id: dmwi title: Doing more with my Ideas previous: wgl next: ile date: 2021-04-10 ---

## Doing more with my Ideas

It seems that a lot of very deep thought has come from conversations lately. Last week was “why” and this week was a less philosophical and more practical question.

Walks are amazing. When I am alone they are amazing for thinking, and with company they are a perfect time to have a great conversation. I don’t have my phone or any other distractions out while walking (except for music) and that gets put away when I have company.

So the other day on a walk with my girlfriend we were talking and she asked what the purpose of the idea generation that I do is. That is: I try to come up with 10 ideas a day. The question was not really about the thought exercise itself, but what I want to do with that skill I am training. My initial answer was that I wanted to be good at generating ideas of course, but that was not enough. “Why do you want to be good at generating ideas? What do you want to do with those ideas?”. I outlined some very vague things such as starting a business, self employment, making interesting tools, writing etc. Then she asked why I was not doing anything with the hundreds of ideas that I had already come up with over the past few months. Even if most are bad; some must be useful. I couldn’t answer that.

I realized that I had been overlooking the important fact that there could be a lot of value in the mess of ideas I had already come up with. I was waiting for an idea to feel just right before going after it while forgetting that that sort of expectation is unreasonable. I was only looking at my gut reaction to the ideas without delving any deeper to find the value that was not directly apparent.

This is one reason why it is vitally important to talk with others often. Not only do they provide a differing perspective but the act of expressing an idea will refine it. I have to think of an idea much more clearly when I explain it to someone else than if it is just floating around in my head.

I came to the conclusion that I was losing out on: the value of the ideas themselves and on building other skills that can come from pursuing them further. So I have spent the last week working on a system to help with this. I don’t know exactly how well this experiment will turn out.

My daily practice (which I have been slacking on) is still generating 10 ideas. The system consists of a program that will provide sequential filters so I can take each idea as far as it merits and practice the further steps to implementation. At each step if I find a roadblock I can’t get through, I can drop the idea there. The program takes care of organization, file creation, and access. This makes working on the ideas as easy as possible.

The system involves four steps after the generation of the idea.

Quick look. Does the idea have merit and is it interesting to me?

Generate a coherent vision of what this idea might look like if it was implemented, what the final stage would actually do. I don’t need specifics here but just articulate what the outcome would be without worrying about how to get there yet.

Develop an actual plan for it. Is it possible? This is the step where I will have to start researching specific methods of implementation and try to coherently plan how it might come about.

Lastly the experimentation step. If an idea makes this far it is something that I can see implementing and am fairly interested in. Here I will develop small scale experiments to actually test the implementation. This is the first point where the idea will have to actually come in contact with the outside world to test its viability.

If the experiments are promising then I can go further. There is no restriction on what the ideas might be. Business ideas, home projects, role playing games, anything is fair game. I am hoping that actually pursuing them will result in a bunch of new and interesting activities and projects.

Yesterday I loaded all of the ideas from the past months into the program and started filtering through the first step. It is quite enjoyable to revisit some of the horrendous ones I came up with. In total there are a little over 1000.

I plan to work through the steps as I have time. My goal is to spend a little time each day working on it. I have several other daily practices I am trying to implement so it is going to be wherever I can fit it in at the moment.

Most of my daily practices have been suggested through books, podcasts etc so this is one of the first experiments that is my own. I am looking forward to seeing how it turns out over the next few months.

Thanks for reading.

Phone time: 16h 30m