How to develop an idea abundance mindset 🧠
Practical steps to convince yourself you'll never run out of ideas (and to generate endless ideas)
Recently, an author I follow asked his audience of writers “What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing lately”. As usual, someone replied, “Finding ideas to write about every week”.
This is an eternal problem. Too many creators are slowed down by a lack of ideas. Too many don't even start publishing because they're afraid of running out of ideas.
Look, my first blog taught photography. I started it when I had been practicing photography for less than a year.
For a long time, I published two articles a week. Then I added weekly YouTube videos. I never found myself staring at a blank page, wondering what to write. But it's not because I have superpowers.
If you're afraid of running out of ideas, you need to develop an “idea abundance mindset” and get rid of the scarcity mindset. It's not an esoteric process. As usual, you can train it by following well-defined practices.
Observe clever creators
Take any creator who publishes multiple times a week on one or more platforms. Scroll through their content and look at the titles. If you can, read something as well. This exercise works best if you've been following the creator for a while.
Pay attention to one thing. Often, their content comes back to the same topics:
sometimes they repeat exactly the same thing and only change the format (e.g. YouTube videos vs Instagram post),
other times, they explore an idea in different ways,
other times, they combine ideas in different ways.
The lesson is that you don't need completely new ideas all the time. You can explore the same idea in different ways. Sometimes you even need it, because your thinking and your comprehension evolve.
Keep an eye on prolific creators over time. Carefully observe the various ways they reuse ideas. Write them down in a document so you can use them too.
One creator that does this constantly is Alex Mathers. I found the same ideas in his newsletters, social media posts, and books.
The web is an inspiration machine
Don’t underestimate the volume of information freely available online:
choose a topic, something that interests you or something that might interest your audience,
search for it on Reddit, Quora, or Facebook groups,
read the discussions,
every question is content idea.
You can do the same by looking at the chapters of non-fiction books.
When I got into photography, I spent hours every week reading about it. I had my own questions and knew the questions of other photographers. I just wrote to answer them.
Start training your idea muscle
The first step was just observing. Now it's time to get to work.
I've always advised my clients to start with this exercise: think of a list of problems you can solve for your audience, big and small.
For example, if you're talking to people interested in losing weight, the general question is “how to lose weight?” But content ideas come from specific questions, not generic ones.
So, imagine a person who wants to lose weight and hasn't succeeded yet. What unanswered questions torment them every day?
How to choose the best weight loss program?
How can you eat what you like without gaining weight?
How to lose weight before a wedding to wear a beautiful dress?
How to lose weight before summer?
How to diet without starving?
The answers to these questions are content seeds. Some will lead to long articles, others to short posts.
But for now, your only concern is to brainstorm with abandon, to realize how easy it is to come up with new ideas.
If you don't have an audience yet, think about your problems. Consider an area of your life that you'd like to improve and all the doubts and difficulties you encounter.
Multiply your ideas
This trick is used by most prolific creators: multiply ideas by passing them through filters.
These filters are usually called formats, frameworks, or templates:
mistakes to avoid,
step-by-step instructions,
lists of tips,
lists of tools,
case studies.
These are some common, proven ones. But over time, you can come up with yours, or collect others.
For example, if the idea is “how to lose weight fast at 40”, you could write:
10 mistakes to avoid if you want to lose weight fast at 40,
3 steps to lose weight fast at 40
13 essential tips to lose weight fast at 40
4 cheap tools to help you lose weight fast at 40
This 40-year-old men lost 40 pounds in 4 weeks.
Leverage momentum
The wonderful thing is that creating content helps you create more content.
When you write on a topic, you spend a lot of time with it. It gets woven into your life.
Your mind works in the background. It thinks about how to improve what you already published. It turns daily experiences and observations into material.
I've been a content creator for almost 14 years. Every day I save at least one idea for an article or video. This happens seamlessly while I'm doing other things.
But the act of creating itself is the most powerful source of inspiration. Very often, while writing an article, I get ideas for other articles. Often it’s a point I can’t expand in the current article. I save it in my idea cache for later.
Your audience will make it easy
After a while, your audience will begin to comment on your content and send you emails. You won't need much imagination to extract ideas for new content from these interactions.
There may be explicit requests. For example, I have a small channel in Italian, but even videos with only a few hundred views inspired explicit video requests.
More often, your audience will need clarifications, or will share their issues. You can always answer with new pieces of content.
If you have questions, add a comment. I always answer!