CREATIVE ADVENTURES — 48

Imagine You Have One Million Ideas Trapped Inside You

In this thought experiment, you will imagine that you have one million ideas trapped inside you.

In this post, I have been inspired by Neil Gaiman’s famous advice on writing below:

“Assume that you have a million words inside you that are absolute rubbish and you need to get them out before you get to the good ones. And if you get there early, that’s great.”

Similarly, David Eddings provides the following advice:

“My advice to the young writer is likely to be unpalatable in an age of instant successes and meteoric falls. I tell the neophyte: Write a million words–the absolute best you can write, then throw it all away and bravely turn your back on what you have written. At that point, you’re ready to begin.”

This means you need to provide yourself a lot of opportunities for creativity, content creation, and experimentation. Sir James Dyson tried 5126 times and he failed each time — until he invented Dyson’s bagless vacuum cleaners.

If you want to be wildly successful and innovative, follow Elon Musk’s example. Conduct hundreds of experiments and keep learning. Give yourself hundreds of opportunities for failure. Create a huge library of your work. Remember the principle: Renaissance people and inventors thrive by doing 10,000 experiments.

Whatever your passion is, you need to create a huge body of work to make a big contribution, and this means creating thousands of pieces of your work. Joe Rogan created 4000 episodes of podcasts which were downloaded almost 200 million times. Creating this huge library made him the king of podcasting and Spotify paid Joe Rogan $100m to license his contents.

From Leonardo da Vinci to Mozart, from Edison to Einstein, prolific inventors and geniuses allowed themselves to do thousands of experiments. Einstein had 2332 patents on his name. Einstein published more than 300 papers. Leonardo started every day with a list of things to learn that day — from geology to optics.

To be unstoppable, you need to create a lot of crappy work. Give yourself the freedom to produce lots of foolish ideas and bad drafts. Do not let your inner voice judge you. Just keep creating and writing.

In this thought experiment, you will imagine that you have one million ideas trapped inside you. Please respond to the following prompts:

1. How will you unleash these 1 million words? Create a long-term plan where you will create your own renaissance. What kind of big questions and topics will you be focusing on? What are you really curious and passionate about? Make a topic of 30 topics and ideas that capture your interest.
2. If you write 1000 words every day, it would take 1000 days for you to reach 1 million words. Building some flexibility into this goal, let’s say this will take about three years. How will you keep creating and writing every day for the next three years? How will you establish your writing practice? How will you create an ideal environment for your creativity and productivity? Think of 10 small actions and habits you can do to establish your writing practice.
3. Imagine that you have written three books on the topics that you are curious or passionate about. These books might be fiction or non-fiction. What would be the titles of these books? Write down the Amazon description of these books.
4. For the sake of imagination, please imagine that you can write 40 different books. These will be books that you would love to read yourself. Brainstorm and create the titles of these 40 books. Make the titles interesting and remarkable. The more titles you can generate, the better. After you are done with your list, ask yourself this question: What if you write each of these ‘books’ as a condensed Medium article? Create a Medium series where you create a very useful, ever-green, and insightful article every week. See if you can continue this practice every week and finish writing 40 articles in one year.
5. Get your notebook and pencil. Imagine that you are 70 years old and a worldwide renowned and accomplished author. Create your own obituary that captures your imagined legacy and success. Create a list of all the imaginary best-seller books you have written.
6. Write yourself a letter that captures all your wishes, values, and contributions as a writer. In this letter, define your ‘why’. Why do you write? What drives you? What do you hope to accomplish? Why?
7. Create 50 interesting creative writing prompts that will inspire and motivate you. For example, you are an inventor who invents a dream design pill that lets people design their own dreams. What happens next? Or, write a thriller story where it starts to snow, but the color of this snow is red. Why is it red? Write a science fiction story where an Earth day is reduced to 12 hours instead of 24 hours. What happens next? Imagine that you are given the opportunity to create your own reality show. What is the title? What do you do?

How many writing experiments are you conducting every day? How many opportunities do you give yourself to fail every day? How many new, fresh, and exciting things are you learning every day? How many words are you writing every day? These are the true measure of innovativeness and success in today’s world. You need to continue experimenting until you reach 10,000 experiments in the field(s) that you want to contribute to.

Fahri Karakas is the author of the Self-making Studio. You can explore more here.