The Focus Course

Assignment

Write down 10 ideas.

They could be: 10 places you want to visit; 10 things you want to write about; 10 people you want to get to know better; 10 books you wish existed; 10 books you hope never get written; 10 names of superheroes you could invent who have contradictory names and superpowers; 10 superpowers your dog wishes he had; or whatever.

Yesterday afternoon, as I was finishing up my notes and research for this day’s assignment, I wrote down 10 ideas of my own. Here are 10 ways I could improve my communication with people:

1. Read and learn more.
2. Foster better communication and dialog with my website’s readers.
3. Improve my website design for better readability and discovery of past articles.
4. Improve my email design to be more delightful.
5. Refine and hone what I have to say about the value I’m trying to provide.
6. Be more thoughtful and intentional about what I share on Twitter.
7. Take speaking lessons to improve my podcast.
8. Practice gratitude and putting others first in the articles I write (less “me monster”).
9. Implement better analytics to know what people are most interested in learning about on my site so I can better meet those needs.
10. Work with others on my ideas and projects, because a good team of people will build a better end product.
11. Connect with more people face-to-face.
12. Practice what I preach.
13. Cut out any negative and value-less inputs in my own life so it’s easier for me to be excited and keep my attitude positive instead of feeling cynical and down.
14. Do and discover amazing things worth sharing with others.
15. Find other people who are doing amazing things and promote them.
16. Remind myself that I have something of value to offer others.

Okay, you’re right, that’s more than 10. I got carried away. Am I going to do all these things? I doubt it. And that’s not the point. The point is that I gave my brain a workout (and with this list, I also happened to remind myself that things can always be better).

Why this?

1. Practice ideation and you’ll get better at it. And pretty much every area of our lives could benefit from us being able to come up with fresh ideas.

2. Practicing ideation is a great way to strengthen your creative imagination. A way to think outside the box and come up with solutions to seemingly impossible problems.

What’s the big picture?

If you were to begin coming up with ideas every day, here are some of the benefits:

Build your Idea Muscle

If you spent 5 minutes every day doing pushups, would your arms get stronger? If you did that every day for a year, do you think you’d become a pushup machine? You, my friend, would absolutely be a pushup machine. You’d be totally unintimidated to do pushups anytime, anywhere.

On the bus and your friend dares you to do a pushup, you’ve got this. At the office and you lose a bet to a co-worker, show them who’s boss. At the gym and trying to impress that cute guy, no sweat.

Let’s suppose that in your life, there was a situation every day where you’d need to do some pushups. Wouldn’t it make your life so much easier if you were regularly practicing pushups so that when the time came, you’d be able to crush those pushups and show everyone your awesomeness? The same goes for ideas.

In his book, Choose Yourself, James Altucher writes:

What are the benefits of having a functional idea muscle? You will become an idea machine. No matter what situation you are in, what problem you see in front of you, what problems your friends and colleagues have, you will have non-stop solutions for them. And when your idea muscle is at its peak performance, your ideas will actually be good, which again means you will be able to create the life you want to lead.

Are you a mom or a dad? Do you write? Do you design things? Do you make stuff? Do you want to be more helpful at your job? Do you have a challenge or a problem in your life that you’re trying to fix?

All of these roles would benefit from our ability to come up with a great idea. And, when you get good at coming up with ideas, it builds confidence. Again, James Altucher from his book:

If you have creativity (developed by building up your idea muscle), the big ideas become smaller and smaller. Until there is no idea too big. Nothing you can’t at least attempt. As Henry Ford said, ‘Whether you think you can, or you can’t—either way you are right.’”

You learn that you don’t HAVE to act on every idea

You can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything.

At the beginning of today’s assignment I shared with you 16 ideas I had for ways I could improve my communication with people. Some of those ideas are okay and some are pretty good, but just because they’re okay and just because I’ve written them down doesn’t mean I’m somehow obligated to flesh them out. Ideas are cheap. What matters is the doing — the action, and there’s no way we could commit to acting on our 10 ideas every single day, let alone just this one time.

I know people who are afraid to come up with an idea or 10 because then they’ve just committed. If and when the time comes that you can pick one of those ideas and do something about it, then great. But otherwise, just let them be. Or throw them away if you like. When one of your ideas is really great — it grabs hold of you and doesn’t let you go. When you wake up the next morning still thinking about it, that’s when you know it’s time to act.

You get comfortable with bad ideas

I can see the interns now. Sitting around the conference table. Tired. Most of them leaning back in their chairs staring at the ceiling. Others leaning forward with their foreheads in their hands.

“We just need one good idea.” She says to her peers.

And so they sit there in silence, waiting for someone to have an idea.

Ask anyone who has ever come up with a good idea how many bad ideas they had first. Probably a lot.

In fact, we all do. But we edit them in our head. We tell ourselves they’re not worth seeing the light of day. We know it’s a bad idea before we even get started. So we keep the bad idea to ourselves and continue to sit around the table in silence, waiting for a good idea to strike like lightning.

If you’re willing to come up with bad ideas, you’ll find that you come up with a lot more good ideas.

Writing down 10 (probably not-very-good) ideas every day helps keep the momentum going. It liberates me to come up with bad ideas. And then, when it counts, the bad ideas don’t frighten me — I’m happy to share them because I know that if I can come up with 1,000 bad ideas, eventually one of them will be pretty good.

Bad ideas get the momentum going for doing good work

I once read that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. We have to crawl before we can walk and walk before we can run and run before we can leap over a building in a single bound.

Giving yourself permission to stink means you can at least begin, and starting is one of the biggest hurdles of all.

To help get over the intimidation of the blank page, Anne Lamott advises we give ourselves permission to write a very, very horrible first draft:

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really [terrible] first drafts. The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. […]*

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper.”*

A crappy first draft is better than no first draft because now you’re building momentum. The same goes for any sort of art, not just writing.

In The Shape of Design, Frank Chimero talks about the need to build momentum. He writes:

“I find the best way to gain momentum is to think of the worst possible way to tackle the project. Quality may be elusive, but stupidity is always easily accessible; absurdity is fine, maybe even desired. […]*

“Momentum is the most important aspect of starting, and rejecting and editing too soon has a tendency to stifle that movement.”*

To pull the curtain back for a second, one of the monsters I face as a writer is the fear that if the words don’t come out just right the first time around, then there will be no hope for them later. I wait to start writing because I assume that if I don’t write something magical and clever as I’m typing it for the first time, then I certainly won’t be able to improve upon it in the editing and re-writing process.

Of course, that’s not true. In his book, On Writing, Stephen King wrote about his conviction that fear is at the root of most bad writing. I’d say fear is also at the root of most non-writing (and most avoidance of all creative endeavors).

The truth of the matter in my situation is that if I can just type out something — anything — then I’m far more likely to be able to take that crappy first draft and mold it and steer it in the direction I want until it’s something presentable. If I wait, I may never actually start.

Moreover, it’s usually in the molding and the steering that greatness shows up.
Because: momentum!

Seth Godin wrote that the “only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that’s where you are. For now.”

The best ideas and creative works love to build on their previous iterations far more than they love to spring out of nowhere (unless that nowhere is the shower — why is that?!). It’s often when I am going back over my first or second draft that I actually come up with the magical or clever turn of phrase I was so hoping would pop out the first time around. It was there all along, just not bubbling to the surface.

You become a solution-oriented person

Most problems are not permanent. Most problems don’t affect your entire life. Having a daily practice of coming up with ideas re-wires your brain to focus on solutions instead of problems.

To sum it up

One of the foundations for doing our best creative work is the ability to solve interesting problems. Strengthening our idea muscle is a way to strengthen our creative imagination — it helps give us the confidence and momentum we need to do meaningful work.