Writing Out Loud: Channeling the Pull of New Ideas

Writing a daily post is something I did for 100 days in a row.¹ This is something I really enjoyed achieving. I think part of what stopped it from becoming a habit I'd stick to was the streak. The pressure to keep the streak was so overwhelming that when I finally achieved the 100 days that I committed myself to achieve, I was done. Now, in hindsight, it's been 3 years, 2 months and 10 days.

Pulled in So Many Directions

I feel pulled in so many directions creatively. There are projects I want to start and ideas I want to implement.

This is a blessing and a curse. I'm very grateful for it, because years ago I used to go through creative ruts, and just general ruts, where I felt unmotivated to do anything. Right now I'm in the opposite place, which is an amazing thing.

But again, it's a blessing and a curse. I feel like doing everything, and in some ways that keeps me distracted from the things I have to do. And when I say "have to do", I pretty much mean the activities that produce money. Working for myself means I need to be good at prioritizing those. That's why I've been thinking about the dip again.²

The Dip

I know the rule. Every project starts with uninformed optimism, then it drops into the dip, and the only way to reach achievement is to push through the difficult part.

Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.

I struggle with this quote. I do believe I need to say no to so many of the wrong things. It's just that I really struggle sometimes to know which ideas could be a massive breakthrough, and which ones are simple distractions. They might be fun to pursue, but in the end they could turn out to be a time waster.

When a New Idea Shows Up

And honestly, I know it really well. The problem is that the dip is exactly where a new idea shows up and starts to look amazing. For me, that pull towards novel ideas is the hardest part.

A fresh idea always feels like the top of the first hill, and the project I'm working on feels like the bottom of the valley.

So I'm putting this curve here as a reminder. When a new idea feels super exciting halfway through something, it's probably just the dip talking.

We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us… that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.³

3.

From Letter Seven of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (written in Rome, 14 May 1904), in Stephen Mitchell's translation.

So What Do I Do With It?

That is true for me. I do feel like I'm constantly being pulled in many directions.

But I don't think the solution is to suppress that creative desire I have for things. I think the solution is to use it, channel it into something useful, and let it flow into what I write next.

A Good Task System

A big part of handling so many ideas, when you have so many things going on, is having a good task management system. If every idea has a place to land, I don't have to chase it right away, and I can come back to it when the timing is right.⁴

AI Coding

I've been really focused on AI coding, and I'm incredibly grateful to have discovered how powerful it is. It's been about two years now, and I spend most of my days creating some really nice stuff with it. It's also something I've been super passionate about teaching others.⁵

A Writer Who Doesn't Like Writing

So here's the idea. I would like to start using this blog as a way to write more.

"I'm Not Really a Writer"

Of course, one of the objections I always have is that I'm not really a writer. But who cares about that? The real questions are different:

• Am I someone who is constantly learning new things? Yes.
• Do I have things to say? Yes.
• Do I like conversation and saying things out loud? Yes.
• Can I sit down and write for long periods of time? To be honest, not always. I get bored and excited by other ideas, like creating an app.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

What Chesterton means is that some things are worth doing yourself, even if you do them imperfectly. In the book, he's praising the all-rounder, someone who does many things without being a specialist in any of them. Being an amateur at something worthwhile is better than staying out of it and leaving it to the experts.

This really resonates with me. Lately I've had a massive pull towards being a better polymath. And by polymath, I mean someone with various interests who keeps growing in many different skills, as opposed to a specialist. But it's not just about doing that for myself. I've decided I want to teach this to others, or at the very least inspire others to try it. That's a big part of what I call Davincism.⁶

Voice Dictation

But I like talking. So voice dictation is amazing for me, and that's what I want to do more of.

Putting my thoughts out there, everything I have for the day, and using that as a source of material I can come back to later.

Why Put It on My Blog?

Whenever I've done this in my own personal notes, I've eventually given up. I'm a big fan of turning things into something aesthetic.

So putting it out on my daily blog, making it look better, making it more useful to others, and building nice features that help people resonate with what I'm saying is pretty cool.

What I'll Use It For

From there, I can use that material for the important work.

YouTube Videos

On one hand, that's creating YouTube videos with smart, well-thought-out points, and sharing opinions I think are worth sharing. Right now I'm working on my next YouTube video, which is about Branch Writing.⁷

My Fear of Sending Emails

And finally, it's about overcoming the fear I've always had of sending emails.

I've had a lot of setbacks with expensive email companies and their pricing, and it always discouraged me psychologically. This isn't a problem with their business model. It's more about my psychology. Paying for every subscriber always made me not want to grow my email list, which is ridiculous.

My Own Email System

But now that I've built my own custom projects, like the platform where I sell my courses, I can build my own email system.

That lets me get really good at sending emails to the people who actually want them, about the topics they care about. All the way from those who might enjoy these random thoughts, to the people who only want the curated side of how I use Obsidian, or how I use AI to build my own custom projects.

How I Wrote This

This post is scattered, with so many different topics, but writing this way is a technique that's really helping me. It helps me express my ideas better and organize my thoughts better, and I'm very, very excited to get into this habit. Even without the pressure of doing it every single day, doing it consistently would be an amazing thing to build.

The way I was able to write this so effectively was voice dictation. I just dictated my ideas like crazy. Then I have some really cool AI workflows that help me compile all of it, organize it, and display it in the experience you're reading right now, including footnotes like this one.⁸

And yeah, I mean, it's incredible. This is one of the best uses of AI: helping you organize and nicely display your original ideas, your human touch, your human intellect, and helping you share them with other fellow humans like you, the reader.⁹

Footnotes

1. In 100 Days of Daily Blog, I wrote about the culmination of that challenge and the lessons I learned from it. ↩

2. Overcoming The Dip was a daily post I wrote 3 years, 2 months and 25 days ago. ↩

3. From Letter Seven of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (written in Rome, 14 May 1904), in Stephen Mitchell's translation. ↩

4. If this is something you need help with, contact me.

   I created my own custom task system, and I can teach you how to create your own custom system too. ↩

5. I teach this in my course, Make AI Build Apps for You.

   It's a step-by-step system for getting AI to build your own small tools, web apps and Obsidian plugins, with no coding required.

   It's made for complete beginners. ↩

6. I wrote about this approach in Davincism. ↩

7. Branch Writing is the Obsidian plugin I created to help you write the way you think.

   Instead of forcing your ideas into paragraphs, you can lay them out visually as branches and move them around.

   You can see it in action in my first video about it. ↩

8. Yeah, this is an example of what a footnote looks like. ↩

9. Well, I hope it really is you reading this, and not your AI reading it and giving you a summary. That'd be hilarious. ↩