Write ten ideas every day. This is my favorite piece of advice.
For a creative person, there’s scarcely anything else you can do that will propel you further and faster toward your goals.
With a daily list of ten ideas, you’ll come up with social media posts. You’ll come up with projects. You’ll come up with schemes for making money from your creative work. You’ll come up with all the raw material you need to create everything.
Many people have trouble writing ten ideas every day. This is understandable. Lord knows, I don’t always do it. But I try. I get close. Sometimes I keep it up daily. Other times, I write, at best, only ten ideas a week.
This is not an all-or-nothing habit. It’s an every-little-bit-helps habit. Here are three tips for making this game-changing habit easier:
Think of it as putting money in a savings account. Because that’s what it is. Your ideas are an asset that can make you wealthy. Every screenplay that sells for a million dollars started as an idea. Every #1 New York Times bestselling book started as an idea. Every successful business started as an idea.
Thinking of your daily ideas as a savings account helps you understand the value of doing it even half-assed if you have to. If you can’t afford to save much one day, at least save what you can. It will all grow and compound the same. If you can’t find the time to write a full list of ten, write two. Two is better than none.
Don’t spend more than 30 minutes writing your list. These should be stream-of-consciousness ideas. If you spend any more than 30 minutes, the task will feel too daunting, and you’ll never make it a habit. Make it as quick as you can.
Review your lists every week or every month. If you can write ten ideas a day on most days, you’ll have up to 300 ideas to review every month. That’s incredible! That makes you more powerful than ChatGBT, which will choke if you ask it to generate 300 ideas. Furthermore, your ideas will be better, they’ll be in your voice, and they’ll have a soul.
Review your lists long after you write them. If you can get into a routine of reviewing a month’s worth of ideas several months after writing them, a certain magic happens. You’ll have forgotten many of them, and you’ll enjoy the great gift of being in your audience’s shoes. You’ll be able to assess the ideas objectively and pick out the winners.
Once you start ferreting out some nuggets of gold from your lists on a regular basis, this positive reinforcement will spur you to keep the habit going. And pretty soon you’ll be an idea millionaire.
Have fun!
Great advice. Currently in a Beatles phase, and SO EASY to come up with 10 ideas based on their music and lyrics, much of which I have not really listened to for 40 years (1). Also got my first tick of the spring the other day and currently working on 10 etiquette tips for removing ticks in public places.
I focus on jokes, but I am going to start writing 10 jokes or funny ideas each day. I jotted down the idea for the date that behaves like the church several months ago, and just used it this week to write the skit I brought to the Comedy Writer's Room meeting.