Idea Recycling

Tiago, tell me about idea recycling.

Idea recycling is really similar to borrowed creativity that we talked about before, with one key difference. In this case, you're borrowing from yourself. That might seem like a strange idea. Well, I already know what I know, don't I? And the answer is actually, no. You have no idea what you know. And a way to think about this. I refer to your present self and your future self and even your past self. It's really interesting. If you look at psychology, even you don't actually remember what your past self knew. You feel like you do. You feel like, oh, yeah, I remember what it's like to be 14 years old. You know, you can picture your high school and your home and different things, but actually you can't remember. You can remember certain small details, but the state of mind, the emotions, the feeling in your body, the social environment, you really can't remember that. And same thing, therefore, for your future self, right? Your future self, you can't really imagine what that person is gonna feel. You don't know what they're gonna know. You don't know what they're gonna care about. You don't know what their goals are gonna be. So you have to almost think of your. Your past self and your future self as strangers, right? Imagine if it's just a different person, and because they're strangers, you have to pass information through time. And that's what we're doing with note taking. It's kind of like time travel. You're getting an idea and you're preserving it. You think of these Babylonian tablets, these cuneiform tablets that was a form of time travel. You're doing that on the individual level. So what does this look like? What mean by idea recycling is if you take some time to do some hard thinking or really to do any thinking, and you produce some sort of external. You could call it an asset or a deliverable or some material. For example, a report on the top 10 web design tools, an analysis of the best microphones for podcasting, a list of your 12 favorite course creators. Think of every time. Almost every time we sit down at our computer, we usually create something. Whether it's an email, it's a note, it's a Word document, it's a Google Doc. Almost all of knowledge work has these external artifacts. And what I notice is once the project is finished or once the client is served, or once whatever it is is finished, if they save those things at all, they just kind of let them kind of just stick around in piles. They're somewhere in your documents folder, but not organized or preserved in any way. But to me, each one of those things is an intellectual asset, right? It's an intellectual. It's like an artifact. And you have no idea how those could be useful in the future.

One of the things that people don't do is they don't take a lot of their even simplest forms of creation seriously enough. I'm amazed at how many of my ideas start as a conversation, start as a text message, start as an email. And what I'll do is I'll recycle the idea. And in each stage, whenever I reuse it, I begin to see the idea in a new light. The idea begins to become clearer, more compressed in my mind. So the text message will become an article, the article will become a speech, the speech will become another article, and that article will then become a course. And so what I'm doing is I'm taking the same idea, putting it in all these different contexts, getting feedback, and then recycling it through time. And at each individual stage, that idea is beginning to grow in my mind.

I love that. So you can recycle multiple times. And the difference with physical materials, we know that each time it gets recycled, it kind of degrades. There's a limit to how many times you can recycle different materials. And it's also expensive. We pay more for a bag that's 100% recycled, or a pencil or a plastic fork or whatever. But ideas have this incredible quality. They not only don't degrade, they only get better. An idea is not subject to entropy, is not subject to the laws of physics. It is a real thing, but not something that perishes. And so I think you're totally right. And isn't that the way it should be? Like, why would you go and spend a year creating an online course for an idea that had never been tested? You want to test a conversation, one sentence, one little tidbit, then if it's good, it's sort of like we talk about de risking, right? You're placing multiple bets every time you have a conversation, every time you write something, every time you post something, it's a small bet, it's a small test. And 1 in 10 of those or less or more somewhere around there will succeed, will do especially well. And then you invest more of your time, energy, money into it. And that way, every step of the way, you have validation, you have proof that it's. That it's something that people want and something that people find interesting.

So are you telling me that whenever I start a new project. I don't have to always start from scratch because whenever I. For years, whenever I started to write something, oh, it's a new essay. Time to do all this research, just like school. Okay, the essay is due at the end of the semester, so you spend the first three months researching. You're telling me I don't need to do that?

Not only do you not need to do that, you really can't. That's no way to build. It's no way to build an academic career. It's no way to build a professional career. It's no way to build a business. It's just too risky. It's too risky. You don't know what is going to succeed. You have a sort of blindness. It's sometimes called expert blindness. You are the least qualified person to know which ideas that you have are the best ones because you're immersed in them. You have no perspective, you have no objectivity. So the only way to find that out is to constantly be outputting as much as you can as diverse a range of thoughts and ideas and then see which ones really resonate with people. And almost always, I can tell you this, it's going to be the one you least expect. It's going to be the one you take for granted, the one that you think, oh, doesn't everyone know this? Isn't this, like, obvious? And it's obvious to you? That's why it's so powerful. It's something that, for most people, has never occurred to them.

Yeah, what I try to look for is ideas that are obvious to me but amazing to others. That's the sweet spot. What I'm thinking about here is that usually the way that we think of ideas is it's like building up this brick wall. One brick, two brick, three bricks. Then you get the mortar. You have to connect all of them, and then the project is over and we just leave that brick wall. We totally forget about it. What you're telling me to do is to build a brick wall over the course of my lifetime, where what I can do is brick by brick, day by day, have this compounding asset that is all my intellectual capital. And that will stick with me not for a day, not for a week, not for a month, but for my entire life.

Exactly. Exactly. I mean, think about creating new things. You're probably creating some kind of new thing, whether it's an event, it could be a webinar, it could be a. It could be a brochure, it could be a sales call, it could be a meeting agenda. I mean, everyone creates things all the time. Now think over the course of your life. Are you ever gonna stop doing that? Are you ever going to retire from that? No. This is the rest of your life. So it makes so much more sense to build a sort of knowledge library, one central repository that you. Where you can put everything that you consume and draw every time and anytime you have a project, rather than always one off, one off one. That's just. It's not as a sustainable way to work if you have to start from absolute scratch each time.

Talk about this idea of never doing the same work twice.

I think that really comes from this idea that everything is in kind of components, everything is in parts. Whatever you create, let's say you're putting on an event, right? Almost no part of that event is completely unprecedented, right? People have made before, you have probably made before a list of the speakers, you have probably created before a list of the logistics that are needed. You've created an attendee list, you've created an agenda, you've created a catering proposal. All these things, they're like modules, they're like little Lego bricks. Because you've created them before, you should reuse them. Get the last time that you created that, document that piece of information and really just use it as a sort of tactic template. It's a template that you're using from your own past work. You're literally drawing on your past effort to do things a little bit faster. And maybe you add like a layer of innovation, you do one more extra bit of quality, you take it to the next step. But if you do that, over the course of your career, you're going to find this exponential increase in the quality of your work and actually find you're working less and less and less as a higher and higher percentage of what you do is simply reused templates from the past.