Highlights 🥑 Why Your Ideas Are So Bad

“I rarely have good ideas.

To overcome this limitation, I think about one topic (like habits) for an unreasonable amount of time. Then, I revise, revise, revise until only the best stuff remains. It’s slow, but it works.

You can either be a genius or you can be patient.”

Start somewhere bad to get somewhere good. A few weeks ago, I interviewed psychologist Adam Alter about his book Anatomy of a Breakthrough . In it, he writes about the “creative cliff illusion,” the notion that good creative ideas will either come quickly or not at all. Unfortunately, our intuition has that one approximately backward. In studies of... See more

Your ideas are a product of the information you consume. Improving your outputs requires actively directing your attention to high-quality information streams and diverting attention from low-quality ones.

The tricky thing is that our information ecosystem is full of talented marketers who masquerade as experts with convincing copywri

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“A few tips on how to be a better writer:

– write about what fascinates you

– make one point per sentence

– use stories to make your point

– cut extra words like “really” and “very”

– read the whole thing out loud

– post publicly (you’ll try harder when you know others will read it)

And finally, be more thoughtful about what you consume. The quality of id... See more