creativity as gardening

Picture yourself in your garden.

The summer sun beating down on your back. The air full of magical scents. The grass grazing your ankles.

You’re not worried about the way the flowers and plants look as they grow.

No, you’re concerned with how you’re managing the variables: the amount of water you’ve used, the way the soil is sitting, the amount of sun that the garden is getting, and so on.

It’s the same way with your ideas.

If you’re too focused on the quality of the ideas, it’s easy to get some form of writer’s block or resistence.

But if you’re providing the right variables for ideas to exist, and you are constantly nurturing these ideas, you end up with a beautiful garden.

The process is taken from the idea of smart notes, zettelkasten, and the like:

1. Capture ideas as they come from reading or just from thin air
2. Develop these ideas into small, permanent, atomic notes.
3. Link these ideas together.

Think of every permanent note as a “unit” of knowledge and keep building.

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