“My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year. If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.”
That’s from a speech that Bill Watterson gave in 1990 at Kenyon College. Waterson, as you might know, is the author of Calvin & Hobbes, one of the most successful comic strips of all time.
Waterson’s speech is funny. And interesting. And valuable if you do creative work, or even if you have an online brand or business.
It’s worth digging up online. But today I want to share something else with you.
Because I know that frigtening realization that Waterson talks about. Sometimes I sit down to write these emails and really… all the ideas that come to me are uninteresting. I get tense. “This is the best you’ve got? Would you read this crap? You wouldn’t, would you?”
And like Watterson, the only way I know to not to get bogged down in that space is to let my mind water into new territories.
I have a few routines that allow me to do that.
For example, I’m subscribed to a wonderful email newsletter. It arrives every few days, unexpectedly.
And with each email comes a thought-provoking article that I would never have read otherwise. It’s where I came across the Bill Watterson speech I referenced above.
So if you’d like to sign up to this newsleter… and let your mind wander into new territories on occasion… here’s the usefully ugly signup form for Thinking About Things: