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💡 The Big Idea: Creativity is a System. Here's How to Get More Out of It.

For a long time, I believed that I just wasn’t creative.

I thought creativity was a genetic trait I just wasn’t born with.

But then I read Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, and I realized that creativity is actually a system. And all systems have 3 parts:

1. Input (what you feed into the system)
2. Process (the way you work with the input)
3. Output (what comes out)

When you create something new (output), you’re simply connecting (process) dots (input) in a way that hasn’t been done before.

So instead of beating myself up about my lack of creative output, I realized that the way to be more creative was to collect better dots.

This one change instantly made creating 10x easier.

But then I started thinking about the process. At the time, I was responsible for a blog post and podcast episode every week and a new productivity course every month.

How was it that I was able to create so consistently?

As I thought about the different pieces of my creative systems and how they fit together, I came up with a model I call The Creativity Flywheel.

The Creativity Flywheel

A few years ago, I was at the Craft + Commerce conference when ConvertKit CEO Nathan Barry shared a story about digging a well in South Africa. Since there was no electricity in the region, a pump would be unreliable and require too much manual effort to operate.

So instead, they installed a flywheel. It was much harder to get going initially, but it was easier to keep going. By installing a flywheel, they created a system that would more reliably provide water over time.

Here's the key point: A flywheel helps build momentum that makes it easier to maintain the system.

In order for a flywheel to be effective, it must meet 3 criteria:

1. Activities must flow smoothly from one phase to the next
2. Each rotation is easier than the previous one
3. Each rotation produces more than the previous one.

I realized that the way I created was a lot like Nathan’s definition of a flywheel. There were distinct phases ideas went through that made the act of creating on a schedule almost effortless. I still had to do the work, but I’d been doing it for a while, and the consistency made it seem easy.

In other words, I had inadvertently created a Creative Flywheel that made it easy to create consistently.

Here are the 5 phases of The Creativity Flywheel and how they tie together.

1: Capture

The first phase of The Creativity Flywheel is to capture what resonates.

This is similar to the first step in GTD (Getting Things Done), so there’s a good chance you’re doing this already.

But I would encourage you not to capture something just because it has your attention. Instead, capture the things that you believe will be useful.

The things that tend to be useful in my experience are the things that resonate.

I grew up playing the violin, which makes sound by drawing a bow across the strings and causing a reverberation through the body of the instrument itself. When you play the violin, you can feel the reverberation.

That feeling is very similar to when you come across a potentially useful idea. It hits differently, and it causes a reverberation in your soul.

It’s not something that you feel you might need someday. It’s something that piques your curiosity right now.

Those are the types of things you want to capture.

I tend to capture things using Drafts on my iPhone. I’ll also use my dictation via my Apple Watch if I get inspired while out for a run.

But I don’t do anything with these captured ideas right away. I let them sit in my Drafts inbox for a little while first, which leads us to…

2: Curate

The second phase is to curate what’s useful.

One common PKM mistake I see people make is setting up automated ways to dump everything they capture into their connect note-taking app.

The problem with this is that the more low-quality notes and ideas you add, the lower the quality of output you get from it.

Garbage in, garbage out.

But what makes collecting quality ideas tricky is that you can’t judge the quality of an idea the moment you have it.

Ideas tend to feel amazing when you have them. But if you insert some space between capturing those ideas and adding them to your connected notes app, you can better see them for what they really are.

Think of yourself as the curator in the museum of your mind. What makes a museum collection valuable is not just what’s there, but also what’s not included. The things that didn’t make the cut end up increasing the value of the ones that do.

So about once per week (sometimes longer), I’ll go through my Drafts inbox and look at all the things I’ve captured. If I think something is worth keeping, I’ll send it to my Inbox folder in Obsidian (I have some Drafts export actions set up that make this easy). Everything else gets deleted.

I estimate that I only bring over about 10% of the things I capture. The other 90% I discard, trusting that if it’s really important, it’s going to come back.

3: Cultivate

The third phase is to cultivate your ideas by giving them the right environment to grow.

When you have an idea, aren’t really sure what it is. Like a seed, you need to plant it in the ground and give it the essential ingredients it needs to develop (i.e. sunlight, water, time).

Your PKM system is a lot like a greenhouse for your ideas. Once you plant them, you need to let them mature before you start to see the fruit.

One of the worst things you can do for an idea is try to make something out of it before it’s had time to ripen. But when you have a system for developing your ideas, then you don’t feel pressure to force an idea before it’s ready. You know you’ll have more to choose from because the flywheel continues to turn.

The Inbox folder is my idea greenhouse. I keep things there until they are ready to be worked on. I may add some notes here or there, but most of the time, these are blank notes that are just sitting in that folder. But when it’s time to find an idea to write about, I can go there and I have several pre-screened candidates to choose from.

4: Connect

The fourth phase is to connect your ideas and give them context.

In his classic book How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler talks about the 4 levels of reading:

1. Elementary Reading - where you consider, “What does this sentence say?”
2. Inspectional Reading - where you consider, “What is this book about?”
3. Analytical Reading - where you ask organized questions to grok the author’s arguments
4. Syntopical Reading - where you consider the author’s arguments in context of the other books you’ve read

No one book contains the total answer you’re looking for. And no one idea is the penultimate version.

Ideas (and notes) gain exponentially more value when they are connected and given a broader context.

IMHO this is where Obsidian really shines. There are many ways to connect ideas together (tags, folders, internal links, etc.) and I tend to use them all. Links between notes show up in the local graph (which I keep in the lower half of my right sidebar) and help me to understand how my notes & ideas relate to one another.

But the best way to deepen understanding of a topic is to write about it, which leads to…

5: Create

The last phase of The Creativity Flywheel is to create something new from the component pieces.

I like to think of ideas as individual mental Lego blocks. The pieces may not look all that unique or special, but when you combine them together, you end up creating something new and original.

Everything is a remix. The trick is to have good pieces to work with.

Once you have the pieces, though, it’s up to you to make something out of them.

One of the biggest mistakes people make with PKM is that they collect a bunch of things but don’t ever make anything new out of them.

I firmly believe your mind is like a water wheel — information must flow in (the Capture phase), and information must flow out (the Create phase). If there’s no outflow, the (fly)wheel stops turning.

But the output doesn’t need to be a blog post, YouTube video, or podcast episode. Sometimes the output is something that no one else will ever see.

There’s a saying that “thoughts disentangle themselves through lips and pencil tips.”

And also clicky keyboards.

The quickest way to gain clarity for me is to create an opinion note and start typing. The act of codifying my thoughts helps me synthesize my own thinking on a topic.

Writing is a great way to distill the information that I've consumed. It also makes it easier to capture things that are useful (hence the flywheel) by opening up loops in my mind and piquing my curiosity.

A System for Creativity (& Everything Else)

The Creativity Flywheel actually fits into a larger PKM framework I call The PKM Stack.

But since all of the levels of The PKM Stack tie together, I've actually built Obsidian-related workflows for just about everything represented here.

I've been working on packaging them up into a done-for-you Obsidian vault that (at the moment) I'm calling LifeHQ. It comes with all of the plugins and settings pre-configured for all of my Obsidian workflows, including:

• Multi-scale planning
• Habit tracking
• Journaling & reflection
• Task & project management
• LifeTheme & Personal Retreats
• Book notes & quotes
• CRM & contacts
• Much more

Every workflow includes detailed instructions about how to use it as well as a Workflow Summary so you can start using it right away.

I've also built a bunch of custom dashboards to make visualizing the data in your Obsidian vault easier. Here's an example:

I've put a ton of work into this, and this is going to become my signature product. It should be available for sale in the next couple of weeks. If you want more information or to be the first to know when it's available, click here.

😎 Something Cool: Collaborative Editing in Obsidian

There’s a new Community plugin that just came out called Relay that lets you add Google Docs-style collaboration to your Obsidian notes. You can share a specific note or a folder, and you just share a code with the people you want to collaborate with.

The problem is I can’t get this one to work for me (having trouble getting the Google login to work via Obsidian), though it did work for literally every other community member in our live call last Friday. It really is instant, and makes collaborating incredibly easy.

Because I couldn’t get Relay to work, I started down a rabbit hole that also led me to the Peerdraft app (shoutout to Library-member Max for sharing this with me). This doesn’t have quite the polish, but also lets you collaborate on Obsidian notes via a direct connection. The problem with this one is that the connection is terminated once the note is closed, which can make collaborating on documents over a period of time (i.e. show notes for Focused) a pain. But if you only need to collaborate live once in a while, this is a good option.

They’re slightly different approaches to solving the same problem: Obsidian isn’t great for shared notes. My preference, I think (based on what I saw from others), is Relay — once I can finally get it working for me 🤦🏼‍♂️

📚 Book Notes: The Laws of Creativity by Joey Cofone

​Baron Fig is a company that makes “science-backed analog tools that supercharge your thinking.” I’ve long been a fan of this company and used their pens and notebooks for years.

So when I found out that CEO Joey Cofone wrote a book about creativity, I was intrigued.

​The Laws of Creativity is a great book for anyone interested in the creative process. Joey explains 37 different laws of creativity and gives many great examples of how to leverage them to be more creative.

It’s also interesting to note that he had his own struggle with considering himself creative. We discussed it in detail when he came on the Focused podcast awhile back if you’re interested.

And if you want to download my notes from this book, click here.

— Mike