Hey friends,

The international love for my book, The Inner Compass, continues!

In addition to the licenses with Bloomsbury India (English + Hindi) and Dar Molhimon (Arabic), I’ve also sold foreign rights to Arrow Multimedia to publish a Thai translation of the book. I’m truly heartened to see the wide foreign interest in The Inner Compass, and there’s more to come.

Thousands of copies of The Inner Compass are now out in the world, and my enthusiasm for the book keeps growing. There are literal page-length responses in my inbox about how the book has impacted people, which is a strong signal that there’s something here. And of course, if you have any feedback you’d like to share, please do let me know.

As a reminder, if you grab a copy of The Inner Compass in any format, you also get (free) access to a bonus booklet of 30 daily meditations to accompany it. All you need to do is hit reply to this email and send me your order receipt.

All right. Now onto today’s new post, which is all about generating ideas.

I’ve been writing online for ~7 years, which means that I’ve interacted with many, many ideas during that time. You might assume that I have some mysterious process for this, but it’s actually quite simple.

That’s what today’s new piece will address, so when you’re ready, let’s dive right in.

​Ideas Arise Through Action​

A common question I get from readers is how I generate my ideas. Do they usually come from books? From articles? From conversations? From good ole contemplation?

The easy answer is that it comes from all of these things. It’s common knowledge that ideas come downstream from existing sources, all of which eventually find their way into your body of work. After all, originality is nothing more than the reframing of old ideas, done in a way that conjures the illusion of novelty.

With that said, the straight-forward answer is generally a sweeping one, discounting the nuances that lie underneath. So in today’s essay, I want to delve into a particular misconception that surrounds the topic of idea generation, and how I’ve shifted my perspective on it.

The misconception is the belief that your ideas precede the creative process. Or in other words, that you first have an idea, and then you work to bring that idea to life.

This mindset reminds me of an industrial complex, where employees are shown an image of what they’re all building toward, and then are sent to an assembly line to contribute their part to the vision. It’s deterministic in a sense, where they already know what the future ought to look like. In this setting, any deviation from that vision is an error, which means that the overarching idea takes precedence over any individual contribution.

This type of efficiency is great for producing standardized widgets, but does little for cultivating creative minds.

The best ideas are birthed during the creative process, and not before. That’s because creativity often contains a serendipitous element, where a train of thought takes unexpected turns throughout its journey. Even if you know that you have a specific conclusion you’re working toward, the way you’ll get there is going to be winding and, frankly, quite surprising.

A few years ago, my wife took up a ceramics apprenticeship in Korea. I visited the studio a few times during her stay, and had the privilege of watching her teacher and other students create vessels during the afternoons. The immediate thing that struck me was how no one had any clue what their creation would look like at the end of each session. All they knew was that they were starting with the same mound of clay, and that this would eventually become something after afew hours. There were no outlines, no mockups, nothing. Just their materials, their wheels, and their commitment to shaping the clay in front of them.

Over the next few hours, I periodically checked in to see how things were going. Two things were immediately clear each time I did: (1) everyone was so present with what they were doing, and (2) no two vessels were shaping up to look the same. There was something both thrilling and peaceful about the whole thing. Thrilling because the artists had no idea what was going to come about, and peaceful because they were okay with that (or it appeared that way, at least).

This whole scene reminded me that ideas take shape as you create. It’s the flow of the experience that causes another branch of thought to emerge, which you then incorporate to propel that experience in a new direction. Ideas generate through action, and not through a mind that tries to think its way to them. The process of moving your hands, shuffling your feet, writing your words… these are the things that allow ideas to arise without you forcing them to the surface.

So the way to build a playground of ideas isn’t to accumulate a bunch of information, but to regularly put yourself in that space to play. You can read great books or watch amazing films to inspire you, but the only way for that inspiration to give birth to a beautiful idea is when you’re actively engaged in the creative process. And what’s great is that you don’t require a vision of what you want to build beforehand; all you need is the desire to create and the commitment to make that happen.

In my case, I often don’t know what I’m going to write about until I sit down to do it. As you could guess, there’s a lot of creative resistance at first, primarily because we’re so conditioned to believe that you have to know what you’re going to write about before you start doing so. This is reinforced in high school English class, for example, where you’re taught that writing is merely a way of formalizing whatever ideas you’ve structured in advance (via an outline or a lengthy brainstorming session).

But it turns out that the writing itself is where the ideas come from. All you need is one thought to get you going, and once you’re moving, many other tributaries of thought begin to open up. Each session is like entering a laboratory of some sort, where the longer you write, the more personal experiences and external sources of inspiration you touch with each sentence. It’s this inertia that gives rise to your ability to reframe thoughts into ideas that exude originality.

The key takeaway is to unlearn the belief that a vision is required in order for you to start. It’s to dispel with the notion that everything needs to be plotted out in advance before a word is typed, a brushstroke is painted, or a dollop of clay is shaped. The simple yet powerful reality is that showing up and committing to the craft is what matters most, and that moving past the starting line will birth more ideas than any pre-planning ever will.

That’s it for today’s newsletter. Was there anything that resonated? Anything that didn’t? I dive deeply into the topic of creativity in The Inner Compass, so if you enjoyed that piece, you’ll love the book.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to share this email with anyone who might enjoy it. Have a great rest of your week!

-Lawrence Yeo

P.S. Thanks to all the wonderful people that support the blog on Patreon! It means so much. If you’d like to support More To That and get access to book recommendations, exclusive AMAs, offline posts, and other reflections, join as a patron today.

P.P.S. If you want to learn how to write essays like the one I shared today, check out my writing course, The Examined Writer. It's 3 hours' of self-paced material, all designed to elevate your writing practice.