How writing about how I wrote this post could help you with writing posts or in fact any idea

How writing about how I thought about this post could help you think of your next idea

Your idea has you stumped

You have an idea in your head. But you are struggling to push it across the line. Its an intangible feeling. Uncomfortable almost.

So what do you do about it?

Well at the risk of getting all shouty and "sergeant majory" about it.... blimin' shape yourself creative soldier! An idea stuck in your head is flaming useless to man nor beast.

What you need is a process to get you out of your malaise.

How do I do it? 

Well after a few iterations, I thought I would write an post about how I came up with the idea for this post. I hope you can use it as a metaphor for coming up with your own ideas too.

I have nursed the idea of this article for a while. The original thought was to write a "shouty" piece that gave people a call to action. Along the way (as I explain later) this mutated into the a case study on how I wrote THIS article.

It seem(s)*ed a cool way of writing about a paradox of how I came up with the idea would be a cool way of explaining it to you!

Writing about writing this post is a kind of reciprocating loop, its what in programming terms can cause a computer to crash. Frankly its making my brain hurt trying to get it down but I will try.

*(I'll stop writing in present and past tense as its way too complicated).

First I realised that I needed to get my idea out of the back of my head and expose it to the air.

Ultimately the main thrust of what I was doing was simply to make a start. My inspiration behind this is the Chinese proverb that says "a good start is half way to success".

As ever with clichés the words are clever but it seems to me the making the start is often the hardest thing to do and therefore the "thing" that is stopping you from starting in the first place.

My I approach was/is to make the process of bringing an idea to the surface as friction free as I can and to let it emerge in baby steps. By programming myself to believe that each step is progress I find I am not stuck in an analytical loop and over thinking, In doing so I find I don't get stuck so "starting".

What did you do first?

My first step was/is to simply give the idea a name. In this case I called it "A Good Start is Half A Success". I had seen the quote in a book. Incidentally, note that the title didn't last through to the completed article.

If I let the idea swim around in my head I know that it is simply a waste of energy. The trick is to make the idea tangible. I do this by committing it to some form of media. I prefer pencil and paper really, but being the disorganized so and so that I am, I increasingly use Evernote. I know with Evernote my ideas are safe and further more can follow me around digitally. Paper just ends scrunched up at the bottom of my bag.

Here you can see the genesis of the idea as a screenshot. The observant among you will see my thought trains for future posts too!

As you can see the line is only short. Ideally it should contain all the triggers that inspired the idea in the first place. In this case I didn't do that.. its a case of do as I say I guess.

What is the next step?

My next step is to simple stop: First stage tick: Idea safely in the bag (or Evernote); Metaphorical pat on the back; on with my life.

Part of  my stopping is through shear laziness I admit, but there is method behind this too. What I am doing is to give my idea a period of time to let it gestate in my head.

You have two sorts of thinking: Fast and Slow

You see there is a notion described by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that the brain is kind of split down the middle. The fast brain is primitive and bases its thinking on a conservative instinct, the slow brain is more considered and liberally creative. Its a kind of fight between the Incredible Hulk and Bruce Banner. By trying to hammer away at your idea from the off you are more likely to be listening to the primitive brain.

I didn't want my idea ripped apart by the Incredible Hulk did I?

Its seems to me that to make contact with my retiring slow brain, I need to give it time and this is best done when the fast brain isn't noticing. I my case I like to walk my dog. In your case it could be that you process ideas as you sleep, when you exercise or do something completely different. With Archimedes it was when he was taking a bath.

You need to take action 

If you leave the idea ruminating too long your wait can can end up being forever. Its hard for me to give you a deadline on these things. Sometimes the urge to resolve the problem happens in days other times weeks, However, there comes at time when the slow brain has had his restful moment and you then need to take some time out to flesh it out. 

By now you know my shouty sergent major thoughts on that!

To move on I needed to get the idea into something tangible and to do this is simple: make it into something that can be touched or critiqued by a third party. Write it down.

Again, it's hard to start but I find that by following a simple ritual its like pulling the ripcord to a dilapidated petrol lawn mower. Once I get started the words start to come out and then whoosh off I go.

My ritual is to be in a place where there are no other distractions. I have a little background music courtesy of Mixcloud. I close the door to my little office and I begin.

I find (as I am with this article) once you start the feeling is great.

The state of "flow"

This feeling is what the neuroscience lot call "flow". When I enter this, a conversation with my slow creative brain wakes up. He stops dawdling and looking at email, social media and the like and the flashes of inspiration come thick and fast.

As I write this I used a word processor over a notebook. I choose this as I am a fast typist. The speed at which I can download the contents of brain is approximately comparable with my thoughts.

In my first pass at writing I simply let the words flow out of my fingers. I chastise my self for using the back space to correct myself. I focus on ignoring the wiggly red lines that jump out at me almost shouting at me to correct them.

If you stop to do this, your fast (Incredible Hulk) brain takes control and you lose momentum critiquing the work. Given half a chance this "hulky brain" will tell you that the idea sucks and you can evan find yourself grinding to a halt.

As I have mentioned in my previous post about John Cleese "when you are being creative then nothing is wrong". Keep being creative.and don't criticise yourself.

Key to it though is to keep on writing. I try not to stop and this stopping means any time you start to move into a correction mode. I only stop when I think my ideas are emptied form my head.

Take a breath

Once I have reached this stage I take another breather. This gives chance for my now articulated idea to brew like a pot of tea. Sometimes I even get a pot of tea!

With tea drunk and (as it happens) the dog walked I then enter the my critical mode.

I read through what I have written and correct it over a series of iterations. I use the notion behind agile and lean thinking... at this point. Initially I go back and corrected all those wiggly admonishments that my word processor shouted at and kind of reformat the order of the ideas and sentences that didn't make sense; I then read; test it on myself and iterate what I think needs changing.

The evolution of the post started as "a good start is half a success". Along the way and with iterations it occurred to me to write about how I wrote this. The idea mutated to what you now see. It resulted in some  pretty complex use of English because of the nature as I switched between the present tense of how I am writing compared with what I actually eventually wrote. (I guess some of it may still be wrong. If it is please tell me and I will iterate again).

I then spent time getting the text tighter and tighter. By this I mean reducing the word count. I aim to be writing sales copy to myself. A good friend of mine and very successful multi-millionaire businessman once told me that you should image yourself shouting the words out whilst stood on a box.

Sometimes as I read the stuff back I emphasise words in CAPITAL letters as a mechanism to appear as though I am shouting really loud, but as you can see none made it into this article (LOL).

Remove the fluff from the idea

My edits were ruthless. For example my original article rambled because of my attempt to squeeze the development of product ideas as well as the article. I decided to strip this out but saved the copy into Evernote for another article in the future.

I took about two hours for this process; drank a cup of tea and walked the dog around the block too.

As I come to the conclusion I hope that this metaphor helps with your idea generation process. It was certainly cathartic for me and generated another couple of articles in the process!

If you liked this

I hope you find this article interesting, check out my ebook,  Innovation Muscle. Its a short sharp read as to how you and your team can innovate fresh powerful ideas. Using these processes you will be able to create ideas that punch above their weight.

Innovation Muscle
Techniques to Make your Innovations Punch Above their Weight

Check out my book by clicking here: INNOVATION MUSCLE

Anyone purchasing the book will receive not one, but TWO FREE mini e-books that are supplied directly as PDF files to your inbox. These can be distributed to you team when starting a new project or used simply to sanity check your existing processes.

Until next time 

Paul