notebook: he was on #783. Keeping an actual record is an under-appreciated strategy. Mr. Beast recently talked at length about his creative process, and of the spreadsheet of 200-300 ideas for videos that his team has going at any time.
The vast majority of students and professionals I interact with have no idea how many ideas they’re coming up with. That’s a shame, because it’s awfully hard to know if you’re improving a skill you aren’t measuring.
Are you becoming a better runner? Just look at your mile time! Are you becoming more creative? How many ideas do you have?
It may seem overly simplistic, but our ideas — or rather, our ability to generate lots of potential solutions to any given problem — are one of the simplest ways we can track creative progress.
We should count them.
Related: Carry A Notebook
Related: Capture Inspiration
Related: Flex Your Idea Muscle
Related: Gather Lunatics
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The quality of our thinking is deeply influenced by the diversity of the inputs we collect. Implementing practices like Brian Grazer’s “Curiosity Conversations” ensures innovators are well-equipped with a variety of high-quality raw material for problem-solving.