I Have Too Many Ideas

Like many of you, my project list is exceptionally long. I thought I would run out of ideas when I started making things. I have the exact opposite problem: too many ideas, insufficient time, and how to keep track of all my ideas and what inspired them.

I find inspiration from various familiar places, like YouTube videos from other Makers, social media, Disney, Star Wars, books, and Marvel, just to name a few. Some of those ideas are complete projects I want to build myself. More often now, I’ll get inspiration for a project component, and a few ideas come together into one project or a series of projects.

As I mentioned in the My Second Brain post, I am not good at keeping all those ideas in my head. I have found it very useful to keep my ideas in a constantly evolving second brain. My second brain helps me document ideas for reference later and makes it easy to look through them. It also lets me tag where the inspiration came from to give proper credit, which is very important.

In the book Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon says, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.” He also mentions giving proper credit. While some may find that no idea is originally disconcerting, I also believe that combining existing ideas can create something new. I also find this comforting as someone who does not think they are creative. It permits me to take inspiration from others in my projects. I don’t like creating carbon copies of something else, so combining ideas into something new resonates with me.

Keeping all these ideas in one place to easily add new ideas and look through older ideas has been incredible. I’m still working on how this database resource will function, but once it’s in a good place, I’ll share my Notion setup so others can use it for their ideas.