One of the most challenging parts of blogging every day is deciding on what to write about. Especially when it is late at night, after a long day of work, it is hard to think up an idea and decide to execute on it. So, over the past 220 days of blogging, I’ve had many late nights, where I’m uncertain of what to write about.
The way I overcome that is by forcing myself to write lists of ideas.
This idea originally comes from James Altucher’s work on becoming an idea machine. I first heard James talk about his habit of writing ten ideas a day on his podcast in 2014. I started trying it out myself and now it is my go to when I’m feeling stuck for a topic.
Our instinct is to sit and wait for an idea before we start writing, but good ideas won’t come if you just sitting around. To get to a good idea, you need to brute force it. You need to get all the bad ideas out as well by simply forcing yourself to write out ideas and eventually, so long as you don’t stop, you will run into one that is worth using.
When I sit down at night to write my blog post for the day, I pull up a note on Evernote, start a number list, and force myself to write out my ideas (no matter how dumb) until I find one that works. Usually, by forcing that first step, something switches in my mind, the ideas start flowing, and I find a topic to explore before I even hit ten ideas.
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