Have you ever had a brilliant idea, and then end up forgetting it later?
Almost everyone struggles with ideas, especially now in this fast paced world. We get lots of ideas and it's only natural that we forget. Furthermore, it’s really hard to know in foresight what is important and what is not.
Over time you may realize not all thoughts are meaningful, and if you observe yourself over time you will realize that thoughts are scattered all over the place like confetti sprinkled on cake. Furthermore, to complicate things, in the heat of the moment you may find yourself giving the thought a lot of power because of the emotions it invokes in you.
So where do your thoughts take you?
Let’s visit the two sides of the aisle. One, someone who rarely writes anything down. Some people are in the mindset of “it’s pointless to write down my ideas because my ideas are all over the place”. Also it is accompanied by the belief that there is no way to make sense of them or do anything meaningful with them.
On the other side of the aisle, there are people who meticulously write everything down.
A personal example – for building my business, at one point I went into the mindset of “every thought is important”, every small detail counts! I would think… “oh only If I could connect this idea to that then I will end up with the next breakthrough idea”. Also to be fair, this type of thinking is accompanied with the assumption that you could execute on everything and hyper-optimize for productivity.
Looking back, I think there's something behind the idea of “connecting the dots”. If you follow the trail of your thoughts and connect enough of them you will end up with a new perspective that will surprise you. It’s a great mental muscle to be able to combine the best of two worlds - the scattered ideas and the organized and aligned set of ideas.
Also it’s worth mentioning that at the end, it may not even be about the thoughts and the ideas themselves, but about what we derive from them! What you get out of your ideas and how that translates to your life perspective.
Let’s divulge into a visual look, say you have had ten great ideas, imagine it’s like ten sugar cubes. Now say these are random ideas, so we just put these sugar cubes horizontally side by side on a table top. Say a few of these cubes are related to one another, you might stack one on top of the other so now there’s a vertical depth.
A practical example of this that I’ve had recently -
I was at a philosophy meetup here in Toronto, we were contemplating
“What is status?”
“What role does it play in society?”
"Is status fixed at birth or can it be earned?"
One of the conclusions we came to, as a group, is that status is an abstract concept, and by its inherent nature for something to be “high” status means that we collectively voted as a group on it.
Status is psychological, so its subject to perception.
Status is also a categorization and method of labeling that helps us make decisions faster.
Later the next day, we were talking about building a great product, specifically about feedback from users… we realized that some elements of our app design may indirectly signal the feeling of old design or lacking modern look. In some projection, this translates to a “low status” or “not cool status”.
What if you wanted to have more of these types of insights on your life?
Would that have an impact on your life?
