How to never run out of ideas

💡 This blog post is adapted from my Playing Favorites newsletter.

A friend of mine is a writer and marketer who loves to teach. Let's call him John, because that's his real name.

A few weeks ago, John called me with an issue. He felt completely and utterly tapped creatively. He had nothing left to offer his subscribers. For almost a year, he'd spent several days per week sharing tips and tricks, processes and frameworks, big ideas and tiny techniques -- all the things he'd learned over the years as a prolific writer and marketer. And after a year full of building credibility by sharing everything he knew ... he'd run out of ideas.

John believed the problem was that last part: "he'd run out of ideas."

After speaking together, we realized the actual problem was the part right before that: "building credibility by sharing everything he knew."

On our call, we identified a common problem that many of us face when we create things for a living, especially things meant to teach or inspired or rally and change a community. This issue is everywhere, plaguing creative people, unbeknownst to them -- until you feel you're out of ideas, like John.

I asked John (paraphrasing for clarity here): "What if, instead of sharing what you already know with certainty, you share things you'd like to know, then show them what you're learning as you go? What if you feel stuck because you've relied more on your existing knowledge than your curiosity, and knowledge is limited? You're out of answers to give them, but surely, you're not out of questions about this work you do? My friend, I think the problem is you're acting like an expert. What if you acted like an investigator instead?'

Silence.

"John?"

Silence.

"Hello?"

Then finally, "Aw crap, I think you're right."

* * *

We spend so much of our time as students learning a simple truth: success is knowing the answer. To get something wrong is to be subtly ostracized or even outright shamed. After literal decades of this philosophy being beaten into us, day after day, class after class, grade after grade, we enter the workforce unwilling to be wrong. Most people won't say or try anything unless they're absolutely certain they're right.

In this line of work, you're better off looking for Sasquatch than absolute certainty. How many things are you definitely right about? How many correct answers do you possess? For John, it was one year. One year's worth of certainty and answers. Then he was spent. He was out of ideas.

The thing is, we each possess our very own endless idea machine. As kids, we use it constantly. We're born with it. It comes standard with our operating system. So let's remember how to operate this system, shall we?

The endless idea machine starts with intake. You observe the world and interact with it. You consume media. You text and type and talk to others. You go for a walk, and eat a sandwich, and sit on a bench. You do stuff -- or, yanno, sometimes you don't.

It turns out that merely existing is a pretty darn great way to take in some inspiration and raw material for making stuff. That's the endless fuel for the endless idea machine.

Next, your perception of the world starts to bend the idea one way. You start to understand and perceive and feel and think. Whatever stimuli you've just taken in becomes subjected to your subjective self.

We as humans can't be entirely objective, documenting what we perceived from a dispassionate distance. We can't help but be present -- sometimes more fully than other moments -- whenever we make sense of the world.

It's here during the endless idea machine's endless whirring that I think about a quote from author Kazuo Ishiguro. In 2017, as he accepted his Nobel Prize in literature, he said, "In the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?"

To this point, your endless idea machine has helped you with the first part. "This is the way it feels to me." But as you want your ideas to spread or to have an impact once you create something, you need to focus on the next part of the quote, too.

Next, you subject your thoughts to others, which bends them a different way. The best way to improve an idea is to "aerate it." Share it with others. Interweave your existing flow -- of conversation, of content -- with bits and pieces of your new thoughts. Then, slowly, create new content more fully focused on these thoughts, made better by the initial aeration. All of this is you essentially saying, as Ishiguro did, "Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?"

That bends the idea another way.

Finally, you feel the idea is ready for "prime time." You've bent it towards your perception, then bent it another way towards the people you wish to serve. You thought about it, and they gave you valuable feedback on it -- sometimes overtly, but mainly subtly by interacting with your work.

It's here that your idea feels focused, and it comes back to center:

And now, and only now, does it feel like you have The Idea.

The world perceives it as that singular entity: one complete project. But you know the truth. It wasn't a magical moment. It was a slog. It was a continual process of asking questions.

THAT is our endless idea machine: our collective ability to ask questions about the world around us.

Take stuff in. Make sense of it. Communicate your thoughts with others. That changes the idea and improves it. Then, finally, ship something better. Others may assume you have all the answers, but really, you're just better at asking questions.

* * *

PF Blog - Ideas Machine.png — This week, try pursuing curiosity instead of *just* knowledge

The problem John faced -- and that we all often face -- is the need to act like an expert. Instead, what if we acted more like investigators? That's how we can yield endless ideas, improve them, and ship better things -- things that most of the world have never encountered before, so they just assume you know something they don't.

Ask questions. Investigate. Distill. Share. Repeat.

Endless ideas, all stemming from questions, not answers.

Remember:

Your knowledge is finite, but your curiosity is infinite.

My push to John, to you, and to myself (because that's what writing is, after all) is to pursue curiosity, not knowledge. Knowledge is the byproduct. It's your prize for being relentlessly curious. Others will declare that you're the expert with all the answers, but you'll see it a different way.

And look, I understand: it feels so much cleaner to share answers, the stuff you already know with certainty. It's a lot messier to ask questions and investigate. That approach feels like a messy slog through the mud...

The key to all of this is to abandon our own self-seriousness, the desire to be THE expert and have THE answer to be revered or at least taken seriously as credible and smart.

But the way to get any of that -- and really, the way to make what matters (a better aim than what others think of us) -- is to stop trying to be experts and start acting like investigators. Those are the people in this world who others end up taking seriously and viewing as credible.

Be curious. Not "smart."

In setting aside our self-seriousness, that muddy process becomes more enjoyable. We can get back that sense of childlike wonder at the world, and our willingness to ask questions, constantly, insatiably. Your knowledge is finite, but your curiosity is infinite.

My sincerest hope for John and for us all is that we remember just how much fun it can be to dance through the mess.