George Kao (authentic business coach) encourages building a daily habit of creating and publishing ideas to strengthen an "idea muscle," increase creativity, confidence, optimism, and problem-solving ability. He contrasts weekly publishing (which creates attachment and pressure) with daily micro-publishing (tweets, short videos) that permits play, fast testing, and iterative development; he recommends using low-engagement platforms (he uses Twitter) to liberate experimentation and notes timestamping and uncopyrighted content as benefits. The talk includes personal anecdotes (influence of James Altucher, his own practice) and practical tips for where and how to publish short, timestamped ideas.
Chapters
I'd like to encourage you to have a daily practice of creating and publishing new ideas. Now, I know that might sound a little bit intimidating, but bear with me here. And I promise that if you do this, it will create a completely new level of creativity, optimism, hope, and confidence in your life and in your business. So let me explain. When we only create, like one article a week or one video a week or something like that, we are only practicing creating and publishing once a week, which means we only have four things a month out there. And so for each of those four things, we naturally feel some attachment to. So, well, these things better work. How am I going to build my audience if this thing doesn't go viral or this thing doesn't get seen by a lot of people? So there's more of a weight to it when you only create, create once a week. But if you create every day and publish every day, then there's a lightness. Because now you get to play, yes, play with creating. You get to test a lot of different ideas that are coming from you and you get to strengthen your idea muscle. This is a very important concept. And I want to thank James Altucher for inspiring me with that concept many years ago, which really, as I look back, that was one of the most significant practices that launched me on my. On my current business today is having that idea muscle constantly utilized. Okay, so here's what that means. Are you able to create ideas on the fly? Actually, I think most of you can, because when I have tried this in my courses, I've made you. We set a timer for five minutes and had you write an article, and you did it. Every. Just about everybody in my course does it. So I know that you have the possibility. In fact, I know, I mean, just everybody I interact with in my courses. You are really smart. I know that. I really do. And sometimes I think that most of you are smarter than me. I know that sounds like humble brag, humble or whatever. No, but it's true. I mean, from what I've seen, I really do think that many of you are smarter than me. It's just that I am. You might say I am stupid enough to not mind being a fool publicly. Right? I don't mind being a fool publicly because I just, I. I grew up thinking not much about my intelligence. I really, I really didn't. So I just like, yeah, I'm not a very good communicator. Well, now you're like, what are you talking about, George? You're so good at talking. Well, it's after Years of practice and it's really. Confidence is what makes you seem like you're good at communicating. That's it. If you're confident, you seem like you're really good communicator. But I'm not. I'm just confident. Okay, so, so, and how did I get confident? Because I just made a fool of myself thousands of times so that now I don't mind making a fool of myself. Right? Just like in front of you, I'm trying this new thing. So, so, so back to this idea of having a daily practice of creating and publishing. I will tell you how I'm doing it now, right? I am now doing it not on Instagram, not on YouTube, not on Facebook, because I have too big of an audience in those places. Yes, you might say that again. Yes, you should give thanks if you don't have much of an audience right now. Whichever platform, think about it, do you have? Think about the platforms, the social media places that you could post. Where do you have the least amount of engagement? Make that where you test new material every day, new ideas. Just put it, put it out there. So where I am, where I'm doing that now is on Twitter. Because for years I've been on Twitter for many years and I've been so stupid about it because I, even though I have thousands of followers on Twitter, I get almost no engagement with any of my tweets. And for years I was like, I was like banging my head against the wall. Like I just kept tweeting every now and then, you know, here's my latest blog post, here's my latest, here's a cool little article, whatever, and I'll get almost no engagement. And I just, I, to be honest, I feel kind of dumb now after all those years not realizing the power of what I could use Twitter for, which is as a idea testing platform. So that's what I'm doing now. Ever since last month, I've been tweeting every single day some idea that I might use for a future blog post and video. And it's wonderful because I get almost no engagement there, which gives me the liberation to just try stuff. And the other good thing about Twitter is that everything has a timestamp. So that if in the future I develop that idea and someone happens to say, oh, George, I thought you took that idea from me. It's like, really, look at the timestamp. I actually tweeted this idea out nine months ago and now I'm developing it out. So that's one of the other benefits. But My own content. By the way, just so you all know, all of my content is uncopyrighted. So I never go to someone says you took my idea. No, I'm. I hope you'll take my ideas if it, if it's relevant for your audience. All my content, all my videos, all my articles, all my ideas are uncopyrighted. So you're welcome to take my ideas, develop them. Don't even tell me about it. Don't give me credit. It doesn't matter. I don't need the credit. I'm just busy creating, okay. Rather than claiming credit. So that's what I want to encourage you as we end this video is do you have a place where you can feel liberated to create and share ideas every day? It doesn't have to be long. Like I said, it could be a single tweet. So here's an idea I'm thinking about that I might want to write about in the future. It could be a three minute video that you make on YouTube where you get no viewers, right? But you put it out there as again, timestamped idea that you might develop further in the future. So if you want, if you already have lots of YouTube subscribers, you can create a new YouTube channel to test ideas out for. So anyway, I hope this is encouraging and if like I said at the the bottom line is if you use your idea muscle every day, you will reach a new level of optimism, confidence, hope and frankly, capability in solving any problem that you have in your life and coming up with new, new, innovative ideas. Anyway, I'm George Kao, authentic business coach. I hope you found this helpful and I'll see you in another video. Take care.
