The Daily Idea List Practice 💡

In this video, I'm going to share with you a practice that I do almost every day that has been really helpful for my creativity, for my ability to generate ideas. This is one of the things that my clients, my audience often ask me is, George, you have created, you know, 300 plus blog posts, more than 2,000 videos, more than 25 courses. How do you keep getting ideas that you, you know, you have so many ideas that you then obviously put some of them into practice, which requires an abundance of ideas because not every idea gets to be put into practice. So this practice is something that I do almost every day. I do it five times per week, so usually Monday through Friday and then taking the weekends off. But sometimes if I am one of the days I don't do it, then I'll, I'll use one of the weekend days. But I, I, that's been my commitment for, for a while now. Five times a week. I started doing this practice more than 10 years ago and which correlates with the, the time when I began creating content consistently. So there really is, I think, not just a correlation, but a causation. This practice inspired and was foundational to my ability to generate content on a consistent basis. So I'm excited to share it with you. Let me first share with you the of this and why I think this practice works. Well, the practice is simple. Let me just tell you that the practice is very simple. It is to write 10 ideas a day. That's it. Those 10 ideas could be for an upcoming blog post that you want to write 10 ideas about it. So 10 ideas on a topic of interest to you could be 10 ideas for an upcoming video you want to make. It could be 10 ideas for a problem that you have that you'd like to generate some ideas to. How might you might solve that problem? It could be 10 answers to a question that is important to you. It could be 10 ways to apply one of your values in your current life. It could be 10 ways that you can appreciate your life even more. It could be 10 ideas for somebody else. Yeah, I sometimes do this for a client or for a colleague. I'm like, based on our conversations recently, I came up with 10 ideas that, you know, take it or leave it. One or none or some of these ideas might be of interest to you. Let me know if, if it's interesting at all, you know, and no, no pressure, that kind of thing. So I have sent ideas to people like, it could also be 10 titles for an upcoming article or video you've already created. And you are brainstorming. So, or it could be 1010 thoughts about A current situation happening in the world. Or it could be 10, you know, things that you want to do this weekend, right? Like it could really be just about any list of 10 ideas. But the key is to keep writing or keep brainstorming until you get to, to 10, if at all possible. Not, you know, when you're first starting out, you might, you know, be gentle on yourself and, and just generate three ideas because your, your, your, your sort of idea generating system is still, you know, is relatively new and, and you still need to practice more until you can get it into a flow. But, but the, but the overall daily practice is to aim to generate 10 ideas on something of interest or importance to you. Okay, so it's a very simple thought, simple practice. And it might sound like, well, maybe throughout it, maybe throughout a given day, you, you already generate more than 10 ideas here and there. But this is a, like a, like a sit down, you know, 10 minute session, 15 minute, maybe sometimes up to half hour depending on how much time you have. But it's like a sit down gym for your brain. So let me, let me actually first begin by sharing with you the origin. Like how did this come to be? And then why is this practice so powerful? And then I'll give you some tips for what I've noticed helps to keep this practice going consistently. And then finally I'll, I'll share with you a way of doing this practice even more easily during a daily process. So I'm excited to share this with you. Okay, let's begin with the origin story of this. I first came across this probably 12, 13 years ago and it was through a blogger podcaster named James Altucher. He has several books which are quite good. He's quite a good writer. James Altucher and the idea, he named it as the Idea machine. So you can look this up. The Idea Machine James Altucher. Even if you misspell altitude, Google will know what you're talking about and it'll, it'll bring you the original article that started this whole thing. And I've just told you what the article basically says. Generate 10 ideas a day, you know, no matter what. And you know, it doesn't have to be good ideas, bad ideas. The key principle of brainstorming, which is what this is, is that you don't judge your ideas as you're going through them. I mean, that's the natural, you know, way that we humans work. But if you can set aside it's a, it's a practice also of setting aside your inner critic because that's very more helpful for you to be more expansive with your creativity rather than saying, no, that's, no, that's not good, that's not good. You should generate ideas within this particular, you know, standard that I think is good. Well, then you're going to feel yourself being blocked a lot rather than the practice of setting aside your inner critic is essential for expanding your creativity beyond your current comfort zone. So anyway, James Altucher, that's where I first heard of it and he made this quite so popular that his, his wife ended up writing a book about the idea machine, Claudia Altucher. You could still find it on, on Amazon. And I read the book and really enjoyed it. And I also noticed in the book that there were quite a few typos which was, you might say, well, typos, that's terrible. Well, actually it, to me, it's a testament to how important it is to generate ideas rather than being perfect about them. So I actually found the typos to be an encouragement for me to say, well, gosh, even a published book like this has typos, then I'm not going to worry. I'm going to just go ahead and generate ideas every day. Her book gives a list, many lists of potential idea lists that you could generate. So recently as I picked up, I did this practice for at least months when I first discovered it and it was so helpful. Like I told you, it really kickstarted my rhythm of creating daily content back in 2014 when I started practicing the idea machine. I also then started creating content every single day. And so it really, I hope that this practice will also inspire your creativity whether you're going to be creating content or just working more effectively with clients or solving problems in your life. And so that's actually one that, that's to me, the key benefit that this idea machine, as what James Altucher calls it, is that think about this way. Your life is a series. Your life is a series of problems and challenges and opportunities. You can look at life in this way, right? And because the ability to solve problems and to, and to overcome challenges and to activate opportunities, to, to take advantage of opportunities is so much about whether you have good ideas. That's really it. Because when you have a problem and if you can't think of any good ideas to solve it, you feel stuck. But when you have this idea generation apparatus called your mind body system, able to generate many ideas at will, then you're like, well, gosh, this is a Problem, sure. But I can think of 10 different ways to go around the problem, above the problem, dissolve the problem, go underneath the problem, remove the hurdle in this way or these three other ways, or to create a tool that can help me solve the problem, whatever it is. It is about your idea generation system. You can solve any problem if only you could generate enough ideas. And from those abundance of ideas, you can then narrow down on which ideas are especially good and the ideas that are good. You could generate further ideas along those lines. You can solve any problem if only you could generate enough ideas quickly enough, particularly right at will, on demand. So that is my hope for you, for us, and my encouragement for you to do this practice on a daily basis. Same thing with an opportunity where you think of a business idea or you think of an idea for an offer that you could give to your audience and to your clients. Those. That also depends on what good ideas you have. So maybe at first you say, well, I want to create a great offer that my audience would love. Well, first thing to do, let's generate 10 ideas for potential offers. And maybe even after 10 ideas, you're on a roll and you keep going, right? So, and then once you come up with, you know, a bunch of offer ideas, you narrow it down to which ones you're most energized by and which ones seem to be most in alignment with what the market wants right now, based on your conversations with. And then you have an offer idea, and then from that offer idea, you could generate ideas underneath that to say, well, what could make this offer even better, even more interesting? All right, let's go with 10 ideas go, right? And so it's like any problem or opportunity, any, you know, frustration or any goal can be made much more. You can make a lot more progress with them by your ability to generate ideas quickly and on demand. So that's, that's, that's the key benefit of this practice. But I have other benefits that I want to share with you. And of course, I used the idea. Oh, well, first, before I give you more benefits, I want to share with you that I decided to rename this practice. Originally, James Altucher called it the Idea Machine. But these days, what is literally the Idea Machine, AI. AI is literally, you go into AI, you could ask it to generate ideas all day long on anything, any problem, any opportunity. And that is. Anyway, I'll talk about why that's a problem for us humans, okay? But first I had to come up with a different name than the Idea Machine. So eventually, after generating some Ideas. I landed on one that I liked the best, which is the daily idea list. The daily idea list. And a friend that I shared this with. Thank you, Guillaume. Guillaume. Anyway, his business is called Metahelm. You can look it up metahelm.com I think. Anyway, Guillaume said, well, why don't you call it Idea Tai Chi? That's because my business podcast is called Business Style with George Kao. So he thought Idea Tai Chi because it's kind of like content, creativity, well being and then it's like a set of movements and it also activate your business cheese. So I thought that was a cool idea too. But whatever name you want to call this, the key is to do the practice. Do the practice. Okay. All right. So I, I'm going to share with you some more reasons why this is such an important practice. Okay. So one, keep your idea muscle fit. So as I've already said, your, your human mind, body, brain, heart, gut system, you know, you could say your mind, body, spirit system is the complete apparatus for receive. You could. Some people believe that we receive ideas from, you know, the spirit world, but we also, sometimes we also generate ideas on our own. Whatever you do believe this mind, body, spirit system, if you don't practice generating ideas regularly, it gets, it gets unused and it gets more difficult to generate ideas. Right? It's like if you don't speak for a long time, it's more difficult to speak in a way that has flow. Right. And so I think about, you know, when, when calculators became, were invented, human beings really atrophied our ability to do mental arithmetic. And because now people are like, oh, what's, you know, 8 plus 18? 26, right. I think. But, but people are like, oh, what's eight plus 18? Right. I do a lot of mental arithmetic just because I have some interest in it. Like I, I use it in my daily life. But a lot of people just started using calculators and they lost their ability to, to do basic addition, basic subtraction, even, right. Basic multiplication. But that, that wasn't as big of a deal because most people, most of us don't rely our, our jobs don't rely on doing mental arithmetic quickly all throughout the day or our lives don't. It's so easy just to pull up these days. Your, your phone, you know, what's, what's this times that or whatever. Right. However, now that the idea machine AI has been invented, AI is currently basically the calculator for words, for images, for creativity, and now also calculator for sound. Right. Music and for videos, etc. So AI as the calculator for ideas is eating away at the very system that we need, the mind, body, spirit system. We need to solve problems, to reach our goals, to activate opportunities. You see where I'm going with this? So it's really dangerous that a lot of people now are relying on AI. Just like people relied on the calculator to do basic arithmetic, people are relying on AI to say, well, I don't know how to solve a problem, so let me go to AI and what are, what are 10 ways I could solve this problem? Which is great. AI is super fast and it's, if you have a phone, it's always with you. However, you are essentially outsourcing the very essential human ability that, to generate solutions, ideas, creativity. And you know, in the future I think a lot of people will have without, without their phone nearby or AI nearby, they'll just have this kind of blank brain and be in, unable to generate ideas because they rely on it so much. Just like a lot of people have lost their ability to do mental arithmetic. So I think that, you know, in the, in the coming world, humans who have a strong idea generation system organically will, will be more effective in life and in work than humans who have to rely on AI for that. Now what's also interesting is that the ability to generate ideas quickly also lets you use AI more effectively. Because when you, when you go to AI and you say I don't know how to solve a problem, what are 10 ideas? It goes into the average of the ideas out there and they think of those. Everybody who has the problem or a similar problem are getting the same ideas from AI without prompting AI to say, well, I'd like for you to give me ideas that are going in this direction or don't give me ideas that are about this. Well, like I said, if you don't have the ability to generate ideas quickly, you will be getting an average of the AI ideas. But if you instead can generate ideas quickly, you will go to AI and say, I'd like to solve this problem. And already some of the ideas that I think might be promising are in this direction and, and maybe don't give me ideas in that direction, then instantly the AI answers coming back will be unique compared to what everyone else is getting. Because you've prompted the AI with I initial seed ideas and it'll give you more, deeper ideas, more ideas in the direction you thought. And you could say, well, give me something completely different than that too, but then it could bounces off of that to give even more unique ideas rather than what everyone else is playing with is, is what's average. Okay, so very important. Also, as a solopreneur, most of you watching this who follow my videos are solopreneurs. So you might be some kind of a coach, healer, creator. Your ability to generate ideas at will is essential for your ability to serve clients well. Because when you're in a client meeting, right? Whether you work with clients or you do some kind of teaching, whether you're with a group of students or whether you're just generating ideas for content, the ability to quickly come up with ideas, having your mind, body, spirit system be able to receive or generate relevant ideas in the moment is so important for being an effective coach, healer and creator. And you don't want to say, well okay, client just said something to me, let me type it in the chat GPT right? Because whatever then you read out will sound average too. So your ability to keep this mind, body, spirit, idea generation system strong is I think essential for your effectiveness at work. What else, your ability to generate ideas also is really fun. That's, that's the thing that I want to, that I, that I want to end with before we get into more of the tips for how to do this well is I, you'll, you'll find this to be like, wow, you know, you're, when you tap into this idea flow, whether you believe you're receiving ideas from, from the non physical world or whether you are generating ideas with your brain, like once you get going on it, the first one might be a little bit, it's like, it's like you're pushing, you're pushing a rock, you know, before it can roll down the hill. That, that those first couple pushes are going to make your brain sweat. You're going to make your, your idea receiving or your idea generating system work a little bit, right? But it's good practice, it's good for your idea muscle, right? You, you work, you work in the beginning, the first couple ideas and then it starts to flow down the hill and it's like whoa, this is so powerful and joyful to be in that experience of the idea generation system. And okay, so I've given you hopefully enough reasons why you should commit to a practice like this. And by the way, you know, if you, if you decide to modify the practice, please comment below and share with everyone who is, are seeing the comments. You know, what ideas you have to, to modify, to customize the practice. So that's even more effective for you and your professional life. And maybe that will be one of your idealists, like, how can I use this daily idealist practice for me? And if you do come up with ideas about that, please comment below because I'd love to see how you're customizing it. Okay, so here are some tips for how to make this thing work. I find it very helpful to anchor it to a specific time during my day. For me, it happens to be after my shower. In the evening before bed, I allow myself 20 to 30 minutes to do the idealist practice. Okay? And the reason I give myself that much time is because not only am I generating ideas, I also tend to, I also tend to create a blog post sometimes out of that or some kind of a document that I can work with. So I often turn my idea lists into something actionable, implementable, whether it's a blog post or some kind of project or, or some kind of plan or something like that. So that's why I give myself upwards of 30 minutes and it's, it's uninterrupted time for me because that time of day, there's really nothing I need to attend to here, here in the home. So that's what I recommend for you as well. Look at what time of day or evening can be uninterrupted for some of you, maybe early morning, some it's, you know, you know, noon. And some of you it's, it's later at night. But whichever it is, carve out that time. All right? Carve out that time and stick to it. And then say, okay, after my this or before I do that, I'm going to do my idea machine. Idea machine or daily idea list practice. Now you might not be able to carve out half an hour a day, right? So start with like 10 minutes a day and that might be enough for you, right? That might be. And because you might not do what I do is turn it into a blog post or whatever, at first you're just doing the practice of generating ideas. Keep it light. I always tell my clients, work lightly, work lightly. So start with 10 minutes a day. Really, it's better that you do it than to not do it. And by the way, don't be perfectionistic and say, well, I have to get 10 ideas. When you're first starting, you are, you know, getting the idea generating system into, into working, working, you know, working condition again into more excellent conditions. So maybe all you can do is three ideas right now for any topic and that's okay. Maybe it's only two ideas, whatever it is, but the Fact is that you practice every day. You know, it's just like working out at the gym. It's like, you don't just work out once a year. No, you work out on a regular basis. Whatever your gym rhythm or exercise rhythm is, it's a consistent thing. So even if you just do three ideas at the beginning, that's okay, right? That's okay. And then just come. Only 10 minutes, only 5 minutes. Whatever it is, stick with it consistently. If you want to do it like me, I do it five days a week. That's my commitment to myself. Five times per week, whichever days it is. I try to do Monday through Friday if possible, so I can have the weekends off. But, yeah, if you do it every day, it's right. Give yourself permission to have bad ideas. Remember, brainstorming means you practice setting aside the inner critic. So it's okay if you just, you know, it might be better to say, I'm gonna, I am gonna go for 10 ideas. And some ideas might be terrible or repetitive or makes almost no sense, but I am staying with it. I'm staying consistent, and I'm, I'm using that system, and I'm, I'm conditioning it to be even more quicker, more effective. Right. You might start with easier topics. So rather than saying, I have a very challenging problem in my work, really challenging. It's, it's, it's triggering for me. I'm gonna generate 10 ideas a day. That's probably what you shouldn't start with. Start with something easy, something light, something fun even, because then you're more likely to get into this consistent rhythm build up, just like fitness. You don't want to start by saying, well, I've never run before. I'm going to go for a marathon. Okay, maybe eventually you'll do a marathon, but at first you're just trying to run around the block. So you got to start easy and know that it's a stamina thing. It really is. You'll notice yourself having the brain muscle, the idea of a generating muscle, become more powerful over weeks, over weeks. Not just, oh, I did it for a day, now I can go and do something really tough. No. Start easy, start light, start with a little bit of time, but be consistent with it. I find it really helpful. Another tip is to have human accountability. So you might actually share this video, perhaps with a couple of friends, colleagues that you would love to keep accountable to for doing this, this practice, and maybe they would enjoy doing this with you as well. And every day you say, all right, I'm Gonna, we're gonna commit to sharing our idea lists with each other every day, just in our small private group or something like that, or even if it's just with one person. So I too have a little habits group that I, that I tell them that I did my idea practice. Okay. And then share your ideas publicly. That's, that's another way of accountability to say, oh my gosh, every time I generate ideas, it could become a blog post or it could just become a substack note or something, a quick social media post. And that's what some of my friends who picked up this are doing now. They're using the idealist practice to generate content on an almost daily basis, which is amazing because they never created so much content before on a consistent basis. So, so think about that. But totally optional. You may want to just start with just private, and you might just always be private, and that's okay. In fact, James Altucher has an interesting counterintuitive idea, which is throw away the list after you're done with it. Because he says great ideas will stick with you anyway. Well, you'll remember them anyway. So to him, the idea list practice is so much an exercise that he doesn't care whether or not he keeps the list. So he throws away the list after every time he, every day he writes it, tosses it away. He remember. He probably, he remembers the good ones. He'll probably do something with it the next day or whatever or. But I actually. And as I'm going to show you right now, this video is getting a bit long, but I'm going to show you how I do it. And I actually use AI to help me, coach me through my, my list generation every day. I, I find using AI to be fun. It be for you. So if you don't want to use AI to help you. Now, let me be clear. I'm not getting AI to come up with ideas for me. I'm getting AI to encourage me to come up with the next idea. That's very different. I'm using AI as a coach to say, all right, what else have you got for me, George? Kind of thing. So let. So if you, if you want to check that out, continue watching. Otherwise, I hope you will do this practice and share with me. Comment below any insights that came out of this video for you or what idea lists that you generated. You know, anything you want to share with me or any questions you have, comment below. I'd love to see it. Okay, so for those of you who are interested in how I use AI to coach me through it. I will go ahead and open up my screen now and share it with you. All right, so the first thing I'm going to give you below is I'm going to give you a link to my blog post about the idea list practice. And in that blog post, there will be this prompt that you can copy paste into AI to be your daily idealist coach. Okay, so where it's the startup prompt, go click on that and then scroll all the way down to where it's end of prompt and select everything, copy it and go to. These days I really love using Google Gemini for my idealists because as of this recording, it changes almost on a weekly basis. Google Gemini has the largest context window of any chatbot, which means it's able to receive and remember a lot of the same chat. And I like it because I use the same chat thread to generate daily idea list, after daily ideas, after daily ideas. And after a while it kind of gets. It just understands me better in the same chat. So if you have Google Gemini Pro or you can use Flash, Flash also has really long, large context window, larger than most other chatbots, larger than chatgpt. So, but Pro is, is even larger. And, and anyway, so paste in the prompt that I gave you and then press Enter. And then it will think for a little bit and then it will say, all right, I'm ready to go, but let me just let it, let it think. What I actually do when I then generate ideas is, is that I used ChatGPT dictate to stream of consciousness, say my ideas. Now why can't I do that with Gemini? It's because I find that the Gemini dictate tool, you know, the voice dictating tool isn't as effective as the ChatGPT one. Now, I'm not talking about voice mode, I'm talking about dictate. Those are two different things. With voice mode, you can't. It doesn't allow you to pause very long to think and because it'll like interrupt you. Okay, with dictate, you're not. It just waits for you to say everything before you click on submit. So let me go and show you what I mean. So let me go ahead and generate ideas, let's say about why creativity could save the world. I don't know. I just came up with that. Okay, so let me show you. I go to ChatGPT. Now we're going to go back to Gemini and paste in the stream of consciousness. But I use it to. You use this one to dictate my voice into words. So let me show you. Go ahead. Okay. All right, let's start a new list today. And the topic is why creativity could save the world or why I believe in creativity and innovation for saving the world. And one idea is that humanity has been through so many crises over millennia, but we are still here. And we are. Humanity is, you know, more populated than ever before, and we have gone through, you know, plagues and famine and world wars and, you know, the verge of nuclear destruction, wars, etc. I already said that. So I believe, given all of that, we are still here because we're able to figure out how to survive and how to work with each other and how to create technology that solves our most important problems. So that's one idea that I have for why creativity, innovation will save the world. Okay, so after I've dictated that, I'm going to click on check mark here and then ChatGPT will take the recording and turn it into text words that I can then copy. Paste. Okay, select all by doing Command A on the Windows Control A. On the Mac, it's Command A and then Command C or on Windows Control C to copy it. And then I go to Google Gemini that has now understood my instructions. And then I paste it in. I paste it and press Enter. And basically what it now does is to take my stream of consciousness and it turns it into, you know, well written. Oh, okay. So that's actually it. After a while, after you give it several ideas, it'll start to summarize for you. All right, I've got these ideas thus far and so I just keep going back and forth. I go back to Chat gbt, I delete this, and then I start voice mode or not voice mode. Dictate again to let it record what I'm saying. And then when I'm. Once I'm done, I click on this to copy the ideas. You know, you can review the recording what I did. So with that, I'm going to let you get to it. This is long enough video and I. I really hope that this has inspired in you something. Whether you do it exactly like I do it or you do it a different way, I hope that you will be exercising your creativity muscles every single day or at least five times a week. All right, so let me know how this sits with you or if you're going to do something with it. I look forward to seeing your comments below. Have a beautiful day or night. Blessings.