I used to have a list of ideas I carried with me everywhere. It was overflowing with literally hundreds of ideas, and of course I knew I could never get through them all but I still added more and more to the list everyday. I couldn’t help it. Everywhere I looked, everything I saw or experienced triggered a new idea. A new digital product idea, a new company idea, a new newsletter, podcast, video game, SaaS, movie, gadget…
Half were outside the bounds of what I could even tangibly create, either restricted by my own skillset or occasionally by the available technology altogether. I was constantly inspired and curious, finding a dozen new things I could build every single day.
Then one day I woke up and realized that, without noticing, I stopped having ideas.
At some point along the way the number of items I was adding to my list shrank and shrank until it hit 0. The list became stale and I stopped checking it altogether. Even as I write this, I couldn’t tell you exactly where that list even is anymore.
So what happened? Did I lose the naive ambition I had 10 years ago that drove me? Did the failure of my first startup knock the wind out of me more than I truly realized? Did I lose my creative spark? A combination of all three, or more?
I let myself swirl in these questions, trying to figure out why I wasn’t coming up with awesome new ideas I could obsess over. Where did my ideas go? Where did they come from to begin with?
And that’s when it hit me.
I didn’t lose my creativity, or my ambition, or my ability to do and build and create cool shit. Not having ideas anymore was a symptom, because realistically I still had some ideas. I often dismissed them as “already done” or “not big enough” or “not exciting enough” and led myself into believing I just didn’t have ideas.
But really, I was lacking inputs.
Somewhere along the way, I became disconnected from the contexts where I was naturally observing patterns and problems. I wasn’t challenged, or challenging myself, to notice and observe other experiences like I used to. Maybe life got too busy, work got too important, social media became too distracting. Either way, I became cutoff from my core sources of inspiration and ideation.
Ideas don’t form in a vacuum.
That realization alone felt like someone turned my pilot light back on. Suddenly I felt that spark again, that tinge of an idea that made me jump up and get to work. I realized it was time to reignite the inputs that drive my creativity, my idea generators, and my internal systems that make ideas unavoidable.
Lacking Inputs is my way of sharing that journey in realtime - my learnings, my strategies, my changes. Hopefully along the way, I can help a few more people rediscover their inputs.