How I get my best ideas (my creative routine)

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How I get my best ideas (my creative routine)

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The written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, chaotic version. This is the good bits, organised by taking the transcript and having an AI tool clean it up. HEY!I was supposed to fly back to Berlin yesterday.Instead I’m sitting on the ground in a forest in Sweden, recording this week’s episode on AirPods and a laptop camera. Changing my flight was quoted at €15, then the Eurowings website broke, so booking a whole new one cost €100. I paid it, because I didn’t feel like leaving yet.I wasn’t going to record at all this week. The show is called Unscheduled, I can do it whenever the hell I want, and nobody would have noticed a skipped Tuesday. But I was sitting there rereading The War of Art, and I caught myself asking: why the f**k am I recording this episode anyway?The answer turned into the episode. And I think it applies to your business as much as it does to my podcast.The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)* Ideas behave like fish: you can’t summon them, you can only be out on the water when they show up. This is Rick Rubin’s framing and I’m stealing it openly. The fisherman casts lines for a chance to catch something. The fish might be there either way, but if you’re not out there, you catch nothing.* A dedicated practice matters just as much for making money as it does for making art. You have to be creative to figure out how to generate revenue. It’s the same muscle, and it responds to the same routine.* If talking is how you think, build your outlet around talking. This show is one unbroken, improvised take because talking is my way of getting ideas out. Your version might be writing or walking. Find it, then give it a slot.* Your workspace trains your brain. A band walks into a studio and creating becomes natural, because the studio is where they create. My office is set up as a place where I go to check our numbers. Worth noticing what your space tells you to do.* The content you make for other people doubles as infrastructure for yourself. This podcast is my brain dump, my idea generator, and my way of staying in touch with people without networking. Last week’s video handed me the idea for a whole new workshop.* If you’re loving a trip, check what staying actually costs before assuming you have to leave. Mine cost €100. Most people never even look.Okay. The story.The fisherman ideaI have a few books with me in Sweden but the 2 that I kept rechecking were my classics: The War of Art, and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. If you listen to this show you’ll know I bang on about both of them. They circle the same concept, which is that ideas come from somewhere else, and if you’re in the right headspace you become a kind of antenna that can receive them.Whether you believe that or not doesn’t matter, and I don’t even know if I believe it myself. It’s a useful metaphor because you can experience it. Paul McCartney says the entire melody of Yesterday appeared in his mind in one go. Chris Martin says the same kind of thing all the time. Writers say it, filmmakers say it: I was just driving, and boom, the idea arrived.Rick Rubin has my favourite version of it. You’re a fisherman out at sea, casting lines into the water for a chance to catch something. That’s why writers sit at the desk from 10am until 1pm every day no matter what. They’re keeping the lines in the water.And that’s why I turned the camera on today. I’ve been doing this show for almost a year now, since September, and most episodes have no specific topic when I start. Sitting down on a Monday and pressing record is me casting the lines.I’ve felt this myself. When I was in a band and in the practice of songwriting, the songs just came. When I was writing scripts regularly in college, the film ideas flowed. Your antenna becomes more sensitive to the thing you keep showing up for.The mustard jumper problemLast week I told you about spending 2 days with my mentor Blake, so here’s the short version if you missed it. I went in with the goal of getting the company to 10 million a year. We were at six. By the end of the 2 days I realised I didn’t want that at all.What Blake actually did was watch me. In San Diego I was in a great mood, excited about buying a mustard coloured jumper in a tourist surf shop, telling him how much I loved every coffee shop we walked into. Then we’d sit down to talk about the business and he’d say: whoa, your entire vibe just changed. More serious, more closed off, kind of practised and strange. He kept saying GERMAN.When I talked about my relationship with my now fiancée, he said that’s the real version of you speaking. When I talked about the 10 million, it was the other one.We dug into it and found the uncomfortable bit: to make AJ&Smart and Facilitator work as well as they did, I’d more or less stopped using my creativity. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I was a creative first. I was in a band. I moved to...

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