Someone told me recently that the human brain comes up with 10,000 ideas a day. I can hardly wrap my head around the immensity of that number, though it isn’t necessarily surprising to me either.
What is surprising to me is not that we have the ability to process so many ideas each day, but that we do so little with all of those ideas each day.
When was the last time you had a great idea and did nothing with it?
For me it was yesterday. I had the idea of calling up a friend who has recently gotten divorced to encourage him and pray for him. I never made the phone call. The idea fell away as the immediacy of other pressing moments became higher priorities.
Philippians 4:8 says:
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
Ideas typically come in the form of thoughts. Here Paul is encouraging our “thought life” to be centered around things that matter.
Because of all this I think my decision to start blogging consistently back in September of 2007 truly changed my life. Here’s how…
Space to Process
Blogging forced me to dive into at least one idea almost every day. Rather than allowing life to fly by, processing and writing through one idea I got into the habit of creating space to process ideas rather than letting them float away in time and space.
For ideas to really make a difference in our lives we need the space to process them. For me, I always (well, not always, but that’s the goal) jot down any idea I have into Evernote either on my phone or computer.
Rarely do I have time and space in the moment to process through each idea as it comes, but by jotting down the full extent of each idea I can come back to it. Only about 50% of my ideas ever resonate with me when I come back to them, but that still leaves half of my ideas as something I can build on and begin to process through.
Forming Concrete Ideas For Life to Flow Into
I’m blown away but how unintentionally I can float through life. Interactions with people, watching television, reading books—I hardly ever think critically about what is going on underneath the surface.
What if we took the ideas going on inside our minds and began to let them influence how we live?
Blogging allowed me to not only process through ideas, but also to form them around written words that my life could then flow into. Processing through ideas is one thing, forming ideas into something of substance gives life a launching point. Ideas at this point are no longer just things stuck in our minds but they are written down for all to see.
For me, blogging was not just about getting readers, or about finding “my voice” as many say, blogging changed how I lived because I had been implicated by how God was forming ideas in my mind and then speaking them into the written word.
What practices have you used to implement ideas into your life?
