 Two words that describe my idea generation process, totally random. That's right I do not have a proper idea generation process in place But what I do have are tools that can help me capture these random ideas and over the years I kind of refine my process and it feels like it's hard to explain it and hard to describe it mostly because most of it is Just like muscle memory at this point because once I see something that my mind thinks is interesting I will capture that specific something almost Instantaneously, and I think that it is fair to say that even trivial information can often produce illuminating insight that can help you adjust Delete or enhance the myriad of ideas in your head And sometimes I think that's obvious that I'm generating ideas by consuming a lot of stuff And I think that I'm getting better and better in terms of filtering out the unimportant stuff that I have to navigate through in my oftentimes mindless consumption Escapades so that I can end up with a plate. That's full of the most important and interesting stuff I've managed to dig up now I do think that my idea generation process is sort of tied and synced to the fact that I'm always trying to pay attention My surroundings and some people might say that I am over analyzing things and situations and objects and how someone might have left the car parked down the street and how the way that particular someone parked and how The inside of the car can help me speculate about what type of person that particular Individual is and sometimes it can feel that I'm on a rant and also that I might be a stalker as well But it is something that I cannot turn off and I cannot say that I train myself to do that I was like this as far as I can remember and this type of exercise essentially being more aware of your Surrounding so that you can observe stuff can be quite illuminating and this also sort of comes hand in hand with paying attention To how your mind wanders right because you're not only spotting and observing what is happening around you But also how you end up having something in your mind. For example, I'm oftentimes doing this thing where I'm trying to mentally track my thinking process Meaning that if I end up thinking about something or randomly and spontaneously Communicating something to someone I would go back and think hmm How did I come up with this and most of the time is just like a combination of words and phrases I heard in a different time and place or scenario and a combination that acts sort of like a small rock hitting a spider's web with the Spiders web being my mind and then once that hits the web the interconnectivity of such weird contraptions start becoming more and more Active so how do I seize these opportunities for generating new ideas? First again, I would just like pay attention to the quality of my surroundings But also trying to pay more attention to the quality of the materials I'm ingesting every single day and I know that there's that online quote saying that you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with which is a bit debatable and I myself enjoy absorbing diverse sets of materials meaning very random and Seemingly unmindful topics and areas and I also enjoy being part of oftentimes weird surroundings that my seem that are not that High quality but through these indirect interactions with you know random people or people coming from a different culture or Family these can help me fill in and solidify my lack of understanding of the world as I'm not trying to specialize and become one of the Top 1% in a specific field as that would leave me with no room for diverse Exploration and later I end up sort of like connecting all of these dots I have collected from all of these different areas of life on the capturing ideas side nowadays I'm using the notes app on my phone. It's simple clean and it syncs with the rest of my environment If there's an important idea I would need to tackle I would pin it on top and this way I know to Prioritize it. I'm also using the notion web clipper Which is a browser extension that allows you to save links and send those to the notion web page that I created especially for this purpose and what I would do is briefly browse through the stuff that I'm consuming and if I'm in a Direct or a time crunch I would send that link to notion so that I can process it later And while some ideas might not see the daylight others my stick and have the potential to become Something else to become part of something bigger I have also created some other outlets for idea capturing and that is a what's up group with myself So that I can easily forward stuff every time someone sends me an interesting link to an article music a piece of research Or a video and I would also just like use that group to send links to my future self You can also pay attention to how the other groups you are in are operating and you can just like Make use of that what's how functionality where you can store messages So you can come back to the specific message or just like easily search for it And there's also friction that can be eliminated in terms of capturing ideas from YouTube And that is through building and leveraging playlists or the save later Functionality and while you can easily hit the share button and send that video anywhere through an app I found that keeping playlists that are robust Private and there to stay can be a much more effective framework simply because you will know that everything you have in those places is video Content only in terms of paying attention to how your mind works and how your idea generation process works as well I think it's pretty simple You need to grab these ideas by the tail and you do that by eliminating the friction that's sort of required Capture these ideas. So you sort of like need to capture ideas in a quick and dirty way Having this as a default like the ability to quickly pull out your phone and just like add a quick note Add a quick reminder add a quick calendar invite or whatever Because if you make it hard to pull out your phone and copy paste that idea The next time you will have the same situation Your brain will highlight the friction part that happened last time And you will be much more or less inclined to take that idea down Now the last step of the process is about bringing the ideas you generated based on the content you consumed to life Where these have your own spin on them and hopefully can become a more useful and compressed version of the initial piece And I currently believe that getting to a point where you can better refine your idea capture to idea generation process So that everything can flow seamlessly where all of these technologies and apps and browser extensions are the tools that can Act as a real extension of ourselves Where we are equipped with a personal flavored stack of tools Which can fit our needs and are of course constantly Adapting and well getting to this point is something which keeps me excited about the future