The first time I walked through Day Two, I wrote out pragmatic solutions for a lot of the obstacles I had written down. As has become my practice now, I ran all of my ideas through ChatGPT and asked it for additional suggestions. The LLM pointed out that I had skipped over the instruction to create mythical or fantastical solutions to my challenges.
For one example, I named “too many ideas” as a challenge. So the solution I came up with was a magical idea jar. I envisioned a jar that has a grain of sand appear every time I get an idea. I could remove a grain of sand from the jar anytime I am ready to work on the idea. The jar could have a lid that provides a sifting mechanism when the jar is turned upside down, so that only the viable ideas will sift through.
I sometimes like to combine elements of reality with fantasy because the exercise can be useful in generating new creative ideas, which is definitely what happened here. A grain of sand could get stuck at the bottom of a jar and I would have to shake it to get it all the way down to the lid, which would annoy me. So the jar concept morphed into an hourglass. Like the jar, ideas could appear in the hourglass as grains of sand, and the hourglass would always be turning upside down whenever it runs out. Every idea would be magically tested every time it passes through the bottleneck of the hourglass, and the most viable idea would be set aside on a platform next to the hourglass. The most viable idea could turn golden and sparkle.
I imagined a separate receptacle for dead ideas. An idea “dies” when I lose the desire for the idea, when I find another way to satisfy the idea, or when the idea becomes impossible by definition to carry out (for instance, it’s too late for me to compete in the Olympics). For instance, I will never be a professional musician, which I once thought I might be. The desire for the idea “died” when I realized that I would be perfectly happy to learn amateur music as a hobbyist. The grains of sand would turn gray, whereas the grains of sand in the hourglass would be colorful, and some might glow as appropriate to the individual idea. I’m not sure how often the hourglass would be set to run out, and then it occurred to me that maybe there should be multiple hourglasses. There could be one really big hourglass where each grain of sand passes through only once and is designed to run out at the end of my life. Then there could be smaller hourglasses that are designed to run out every year, every week, every day, or every hour. It also occurs to me that instead of an hourglass, there could be a much more complex mechanism, perhaps a Rube Goldberg machine made up of hourglasses, tubes, pipes, scales, levers, buttons, lights, bells, and whistles.
One could spend all day going down the rabbit hole of imagining what a magical idea filtering system could look like. Note to self: perhaps one day I will write a children’s book called “The Magical Idea Machine.” For today, I will be content with the memory of having gone through the thought experiment above. It is refreshing to be reminded how easy it is to get myself into a creative frame of mind instead of focusing on the negative, which is the real point of day 2.
Of course I had to ask ChatGPT to give me some image ideas for this new metaphor. I’ve shared them below. I had to stop myself from spending more time coming up with more “idea machine” images…
The neat thing about the Day Two exercise is that it gave me permission to stretch my imagination by removing the limits of what is practical or feasible, and I also identified some practical solutions to real problems. I walked away from the exercise feeling hopeful, energized, and optimistic, even though I can’t honestly say I have worked out any actual solutions. But I’m only 2 days into a 30-day process that is designed to repeat again and again. It occurred to me that Sheila and I have really created something cool here, and I’m not really sure why I haven’t actually been using it for the last 3 years!
