There isn't never mind...

I have a lot of ideas lately. I think the main reason I have had so many is because I have been trying to come up with ideas. Contrary to popular belief, ideas do not spring out of nowhere. Idea generation is like exercising. The more you exercise, the stronger you get. Likewise, the more you sit there and think of ideas, the more ideas you generate. Be prepared. When your idea muscle grows strong, it will create an overwhelming flood.

If you are going to try to generate more ideas, you have to get them out of your brain as they happen. The more ideas you keep in your brain the less ideas you will have. Carry a Moleskine, sign up for a note app, create a list or buy a voice recorder. Whatever you do, as soon as you get an idea, get it out of your head. You do not have to instantly go do the idea, just record it.

As you become more disciplined at tracking your ideas, more ideas will come to. Some of those ideas will be improvements to original ideas. Over time you will start to see certain a really cool transformation of some ideas. 

You will create ideas that you would have never been capable of originally, but due to increased attention and thought, they have developed into something great.

Share your ideas. Do not just track your ideas and forcefully try to come up with new ones. Also bring others into the fold. Share your ideas with them and you will be surprised at how differently they think through them, which will in turn help you think differently. Sharing an idea with someone is one of the best ways to really develop it. 

So now you are tracking your ideas, generating more ideas, and sharing them with people which in turn is generating more ideas and mutating previous ones. Pick one. Pick the idea that meets at the crossroads of interesting and profitable. Design it. Build it. Market it. Do not stop there though. Keep generating more ideas. It is possible that the idea you pick will not be successful. If that is the case, you only need to worry if you have at some point stopped your creative process.

Today I had an idea on how to better share ideas. You will never have time to build all your ideas, but that does not mean that the ones you do not pick are not solid. Try to get someone else to work on the solid idea and consult with them. Sharing ownership and seeing an idea take shape is better than letting it rot.

My idea was a blog where I share ideas that I do not have time to fully own, but that I would still like to see created. Each time I decide I do not want to focus on an idea, I could release it as a blog post. Anyone else would then be free to take the idea and run. All I would ask for is the opportunity to help with the idea at some point because chances are I would want to use it and I believe I could be helpful along the way.

The blog idea almost immediately morphed into something else. I think it would be cool to have a site online where you could store your ideas and annotate them with thoughts, links, screenshots and scribbles. If you decide you do not want to devote time to the idea, you can make it public and allow someone else to work on it. That person can take the idea and run with it, and even more wisely, involve you in the process.

That is the idea. It’s an idea idea. Anyone who stumbles across this can feel free to take that idea and run with it. I cannot guarantee profitability but I think it is cool. I would love to help bring this into fruition, but I have already chosen an idea to run with, leaving me with no time.

How to you store your ideas? What are some good ones that you will never do?