Too Much of Anything: Why It Pays to Organize Ideas

Creative work, when you’re really driven, can be both exciting and frustrating. Exciting because you have a ton of ideas you want to execute, and you think them all brilliant, and they’re all floating in your head. Frustrating, precisely because of the same reasons.

I’m willing to bet you’ve heard the saying “too much of anything can be bad for you,” or variations thereof, the point being that an excess of anything will do more bad then good, and the moral being that you just have to moderate everything. And it is true, only the idea is associated more often with food, work, and spending money, more than anything else. Eating too much is unhealthy, and overthinking is unhealthy. It’s also true when it comes to creative work – getting too many ideas in your head and trying to execute them all at once will lead to you producing nothing of value, or something of little value. It’s easy to say that you can devote part of your time for this one creative project, and then another part of your time for another, putting everything in compartments and juggling things all at once. That’s something you can try doing, but whether or not it will work is something else entirely.

Having too many ideas will overwhelm you at some point, and it’s inevitable. Trying to tie them up and make something coherent out of them will give you a hard time, and maybe at some point you will give up on all your projects. While I’m still sketchy about giving pieces of advice (and these sometimes contradict each other, I’m aware), what you can do, when you feel overwhelmed is this: empty your mind.

Cut off the ideas that aren’t fully developed yet, the ideas that you’re not completely satisfied with. Ideas that sound okay, ideas that you can explain if someone asks you about them, you stick with. Organize your ideas. Brainstorming is a fun thing, and it likely yields a lot of interesting results, but having too many little things flowing will become to much in the long run. Group ideas and concepts together under general headings, and think of how one is related to another, before jumping in to attempt to execute your ideas. It’s a stretch, certainly, and I’m speaking only in broad terms, but I can’t really be very specific about this. The idea, though, is that a lot of ideas will seem indispensable at the start, and these may even be things you’re proud of or are unwilling to part with. But if your head’s streaming with a lot of ideas, a lot of concepts, sit down and ask yourself: are you really up for everything? Are all the things you’re thinking about things you want to execute, things that make sense, things that you can develop? When you try to group and organize your ideas together, you will realize which ones can be discarded and which ones can be kept. It pays to organize, because it will help you produce a tighter output, something less general, something more interesting, something that makes more sense.

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Tap Into your Subconscious for Better Ideas

When you have to come up with an idea, you look around to see if something or someone inside the room can pitch it to you. The tendency to be passive when confronted with a problem is a major hindrance to our being natural problem-solvers. As rational beings, we always seek for a solution, even when there is no problem to begin with. We just love to assume that there is always a catch. Perhaps it can be a good thing. I mean, nobody prefers being sorry when being safe is within capacity upon the start. But, is danger really present? In the scope of creativity, I think not.

 

Playing safe is a crime against creativity. The bigger the risks, the crazier the ideas, the more promising the outcome will be. The best source of these extraordinary concepts are buried deeply in our subconscious. Why? It’s because inside our semi-active thoughts, some realities are exaggerated. I know I’ve stressed in previous posts that too much of anything can’t be good( probably more times than I can recall), but in this sense, I’ll point out when exaggeration can work. Upon the inception of ideas, they are basically in a safe mode. Meaning to say, as long as they remain inside your head, there will never be such a thing as too much.

 

Your brain is made to hold unlimited information, pointless and useful alike. You feed it with new ones all the time, as a result of the different senses functioning. Once absorbed, they are stored in your memory. However, we can’t possibly remember everything. Have you ever noticed that when you don’t need to remember something, it comes so easily as though you would normally bring that thing up? But when you actually need to bring it up, you just don’t know where the heck it went. Take for instance when you’re taking an exam and you studied your ass off, but when the questions are right in front of you, you go blank. Artists get this all the time. Even though there is no pressure to get good grades, as some students feel during a test (or most of them at least), they aim to create something worthwhile for their talents’ sake.

 

Memories that can be used as raw material for something creative are often the hardest to recall. If you are frustrated enough about it, there is actually a way to access them. This process is called hypnotherapy. Hypnosis has long been used to treat people who have problems concerning the subconscious. Is it truly effective in improving recollection? I wouldn’t know personally because I haven’t tried going to a hypnotherapist, but according to my research, it’s confirmed – hypnosis can improve memory recall. I’d like to note that it doesn’t work as a truth serum, nor is it a reliable means of accessing buried memories, but it does evoke mental photographs which can trigger interesting ideas.

 

It is really not essential  to see an expert in order to tap into your subconscious. You just simply forget the need to remember, or the need to solve something, and relax. Relaxation is key when you are trying to get into a more creative vibe. Get enough of it and you will be surprised to see that it becomes easier for you to pull your useful memories to the surface.

 

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.” – Alain de Botton

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