idea mining

Your mind is a cavern and writing is mining. The deeper you dig, the more surprising, mysterious, and valuable your findings. A good idea is a rare mineral you can only find in the depths of the cavern. You get deeper by following a thought train down. Different thought trains lead to different rare minerals.

You need to be able to focus to delve deep. You also need to be ready for the unconventional and insightful ideas waiting for you in the depths: Unknown beautiful gems you didn’t know existed because they were formed by the pressure of your subconscious making sense of the world around you.

In the shallow layers of the cavern you'll find unoriginal, popular ideas. These were formed by the influence of social media and pop culture. This is coal. Coal isn’t valuable, ignore it and keep digging.

Most people only find coal because they don't mine effectively. They think, they don’t write. Thinking is using a pickaxe and writing is using a subterrene. Writing drills harder, faster, and wider because

• It forces your thought train to be sharp, clear, and have direction

• When you write your path you can return to where you left off. When you don’t write your thoughts, you can’t re-trace your steps. When your attention is inevitably hijacked by a notification, roommate, or coworker, you’re teleported to the surface, and have to dive back into the cavern.

All of our caverns are rich with rare and valuable minerals because we’ve all lived unique lives with the proper conditions for rare gems to form: time and pressure. The diamonds are there, you just have to find them.

Getting deep doesn't guarantee you'll find a diamond. All you know is that's where the diamonds are found. You’re going to have to get comfortable in the depths because the more time you spend there, the more likely you are to find a diamond.

When you're forging new paths through the depths of the cavern, you’ll find a lot of stone and coal. That’s Ok because you're going to disregard most of it. You're only going to keep the valuable minerals you find. In other words, you're going to delete most of your writing and only keep the good stuff. You need to get through the bad stuff to get to the good stuff.

You have to find the stone and coal before you find the diamonds. Most people get discouraged by the copious amounts of stone and coal because they think diamonds come easily to other people. They think other people find diamonds easier and faster than them. They don’t. The diamond-finders dig for a long time and don’t let the coal discourage them.

The path you follow down matters. Some paths lead to a higher density of rare gems than others. New gems spawn in your cavern as you have new experiences. You can return to old, already explored caves later in your life and find new minerals because you have a different perspective.

If you pay attention, you’ll get glimpses of new starting points (thought trains) in your daily life. Write down the location of the entrance (the snippet of insight that crossed your mind) and return to do a full exploration later.

You’re not done after you harvest the raw ore. It’s not valuable in that state. You need to smelt it in a furnace. You need to edit your writing. You need to refine your idea to make it presentable.

Finding rare gems is Hard! You'll encounter mental resistance, you’ll find nothing but coal most of the time, you’ll feel like a wringed out wash cloth, you'll think your mind is empty. It’s not.