James Altucher proposes to come up and write down ten ideas a day, no matter what as part of your “daily practice”
And he says there are three reasons to do this:
- Some of those ideas may actually be good. But don’t obsess with this. You’re just practicing here.
- If you don’t exercise your “idea muscle” every day it would atrophy and you would lose the ability to be creative.
- If later on you do need good ideas to “save your life”, you know you will be (and have) a fountain of them.
I’d encourage you to do the same and try to come up with 10 research ideas every day. Everything counts (ideas for concrete papers, for new research lines, for project proposals…).
I do it and use Trello (free, we use it in the team to keep track of everything we do) to write them down.
One open question is what should I do with all those ideas I know I won’t be able to pursue myself alsone. I should find the way to make them public in some kind of collaborative environment and let them somehow open for grabs. To be continued…
More on how to become an idea machine here
