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A beginner’s guide to exploration | thesephist.com

think of your ideas as people / your children. I want my ideas to go hang out with other ideas, I don't want them hanging out in a room full of schedules and todo lists

an invitation to experiment

The more ideas you have in your toolkit, the easier it is to choose one to turn into your perfect story. Start with the prompts to build a list for your toolkit. Then regularly dedicate time to add to it. Capture any article or a conversation that leaves you inspired.

Karen Eber • The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories that Inform, Influence, and Inspire

Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a

Steven Johnson • Where Good Ideas Come From

To create an Archipelago of Ideas, you divergently gather a group of ideas, sources, or points that will form the backbone of your essay, presentation, or deliverable. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work with, you switch decisively into convergence mode and link them together in an order that makes sense.

Tiago Forte • Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.

Paul Graham • How to Do Great Work

Explore how you find your best story ideas.