How To Come Up With Creative Ideas Every Single Day

I write, on average, somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 words per day. Sometimes more, rarely less.

The way I treat writing is the same way an athlete treats their sport of choice, or a violinist treats their instrument. They show up to the practice room and spend hours immersed in their craft.

At any given time, I am juggling a handful of different projects and voices in my head:

• I have my own daily “practice” writing, which consists of journaling on my laptop, poetry in my written journal, two pages of long-hand morning “blah” writing in my journal, a Quora answer, and an Inc Magazine column. 5+ days a week, I go through this entire “circuit.”
• I have the ghostwriting I do for other people, which is a portion of my income. Most days I write 1–3+ pieces for other people, each piece 800+ words.
• I have my own personal projects, such as books, which I have to invest a significant amount of time into silently and deliberately. I struggle to feel like a writing session here was of any worth unless I write at least 1,500 words—usually much more.
• I have the blog posts I write on occasion for my personal site.
• I also write daily microblogs on Instagram.

The above is not easy, nor is it something I started doing “all at once.”

I talked about this on WGN Radio when I spoke here in Chicago.

Whenever I tell people how much I write, the first question they always ask is, “How on earth do you come up with so many new ideas every day?”

I will tell you exactly how.

1. I read. A lot.

I am such a firm believer in balancing input and output. In order to write, you have to read. In order to lift, you have to eat. In order to play music, you have to listen to music.

When I eat breakfast, or lunch, or second lunch (fitness life), or dinner, I read at the same time. When I travel, I read. When I am sitting in a cab or have to take the train, I read. I try, best I can, to avoid the trap of falling into endlessly scrolling through meaningless content on my phone and read something that’s going to feed my brain instead.

I have seen first-hand that when I read more, I write more—and write better.

And when I don’t read as much, I feel as though I am licking the bottom of a barrel in hopes of a single drop of inspiration.

Input always has to match output.

2. I keep a list of ideas on my phone.

The best ideas never come to you when you sit down, ready to work.

They come to you when you’re standing in line at the grocery store, or walking down the street on a beautiful summer day, or fastening your seatbelt on a plane, or standing in a park watching an outdoor concert.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been out somewhere and pulled out my phone to write down an idea.

I have been at dinners where I have literally said, “Hang on, I have to text someone back,” only to open my notepad and write out entire paragraphs of ideas or text verbatim I hope to copy/paste into a story or article at a later date.

Ideas come on the fly, and we live in a world where we carry in our pockets mobile idea-capturing devices.

My iPhone is like my Pokéball, and I use it to catch all the slippery ideas I can.

3. I practice, every single day.

My writing output today is the result of 10 years of practice.

I started writing blogs online when I was a teenager in high school. Every night, after I had gotten done competing against the top World of Warcraft players in the world, I would grab my laptop and sit up in bed to write the next morning’s blog post. This usually happened around 3:00 a.m. on a school night.

Since that was the only time I really had to write blogs, I forced myself to do it. From the very beginning, I always treated writing with this attitude of, “Do it anyway. I know you’re tired, but do it anyway.”

When I went on to study creative writing in college years later, I realized this was not how most of my peers treated the craft. They preferred to wait for inspiration to strike—and the longer they waited, the less often inspiration came knocking.

I did, and have always done, the opposite. I write every day, no matter what. This morning? I woke up with a head cold and really didn’t want to write, seeing as I felt so brain dead I could barely figure out how to effectively cut my strawberries for my morning oatmeal. But I got myself some coffee. Posted up at a coffee shop down the street (where I am right now) and started slow, warming up my brain.

Once I felt warmed up, I wrote this for Inc Magazine: Having Trouble Marketing Your Small Business? Here Are 5 Tips For Small Teams To Make A Big Impact

And then I came over here to Quora and wrote the above.

Practice, compounded day after day after day, forces a sort of persistence that endures. Sure, some days the ideas come easier and faster than others, but they’re always there. It just depends on how willing you are to sit there and find them, however you need to, on that particular day.

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I am an author, entrepreneur, and speaker, as well as a 3x Top Writer on Quora and a columnist for Inc Magazine. My work has been featured in TIME, Forbes, Fortune, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Apple News, and more. I am a ghostwriter for a handful of serial entrepreneurs and C-suite executives, and I work with thought leaders to help them build their personal brand online. I write about the golden intersection between creativity, business, and self-development. 

Interested in working together? Please contact me here.