The Power of Original Thoughts

TL; DR: Original thinking is the precious commodity of the future. You’ll learn to think more deeply and creatively by using this week’s tool. If you rely on social media to make a living, this will make you rich.

I got into a small battle on X (formerly Twitter). And no, it wasn’t about politics.

We were locked in mortal combat over a way of marketing that is going to kill a ton of creators/influencers who are addicted to the old model.

Now, usually I write about business topics in my other newsletter, Bold Words. But I decided to write about this here, as well.

If you’re committed to achieving any major life goal in the next 12 months, original thinking will help you learn faster and more deeply. So let’s lay out the scene.

The internet is filled with people like me. You post stuff on social media. Some of the people who see it are interested in learning more. So they follow the links in your bio and sign up for a newsletter or schedule a call. From there, you sell your products or services.

This process worked well in the past, because there weren’t many people doing it.

But now there’s so much content that many would-be entrepreneurs spend hours a day just trying to remain visible. The arrival of AI has made this even worse.

Luckily, there’s an easy way out of this that will make you smarter in your own life, along with giving your own creations a level of quality and recognition akin to that of Dan Koe, Josh Johnson, or Elle Cordova.

Let me break it down for you.

The Battle

Last month a certain “content marketer” was preaching that curation is the future. I enthusiastically disagreed.

Curation is the practice of reading or watching something brilliant. Then you share a summary with your readers and followers.

There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s a useful service. It also gives you an unending stream of fresh, interesting content without a lot of work. If you’re trying to launch a newsletter or build your presence on a new platform, curation is a way to jumpstart your plan.

But curation will not be the future. If anything, it could be the end of yours.

First, AI can already research and summarize content faster than any human being. If people only follow you to get a “digest” of information around a common interest, you don’t have an edge unless you’re Tim Ferriss and have direct access to celebrities and high achievers.

Second, curation trains your mind to be a narrator and deprives you of original thought. If you’re not careful, you’ll become another repercussion in your own echo chamber.

Think of curation as an emergency boost. Use it when you don’t have anything else, but don’t make it the major feature of your work, as some internet gurus are advocating.

So what should you do instead?

Grow Your Mind, Grow Your Influence

The way to stand out and grow online is by creating original content.

Original content comes from original thinking.

You have plenty of original thoughts every day. You probably don’t have a habit of consistently capturing and sharing them.

More to the point, you (hopefully) read, watch, and hear things that stick. You find ideas and tidbits of information that are inspiring, useful, or at least interesting.

You connect those ideas and tidbits to knowledge you already have.

And you have personal opinions about why those tidbits are interesting, useful, and inspiring.

There’s gold in those connections and opinions. That is the start of original thinking. You’re doing it already, but you may not have realized it.

Here’s a process to bring your thoughts into the world.

How to Have Original Thoughts

If you can make the time, do a free-flow exercise every day.

Start with something that’s already on your mind, or read for half an hour if there’s nothing on your mind already.

Grab a pen and a sheet of paper if you’re old school. Otherwise, open up a file and start typing, or hit the “record” button and start talking.

Write, type, or talk. Let your thoughts and ideas flow. Let everything come out that wants to, uncorrected and uncensored. You’ll clean it up later, and probably delete most of it.

Free flow is like jogging or doing push-ups. Do it consistently and you’ll get stronger.

Here’s a way to capture your best ideas.

Tool of the Week: Your Idea Catcher

Create a spreadsheet with Four columns. (If you don’t want to be that techy, you can just divide a doc or a sheet of paper into three columns.)

You first column is going to be “Subject.” The Subject should be a broad category that you think about a lot. It could be Philosophy, Piano, Home Improvement, Business, etc. The ultimate goal is to have many original ideas that you can sort into a few broad Subjects.

Your next column is the Tag. A tag should be a short word or phrase that will connect your idea to the subject and help you find it more quickly. For example, if one of your subjects is Fitness, your tags might include Weights, Yoga, Morning Routine, Gear, etc.

The third column is for the original thoughts. This is usually the one you will fill out first, and then you’ll add tags and a subject later. You might be freewriting about learning to play bass, and suddenly think about practicing scales during the 5 minutes it takes for your coffee to brew in the morning.

Finally, the fourth column is Action. Here you put something specific you can do to act upon your idea. This column will often be blank. Often your idea will be the action item itself. Sometimes you’ll get an idea you just want to ponder and savor without the pressure to do anything.

Now you simply do your free-flow exercise. When you’re done, ideas will often stand out as being useful or important. Write these down in your idea catcher.

Let’s look at an example of hour your Idea Catcher might work.

You’re free-flowing one day and all that’s coming out is frustration that you don’t have more time to practice your bass playing skills. Then the idea emerges that you could do your scales for 5 minutes while your coffee is brewing.

When you finish the free flow, you add this idea to the Idea column of your Idea Catcher. The subject is Bass, and the tag could be “practice” or “scales.” In the Action column you could write, “Put bass in kitchen before bed.”

As you start following this process, you’ll discover your mind is wildly flexible and creative.

Give it the space and you will constantly surprise yourself.

That wraps it up for this week.

If you’re enjoying these rants, lessons, and tools, I would love to hear from you.

If you’re not, I would like to hear from you even more.

Reply to this email and tell me what you think, what you’d like to see in the future, or just to drop me a line about your cat.

I don’t always have the time to reply to your message, but I read every one of them.

Jacob