🎨 The Creativity Flywheel

This week is the Macstock conference!

I’m very excited to go hang out with my fellow nerds (if you’re there, come say hi), and I’ll be presenting on what I’ve titled The 5 C’s of Creativity.

In the last newsletter, I shared how I never I thought I was creative until I realized that creativity is a formula. For me, The 5 C’s of Creativity is that formula:

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Recognizing how these fit together has been one of the most important discoveries I’ve made in my creative life. It’s the key that unlocked the ability to make things for me.

Here’s how they work together to make the creative process fun and easy:

Step 1 is to Capture whatever idea is interesting. Once an idea is gone, it’s often gone forever. So I make sure to capture everything that feels important without worrying about whether it’s good or bad. I do this via Drafts on my iPhone if I’m out and about or my fancy notebook if I’m in the office or at home (I almost always have my notebook with me).

Step 2 is to Curate those captured ideas and transfer the best ones to more permanent storage. Once I capture my ideas, I go through them and decide what’s worth keeping. Like a curator for a museum, I choose what enters the collection – and what doesn’t. What you get rid of is just as important as what you keep. I only keep the best of the best (roughly 9 out of 10 things that I capture don’t make the cut).

Step 3 is to Cultivate those ideas that make the cut and develop them. Many people assume they know what an idea is before it really has time to mature. But like a gardener planting a seed, you don’t see the real value (the fruit) until the idea is fully grown. So I have a greenhouse where the seedlings of my ideas can grow (this happens in Obsidian + MindNode for me).

Step 4 is to Connect those ideas to the others in the collection. This is the newest step for me, and it’s made possible by Obsidian. Bidirectional linking surfaces connections I wouldn’t have seen otherwise and helps me see how things tie together. This is a lot like the syntopical reading step from Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. I love how this step gives me a way to visualize the connections that previously happened in my brain. Being able to externalize this helps me see how the puzzle pieces fit together.

Step 5 is to Create something new. Thinking requires an output. Doesn’t matter if it’s a blog post, podcast episode, YouTube video, or simply an opinion note. It doesn’t matter if it’s public or private, but you need to decide for yourself what all these ideas mean to YOU.

What’s really interesting to me about this though is how the output influences the input. The things that I create in step 5 often reveal questions and provoke curiosity, which in turn shapes the types of things I capture.

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This process functions a lot like a water wheel – water goes in, creates motion, and then leaves. Your mind is like that too. When the ideas stop flowing (there’s no output), so does the creative flywheel.

Until next time – keep going, keep growing, and keep creating!

— Mike

NEW PROJECT: Daily Obsidian Tips!

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I’ve got a new project I’m excited to announce called Daily Obsidian Tips!

Each day, I send a new tip to help you master Obsidian and own your Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. I started with 50 tips, but I’ve got an outline that includes at least 50 more.

You can opt-in by clicking this link.

(BTW, if you want to get them all right away and support my work, I’ve packaged them as a $10 course as well.)

Recent podcast episodes

​Focused Episode #155: 12 Favorite Problems​

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David & I explore the idea of favorite problems and identify a dozen of our own in a quest for self-discovery.

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​Bookworm Episode #148: Building a Better Brain, by Tiago Forte​

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We live in the information age, but it often leaves us feeling overwhelmed. Joe & I embark on a journey to build our second brains.

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​The Intentional Family Episode #60: The Better Part​

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Rachel shares the importance of choosing what is most important in the moment through a story of two sisters.

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This Week’s Sermon Sketchnote Video

(Almost) every Sunday, I take sketchnotes of my Pastor’s sermon and post them to my website. Here’s my sketchnote from July 10th, 2022

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