Choosing Myself / Idea Workout Day One

June 20, 2013

I started reading James Altucher's book, Choose Yourself, yesterday. It's brilliant. He's brilliant. I'll talk more about James and his book in a later post as I am just beyond the half-way mark. I suspect I'll finish it tomorrow.

The Idea Muscle; Mine's in Sad Shape

I am compelled to share one of the key recommendations of the book: generating ideas as part of a Daily Practice. This makes a tonne of sense. He writes of the "idea muscle" and the risks of not working it regularly. The result of not using your idea muscle is that it will atrophy, just the same as when you stop moving for a prolonged period of time, your physical muscles atrophy. I've seen this atrophy in action in both my ideas and body.

After emerging from a rather dark state recently (more on that in a future post), I realized I stopped coming up with new ideas. I was working on the line waiting to react to things served to me by others. Ideas served by others, goals served by others, decisions served by others. I'm doing much better now and the stain left by this dark period is fading but it requires lots of light and exposure to positivity. In any event, before even hearing about James Altucher (first by Chris Brogan and then other smart folks who I've discovered recently), I came to that realization of my failure to generate ideas and be the origin of my actions.

So, when I started reading Choose Yourself, it struck me that not only should I start working on generating ideas as a Daily Practice (sic), I started to wonder what would happen if I shared those ideas? I am not afraid of someone stealing them, I am not afraid of people thinking they are stupid—although many will be.

Leo Babauta of Zen Habits related the story of what started him down the road of his success to Jonathan Fields on The Good Life Project. He said that it was that he made his commitment and practice public. Leo found that putting his goals out there and sharing his results was a way to bring (or force) accountability and help document the progress. People who found his writing saw their own struggles and could identify with what he was doing and it had an impact on their lives.

My First Idea

So, my first idea is to publish and freely share my ideas. I want to put them out there for people to look at, think about, use themselves, suggest we try to execute together, share with friend in need of an idea. They won't all be good. Some will be real stinkers or just plain nuts but in sharing I hope I can help myself and better still, help someone else.