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I come up with 2-10 ideas a day. Most are not good.

How I come up with lots of ideas:

- I consume a lot of high-quality inputs from different fields (reading, podcasts, etc). If it's not difficult to consume, it's probably not worth it.

- I make the idea capture process extremely easy. I use a Siri shortcut to log to a text file with my ideas list, which is ~3k lines long right now.

- I publicly write about my ideas, and allow others to refine what I think.

- I choose one idea to pursue at a time until it's finished. I accept that execution is generally more important than ideas.

- Every morning, I run `cat ideas.txt | shuf | head -n 20` to review and refine my ideas.

- I ask people lots of questions. Every moment I'm talking about myself is a lost opportunity to explore.

1 comments

> I use a Siri shortcut to log to a text file with my ideas list, which is ~3k lines long right now.

If you don't mind, can you describe this system?

On iOS, there's a shortcuts app that enables you to automate things.

I have a shortcut for the following:

  Receive Any input from Share Sheet, Quick Actions
    If there's no input Ask For Text
      |
  Append Shortcut input to Documents/inbox.txt (make new line)

Every morning I sort lines from my inbox file into todo.txt, ideas.txt, calendar, etc. It's pretty much a modified version of GTD:

[1] https://hamberg.no/gtd

I have one idea per line in my ideas.txt file, so I use the following to pick some random ideas:

  cat ideas.txt | shuf | head -n 20

Reviewing old ideas is all about cross-pollination. With fresh eyes, I'll sometimes append a small insight to the line, or delete ideas that have lost their magic.

When ideas get too large to fit on a single line, I break them out into unpublished essays. And if I work on them long enough, eventually I publish them :)

---

Whoa, what a coincidence! I just checked my ideas file, and I'm exactly at 3333 lines.

    cat ideas.txt | wc -l
    3333