Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content

What solutions can I borrow from past problems that can be applied to this current one? • What does this remind me of? • What’s the best-case scenario? • What’s the worst-case scenario? • What am I doing right? • What am I doing brilliantly? • How can I jump the track? • Which strengths of mine (or my company’s) can I apply? • Which weaknesses need

Try This: Set aside part of a morning, and do two to three hours on an idea you’d really like to explore. During your sessions, take no phone calls and answer no e-mail.

“go with the thought” I had just put on paper.

Try This: Think of an opportunity you’d like to investigate (changing departments, creating a new product, writing a book in your chosen field), and hold a ten-minute freewriting conversation with a paper advisor. Now, pick out some interesting point from that conversation, and use it as a starting point for ten more minutes of writing with a diffe

These chunks, by the way, aren’t mere fragments. They’re complete thoughts. That’s what makes this method work. If I read a chunk even a decade from now, it would make sense to me.

Focus-changers are simple questions to ask yourself, in writing, that help you redirect your mind toward the unexplored parts of a situation.

Try This: Write for ten minutes about a situation that physically and mentally exhausts you. Don’t try to solve anything in this bout of writing; just get the details down.

There’s a story about Thomas Edison that relates to this. Edison would hold a handful of coins while resting in his chair, so when he lapsed into sleep, the coins would fall, hit the floor, and wake him—a cacophonous reminder to get back to work.

Your best thought comes embedded in chunks of your worst thought.