In Part 1 of this guide, we explored three practical steps to generate unlimited ideas: giving your mind room to breathe, writing without pressure and using focused effort to overcome creative stagnation. If you haven’t read the first part yet, I encourage you to start there, because these steps lay the foundation for everything we are about to discuss.
Now, let us continue with Step 4 and discover how the information you consume, the attention you give to the world around you, and the actions you take every day can help you develop a stronger and more consistent creative mind.
Step 4 is nourishing your media. You have to feed your brain new ideas.
Do it intentionally. When you live a lifestyle of passive consumption, none of it is intentional. You are eating, or consuming, the ideas your algorithm thinks you should have; it involves no decision-making or creative will on your part.
You turn yourself into a creative athlete, an intellectual athlete or someone who is in touch with themselves and intentional about what goes in the way you do by structuring a media diet. Based on your own interests, and again, this goes back to step one of the framework, you have to figure out what you’re interested in by becoming bored again.
After you’ve gone through steps ½ and three, you might have a better idea of what you actually want to pursue. So then you seek out books. And podcasts and films and pieces of art that feed that part of you, that feed your soul, that feed the creative spark within you that you want to channel in your work.
You go to the Art Museum, you go to the Museum of Natural History, you go to a friend’s house and talk to them about things that you are mutually interested in. You feed your brain Ideas. Then you write down the ideas that come from that, and you create an infinite feedback loop: ideas go in, ideas come out.
What I hope you’re getting from this conversation is that none of these ideas is particularly revolutionary or new, but what I hope you’re getting from this is that we’re framing the conversation around what you can do. It’s a game, it’s a practice, it’s a system that you can run, right?
This is very practical. This is a practical game you can play, turning your life into a creative video game because then you have something you can do, and then you’re free from the whole, like, identity game of, ” Oh, I’m not X, or I’m not Y. I’m not a creative person, I’m not a writer, I’m not a thinker. I am trapped. All of that is a victim mindset that accepts a limiting belief, a limiting narrative. And you live within it because it lets you stay comfortable.
No shame, no guilt; I get it, I’ve been there. But. Do you not want something better for yourself? Do you not want something more? Do you not think you’re capable of more? I would suggest that if you can have the courage to face the unknown and the humility to, you know, drop the ego, start at 0 and then go day by day, your life will be more fun.
It will be more engaging than Chronic distraction, but it requires effort, courage, and humility. All things that the short-form content machine has eroded within us because it’s conditioned us to be addicted, highly stimulated, highly self-conscious, very anxious, very depressed people who are naturally inclined to insulate ourselves in our rooms, consuming and numbing and distracting ourselves forever.
So the opposite is to deploy humility, courage, patience, and creativity, and become intellectual athletes who pursue interesting ideas, feed ourselves nourishing media, use boredom as a skill set when we need to, and devote our precious, limited attention to creating.
Media that, you know, develops the human consciousness and develops our own consciousness. It’s all a collective act of revolution, and this is the war of our time. Only lots of ideas coming out at once.
But you see what I’m saying, right? Like, you have to feed yourself good stuff, let it sit, let it digest, and then really interesting things start coming out of you. Holy glaze, are you with me? Thank you. OK, the last thing I want to cover right now.
I’m forcing myself to make something imperfect to get back into a consistent flow. Sometimes you have to accept that the work won’t be very good, and that if you show up purely as yourself, without expectation, with full honesty, this is who I am, this is what I’m about to do. Apply this strategy to your creative work, too. Great.
OK, the last thing I want to cover is how to do it. Helpful metaphor.
As you start getting into this work, you’re going to view your brain as an ecosystem, which means there are inputs and outputs, there are living factors, and there are nonliving factors. In an ecosystem, you have living factors: plants, animals, insects, microbes- things that are alive within the ecosystem. And then you have nonliving factors. Soil, sunlight, water, rocks, the physical landscape, and these things interact to create a vibrant place where many living things depend on one another, right?
So, like, they depend on the worms. I’m not a scientist here. Do you understand the metaphor that I’m trying to get across? I think so. In your mind, Ideas are a product of that ecosystem. So you need to get in the practice of auditing your own internal ecosystem. What is coming in? What is being allowed to germinate, then be born, and what am I developing? Slash harvesting.
So the inputs, right, you can think of this as water, sunlight and soil. What are the ideas that are coming in? You start auditing your ideas, the media, the content, the information, the programming that’s going into your skull.
When you audit that very intentionally, you realise how much of your media diet is slop, fast food, the McDonald’s and Taco Bell of the information world. And then you decide, you know what? Maybe I have some informational chicken breast and rice, or some informational Spaghetti Bolognese. Whatever you enjoy, right? And then you start reading fiction.
Then you start watching movies with your full attention, without going on your phone, and you start noticing the little details in all the beautiful art that surrounds you. And when you get to that point, you realise that every single moment of your life, every single frame of your conscious experience in this physical realm is a work of art, if you can choose to see it that way. Right, and that choosing to see it that way is the skill to develop.
That is what it means to train your attention. Consider the ideas you allow to germinate and then harvest, right? What do you want to create? And what’s interesting about that question is that when you’re asking it right, you don’t have to think very hard.
So most people try to hyper-curate who they are. In the digital world, they’re like, who do I want to be seen as? Am I going to be the fiction-writing guy, or the mental health self-help guy? I don’t know who thinks of it that way.
Am I going to be an artist, or a tech programmer? And I have to decide on an Instagram bio that will become my identity box for the rest of my life. And then I’ll be OK. Then I’ll have it figured out. Then I’ll be the AI automations guy, and then I will never have to figure out who I am again.
And every dinner party I ever go to, I’ll be like, I’m the AI automations guy, and they’ll be like, yo, you’re so cool and then your problems are solved, right? Incorrect. You are not a thing. You are not X, Y or Z. You are a living, breathing, dynamic process of this life.
And It’s not about who you are; it’s about what. Doing it is an active being. It is a process. You are in motion, and you are never one thing. The moment you decide to be one thing is the moment you die, conceptually and maybe literally.
So let’s stay in motion, and let’s keep that in mind. Forget about… Forget about who you are and what you want your grand magnum opus to be. Forget about your grand project. Let all of that go. Let it go, do you? Let it go. Thank you. And then focus on the doing. Give your attention to the doing in that idea ecosystem. You’re taking in interesting ideas: the soil, the water, the air, the sunlight.
That’s your books, your films, your podcasts, your music. You’re listening and taking it in with your full attention. You’re really digesting it, right. Get to harvesting, get to work. You’re a farmer of your own mind. Forget who you are, forget your Instagram bio and start putting things on paper, on the keys or making something visual.
But start, start doing something. Focus on the ING, the doing of the thing. OK, goodness gracious, we are all over the place.
Let’s review everything we’ve covered and then let’s get the hell out of here and start doing
something. Yeah. OK, so you’re overwhelmed with ideas. Great. Welcome to the new era. We’re going to be doing this work for the next several decades, so strap in. It is not too late for you. This is only the beginning. Humanity is being challenged on a massive scale right now.
You are on the front lines of the creative revolution, and we need you. We need your ideas. No one else can produce what you are here to make. See yourself as a creative athlete, then get to work, get to practice. It’s not about you, it’s about everyone else.
- Step 1. Go back to nothing. So de-stimulate yourself. Let go of all the ideas; let them process themselves out. If you give yourself time and silence, they will.
- Step 2. Reintroduce yourself to the page, to physical practice slowly. Do it gently. Do it with zero pressure. Don’t try to make anything grand; try to do something. Get your body in motion because the only way the anxiety goes away is by doing something.
- Step 3: Dial up the intensity, right? Ring your brain out, ring your body out. Sweat, focus, keep yourself busy for hours. Corrupted focus; time to do the creative work, really stretch yourself, and then your ideas will grow back stronger.
- It’s like hypertrophy in the gym. You break your muscles down, and then they grow back stronger.
- Step 4. Feed yourself with nourishing media: books, podcasts, music, all the great art of our time. You have the Internet at your fingertips; you can use it for good. Be a conscious curator of your own media diet, OK, and use the Internet for good. Feed yourself what your soul needs.
If you listen carefully, if you have the humility to listen, your soul will tell you what it needs and that it is your job to serve yourself. Serve yourself good media, create some awesome art and save the world with your creative spark. No one else will do it, and you are uniquely equipped to do it. I love you. This was all over the place, but I’ll see you in the next article.
