I enjoyed this reminder from Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter this morning:
To generate ideas, get better at noticing. A truth I’d already been stumbling towards was clarified for me by Rob Bell, in his excellent audio course Something to Say: When it comes to amassing a stockpile of ideas to write or speak about, or otherwise to use in your creative work, by far the most important thing is just to get into the habit of noticing things and making some record of them. That’s it. Random quotes you encounter, quirky things people say or do, thoughts or feelings that occur to you, intriguing facts that cross your radar: practice a) realising that you’re encountering them, then b) making a scribbled note, taking a phone photo, anything at all to jog your memory of the moment. Perhaps this strikes you as blindingly obvious! But it’s starkly different from a widespread focus these days on building tricked-out systems for storing or connecting your notes, getting AI to synthesise new insights from them, or storing material you encounter for digesting later on. The way Bell describes it (and the way I’ve experienced it too) is that connections and insights about the material happen spontaneously, or when the work calls for them. But first of all, the subconscious needs feeding – and noticing is how you do that.
