Welcome to Ideaphoria: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

An olden tale tells of a man — a passionate gardener — who is gifted with his ultimate fantasy and dream: a thousand seeds representing a thousand plants. He races to the dirt, inserting seed after seed into the warmth of the earth, envisioning the future: lilacs and lilies, ferns and forests, vegetables and other various vegetation. Blossoming, blooming, green and bright. Little pathways of tiny yellow pebbles would lead you around this cacophony of beauty and delight.

At first, the man races and runs to plant his seeds. But 1,000 seeds and plants to nurture and grow quickly turns from pleasure to pain as he races plant to plant to attempt to sustain life. His perfect plants and his grand plans begin to wither and die.

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Without his intentional care, love, and attention, only a few plants survive.

This is the garden of “Ideaphoria.”

Welcome to Ideaphoria

Definition: IDEAPHORIA, idea·pho·ria (ˌ)īˌdēəˈfōrēə.

Last week I wrote about putting down the weapons of work and resting and just being somewhere solid for a moment. For those of us suffering from ideaphoria, this sounds like you just asked us to run over our dog. 

This combination gift/curse is the power to create a steady stream of ideas for anyone and anything — and then realize you have your arms wrapped around a fire hose blasting water at 180 gallons per minute into someone’s living room. Things get wet pretty quickly. It turns out water damage is pretty expensive and people aren’t that happy with the outcome.

I’ve long been known as the idea guy. Some people love that about me, some people loathe me for it. 

“What in the world is he going to come up with today to change what we’re already doing so well?” they wonder. 

I was an idea maniac in the flesh, a whirlwind of ideas that at a moment's notice could flatten the efficiency of my team with a new tool, tactic, or time-saving hack. I felt like I couldn’t help it, and after many 360 degree feedback sessions, gentle suggestions, and then passive-aggressive comments – I knew something was terribly wrong with me. 

Elon Musk has described his own mind as “a storm.” It’s overflowing with ideas and it’s clear in his mind (as you can watch below), that there isn’t enough time to create everything he thinks possible.

Imagine if Elon Musk was totally dedicated to one thing – it would be magnificent. When his mind is focused he creates incredible things: Tesla, SpaceX, StarLink and more. When the chaos in his mind wins out, the plants begin to wither. Just look at the 17 shareholders in April 2023 who noted Elon’s distraction and attempts to “water all the plants” led to failures and fumbles at Tesla.

Focused Ideaphoria

Great leaders are able to harness the power of their ideaphoria into intense and obsessive focus. Two examples of this phenomenon is the tale of two David’s: David Senra and David Perrell.

David Senra created Founders Podcast, a fully-focused effort on one thing: reading biographies and sharing the lessons from those biographies. Over and over and over again. “A thousand more to go,” says David at the end of each episode as he ingests book after book.

David doesn’t do investing, he doesn’t consult, and he doesn’t have a course to sell you. He reads, he takes notes, and he records the lessons he’s learned.

When you listen to David Senra, you get the idea that his mind could very easily be applied to a great many things. He’s shared that often he is asked to do other things. His response? It would be ridiculous for him to stop doing the thing he loves and that he’s doing so well to do something completely different.

He’s found his life’s work, and he’s going to do just one thing for as long as he can. This is the power of an ideaphoric mind focused intently on one thing.

David Parrell is the founder of Write of Passage, a course I’ve taken recently. Write of Passage and his podcast could explore a lot of things. David shared that early on in his career he was more of an archeologist in search of his “personal monopoly” than an architect that had a clear plan and strategy. But over time, it became clear what his life’s calling was: helping people write online.

The offers of Write of Passage could be in the dozens. But they offer three simple things: you publish the best writing of your life, meet lifelong friends, and 2x your potential. In David’s words: “Write the essay only you can write. Carve the path only you can carve. Live the life only you can live.”

With all the connections from Write of Passage, David’s podcast “How I Write” could be a broad and expansive interview-based podcast. Instead, he’s focused on a specific niche: how great writers write.

There is so much fear for the ideaphoric in embracing this idea of shrinking their focus and attention. Like Elon Musk, we want to water all the plants and wrongly think we can.

Yet when you take a look at the best creators, writers, and thinkers — they all tend to be obsessively focused on one small thing. That small thing gets all their ideas and all their attention. (For going deeper on this, read the incredible essay on Niche-Crafting by Harrison Moore). 

Taming Ideaphoria

One of the great resources for the ideaphoria superstar is The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design. Frameworks, patterns, and systems are the remedy to the pain for the ideaphoric mind.

The great minds at IDEO, no strangers to ideas themselves, recommend at least three strategies for the brain ever in the storm:

1. Download Your Ideas
2. Find Themes 
3. Create Insight Statements
4. Bonus: Create Personal Rules

Download Your Ideas

The first step in taking massive amounts of ideas in your mind is to download them. Just find a way that works for you. Take the IDEO methodology of utilizing sticky notes and clumping similar ideas together for compression, lean into Evernote or use the tool in your hand like Apple Notes. 

Find Themes

Take a few moments to cluster your ideas. This is especially helpful if you throw ideas on sticky notes, which can help you begin to identify themes visually. Asking key questions will help you hone in the best of the ideas:

• Have any patterns emerged?
• Is there compelling insight you read again and again?
• What feels significant?
• What surprised you?

Identifying themes eventually leads to the creation of frameworks that help you hone in your future work and keep ideaphoria from showing its ugly side.

Create Insight Statements

Once you’ve found key themes, work to synthesize the information in one additional step: creating an insight statement. Simply put, take the themes and rephrase them in short statements. It’s simple, but not easy. Editing down to three to five insights out of your downloads will lead you closer to a clear focus.

Bonus: Create Personal Rules

Lastly, as a tried and true ideaphoric, I commend to you the idea of creating personal rules. You can download, theme, and create insights all day long, but unless you have created some personal rules, you will find yourself a victim again of ideaphoria. Here are a few rules I’m adopting:

• No new courses or classes in 2024
• No travel outside of already scheduled events in 2024
• No immediate “yes” to any request without 24 hours of consideration

There are a thousand rules you can have, but for the ideaphoric mind, you must give yourself these boundaries and these rules.

Invest in the best and watch your greenhouse flourish.