One of the questions that I have received a lot lately from people who learn I’m a daily blogger is:
Do you ever worry that you will run out of things to blog about?
In my life, I have often felt anxiety about a lot of things. Learning how to tame my nervous system and stop worrying is a constant practice.
Having said that, I can tell you with 100% honesty that this may be one of the few things that I have never worried about.
Not. Even. Once.
But it seems that this is a concern for many people who dream of publishing a daily blog. So I’d like to share with you why I don’t worry about this.
Ideas Come When You Commit
As blogger Seth Godin explains, the commitment to daily blogging shifts the question from “should I blog?” to “what will I write about?”
This question activates the reticular activating system. In simple terms, the reticular activating system can be summed up like this: You see what you seek.
Knowing I’m going to write and publish a blog post keeps me open to ideas for what that something might be.
If you’re worried about keeping up a daily blogging commitment, this is helpful to know. Ideas will show up when you’re looking for them.
But the real reason I have never worried about running out of ideas is even more simple:
Ideas create ideas. Let’s explore this.
Ideas Create Ideas
Remember the sitcoms of the 1970s and 1980s? One good sitcom would spin off to a few more:
All in the Family led to Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Archie Bunker’s Place, and Gloria.
Happy Days created Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy, and Joanie Loves Chachi (among others).
Ideas are like these sitcoms. Each one creates a spin-off. Sometimes the spin-offs have spin-offs.
One idea leads to another, which leads to another, and so on.
Daily Blogging is How I Keep Ideas Out of My Way
For me, daily blogging was a solution to my “problem” of “too many ideas.”
To be clear, this is a “higher quality problem” — and not really a problem at all.
You can never have “too many ideas.” I am grateful for the ideas I receive every day. I’ve put a lot of practice into becoming an idea generator.
I have notebooks and journals filled with ideas.
But ideas used to get in my way. As I would start to write a piece, new ideas would come to me. Before I knew it, the piece had meandered off track, filled with too many ideas. The consequence was that I wouldn’t publish it because I had to streamline it or trim it down.
Daily blogging is a construct that forces me to do hold the new ideas at bay and keep them out of my way.
It becomes a virtuous cycle: I blog daily because I have so many ideas. AND becuase I commit to blogging daily, my reticular activating system helps me spot new ideas all the time.
A Meta Example
To get meta for a moment, this article is an example of that phenomenon. As more people have asked me if I fear running out of ideas, I realized that this is a common concern. I had an idea that I could address it in a blog post. As I considered what I wanted to write, I had ideas for several directions I could take.
- why I don’t fear running out of ideas
- how I generate ideas
- how I nurture ideas
- where I keep my ideas so I remember them
- the trap most people fall into when they start to come up with ideas
- my favorite strategies for ideation
- strategies for how to stay out of idea overwhelm
These are just ideas about the topic of ideation.
My thoughts also sparked ideas related to other topics.
I’ll write about some of them eventually. Maybe I’ll turn some of them into book, or a course, or a new offering.
See? There is no end to the ideas.
Ideas create ideas.
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