Keep Your Ideas Moving

Tiago, tell me about the importance of keeping your ideas moving.

This is something I really learned from my. From my father. And that's a common theme in a lot of my work, is what I saw with my dad was a model of a creative person who lived a totally creative lifestyle in every sense. Not just his art, but in cuisine, in fashion, in music. Everything he does is creative. Who also wanted to have a life that was healthy and sustainable and safe and financially secure. And so, so many of these principles and takeaways. You know, it's funny, my dad actually talks about his systems. He says, my systems. He relies on this toolkit of systems. And so much of what I've done is just see these things, get these things that I've seen modeled throughout my life from the time I was a child, and make them applicable to knowledge workers. And something I noticed with my dad is he would always have many different artworks in progress, dozens at different stages. Some were just a bare sketch, just beginning. Other ones, he was putting the finishing touches. Other ones were sort of halfway in between. And I can't remember one time seeing my dad frustrated by his art. I mean, even by things he said or even by the look on his face or his body language, he just didn't tolerate it. He didn't put up with it. If one painting is blocked. And it's funny, sometimes he would say things like, I can't figure out how to draw this leg. How do you draw a leg? A leg is a hard thing to draw, but he wouldn't dwell on it for more than a few seconds. He'd just move on, move on to something else, move on to the hand, or move on to the hair, to other challenges, and just let that initial problem stew. Kind of like a slow burn in the back of his mind, which it does. That's how our mind works. There's levels of subconscious. And you may have noticed if you sleep on something, if you take a walk, if you go take a shower, often some minutes or hours later, your brain will just go, ding. Here's the answer. We've been working on it for you in the background, and here you go. And I think when you're only sort of like, right up against a problem, like sort of grabbing it by the horns as if it's a bull, you're not using all the levels of that subconscious. You're only using one kind of attention, one kind of thinking, which is that focused thinking. But you still have to pay the bills. You still have to be productive during your workday. So the only solution is to have multiple things, to have different things. Always something you can turn to, some other kind of activity, other kind of challenge so that you don't waste any minutes, but you also don't spend any time just kind of spinning your wheels and being frustrated.

I think that what you're saying here is that if you can plot out your days and your weeks by having different energies and exploring different ideas, knowing that you're gonna get blocked in one place and then you can move to the other place, then that new energy will get you unstuck in another place by. By having that diversity of things that you do, conversations that you have, articles that you write, PowerPoint slides that you create, courses that you teach by moving around. It's not that you're scattered and unfocused. You are purposefully unblocking yourself and translating ideas from one domain to another.

Yeah, you know, this kind of comes back to the second brain idea because. So think about what's the problem with multitasking? What's the problem with switching back and forth between things? It's that you lose your progress. Right? If you're working on a memo to your company and you only get 50% finished, and you move to something else, when you come back, you'll have lost whatever thinking was done. And this goes back to why it's so important and so powerful to save everything outside your head. When you're doing that work externally and you step away for whatever reason, your current progress, by definition, is saved. It's there in an external medium that doesn't just disappear like your thoughts do. And so, ironically, and this is very weird how this happens, thinking and working externally allows you to do many more simultaneous things, which reaps the benefits of multitasking without any of the downsides. So the advice of don't multitask, which for most people who try to keep everything in their head, is absolutely true. You shouldn't multitask. You can't multitask with a second brain. You can, and you should, and you must, because you're not limited to only doing one thing at a time when.

It comes to this idea of keeping your ideas moving. I always think of a river. There's two kinds of rivers. There's that fresh springtime river, the one that just flows like crazy. The kind that if you step into it, you almost feel like you're gonna fall over because the river has so much motion.

And.

And whenever you look at those rivers, you can see the pebbles at the bottom. And then there are those Murky rivers, the one where there's nothing flowing, there's no fountain in the middle, there's lily pads on top. It's dark and gross. And I think the brain is the same way. When you have a flowing river, ideas in, ideas out. What ends up happening is you can actually see what you're thinking so much better. Because often when I'm just alone for a couple days, I don't actually try to produce anything. I become that murky river and my brain almost feels gross. I can't really feel what I'm thinking. So I always try to just have the flow, have the flow so that I can embody that springtime river feeling.

So true, so true. That's what it is. It's more important to stay in flow, to feel the flow, than any particular outcome, right? Like, think about it. If you, you know, if you have the joy of creating, you're in that. I mean, think about what flow means. Flow is the experience of maximum enjoyment, maximum creativity, maximum engagement, full immersion. Can you imagine any better motivational tool? I mean, that's even a better motivational tool than reaching your goals or producing results and outcomes. Like, if you have joy and excitement each moment by moment, you're unstoppable. Any problem is just a more interesting puzzle. It's a more interesting Rubik's Cube for you to figure out, because you're enjoying each moment. And so what does flow require is movement. You gotta keep moving. Don't allow yourself to think that whatever problem you're stuck with is the only possible problem you can be working on. Just pivot, pivot to something else and come back later. But save the first thing in your second brain so that you can come back to it and it's exactly how you left it.