Quote for the Day: Keep Generating Stuff

The best way to have a good idea

is to have lots of ideas

— Linus Pauling, two time Nobel Prize Winner

Following up on the Procrastination theme from yesterday, I wanted to share this quote.

Too often (if you’re anything like me), we tend to think we can’t write something down until we’ve “figured it out”. We convince ourselves that we either can’t write until it’s clear in our mind or that it will be embarassing gobblety-goop if we were to just write whatever is cooking in our minds and we’d make a fool of ourselves by saying it “out loud”.

However, the truth is that most writers and many thinkers in other fields actually do the working out of ideas best on paper when they don’t yet know what they want to say. By “talking to ourselves”, we can start to gather relevant bits, discard less important bits, see patterns emerging — actually shape our thoughts more clearly as we go - instead of expecting it to be all right there right now.

Is it painful for those of us raised in the Fixed Mindset of “get it right, get it right quickly, don’t need to work at getting it right quickly”? You betcha.

Is the pain useful to tolerate and move through? Absolutely.

So here’s my challenge to you today - and I’ll share it with you:

I have a report I’m writing on a very tight deadline. I’m not sure what patterns I see in my data yet, so I haven’t been writing “The Next Section”. I’m going to follow my own advice and just write — think “out loud” — about what I’m seeing, what I’m not seeing, and what it might mean in the way of patterns and see where I get.

Your challenge? … What could you “think out loud” about? No editing, no worrying about the clarity of the word choices or other distracting editorial activities. Just writing and writing as you think.

Feel free to share your thoughts, your challenge outcome, whatever you have to say.

Get as many ideas down as you can as often as you can —