A Game of Thoughts

In my humble effort to checks notes "map the physics of imagination", I am starting with the basics. I've spent most of my life trying to produce ideas and getting better at doing it (whatever that means). This has lead me to a personal kit of principles, techniques and patterns I use on a daily basis to "play" the "game" of thinking.

I've divided the list into suits:

✦ Currents

◈ Dance

⬡ Web

⟐ Forge

◯ Mirror

◆ Void

The concept is simple: "good thinking" is playing the right card at the right time, to master the infinite game of ideation. This is far from a complete or balanced set, but it's a start!

✦ The Currents

Flow & Energy Management

Read the Temperature

Creative resistance is feedback, not an obstacle to overcome. When you don't feel like being creative it's the framing that needs adjustment.

Ride the Gradient

Enjoy the thrill of inspiration but know the momentum will run out. When things get harder, it doesn't mean you've made a wrong move. It's a cycle of gaining potential energy and converting it to kinetic.

Thread Discipline

Bluntly shutting down ideas kills the creative spirit, but entertaining every idea will lead you nowhere. Track the threads of ideas, keep them spooled and at the ready. Then, when inspiration arrives, you know where it belongs.

Recognize Phase

Creativity is a complex system that operates in different phases over time. Notice when you flip into cynicism, or the feeling of giving up - these are critical points in phase-space. Learn the dynamics and surf the channels between attractors.

Let Fields Lie Fallow

Over-farmed soil yields no crop. Our minds must lay quiet to regenerate the building blocks of ideas. Constantly "grinding" consumes the creative substrate until nothing can grow.

Effortless Awareness

Ideas kept warm spring back instantly; cold ones require full reconstruction. The difference between reheating soup and making it from scratch. Weave your thoughts and your life together and progress is free.

✦✦✦

◈ The Dance

Intimate Collaboration

Dual Awareness

A good creative partner is aware of their own internal state, the state of each collaborator and the group as a whole - simultaneously. Creative collaboration is a balancing act.

Shape the Invisible Object

Collaborators pass an unseen form between them in imaginal space, sculpting it together. Any interference or noise in the signal disrupts everyone's thinking.

Sense the Untethering

We can feel when creative partners are falling out of sync. A sickening feeling, like wheels losing grip on a curve. Respect the momentum of the group.

Give to Gain

Trust is the most important factor determining bandwidth between minds. Low trust means narrow pipes means predictable outputs. Vulnerability and intimacy multiply surprise.

Weather the Storm

Deep creative partnership requires fights, misunderstandings, harsh disjunctions and healing from them. Years of storms build the trust to operate as one.

◈◈◈

⬡ The Web

Community & Collective Intelligence

Connect to the Field

Isolation breeds dysfunction at every scale - cancer in cells, insanity in minds. Creative health requires connection to the broader culture... without being overtaken by it.

Leave Gaps

"I don't know" leaves room for what could be. Clinging to firm ideas prevents collective intelligence from emerging. Delight comes from the unexpected.

Propagate Wisely

Ideas and creative energy move through communities like electrical signals. Know when your role is to amplify, when to filter, when to transform.

Scaling Imagination

More minds mean more potential for divergence, often degenerating to chaos as noise multiplies. As the group grows, we must listen far more than we speak.

Lead Yourself Back

Community is a reliable path back to a headspace. Participating in community has a stabilising effect on the creative 'frequency' you operate on. Conversely, isolation leads to inconsistency.

⬡⬡⬡

⟐ The Forge

Transformation & Creation

Ideas are Fragile

An idea is a spark. It needs to be protected and channeled into a bonfire. Fear will snuff it out early, negligence might start a forest fire. Let the idea lead the way without strangling its vitality.

Go Wide (And Deep)

Our subconscious pattern-matches across domains. The imagination finds connections between disparate fields and topics and these are often more generative than diving deep.

Care Without Caring

Wild ideas appear when outcomes don't matter. To dream, you have to let go of reality. Focus on the feeling rather than strategy.

Creative Metabolism

Bodies digest food for energy, minds digest media for inspiration, souls digest experience for meaning. Food, sleep, friendship, adventure, play - you can't start a fire without fuel.

Choose Your Entropy

Your creative output is a proxy for the quality of your information diet. Doom-scrolling produces very different outcomes than watching cartoons, reading philosophy or a walk outside.

⟐⟐⟐

◯ The Mirror

Self-Awareness & Discipline

Get Out of the Way

Trying to 'direct' yourself to a particular idea will ensure you fall short of your potential. You can't make yourself have good ideas, it just happens.

No Shortcuts

When we reflect on our progress and compare it to the path of others, it's tempting to try and 'catch up'... but shortcuts mean copying someone else's path. You can't get where you're going using their rules.

Price Subjectivity In

Perception of your own ideas is inherently unstable, you are a bad judge of their quality. Working with subjectivity beats pretending that we have objectivity. That means long-running feedback cycles with yourself and trusted peers.

Emotional Instruments

A quickening pulse, flutter of excitement or flood of dread is a signal from your subconscious on how to tackle the creative terrain. These feeling tones are your primary navigation in the mind.

Play Time Like Music

You can't "plan" to improvise an on instrument, but you can practice. The same is true for thinking. Trying to control ideas proves impossible, but intuition for melody and rhythm develop regardless. Playing oneself like an instrument reveals unpredictable yet inevitable compositions.

Document Just Enough

Capture ideas by creating a cue that leads you back to the feeling. Trying to capture ambiguous ideas using words is like dissecting them, you lose appreciation for the whole. An idea note is a tuning fork for imaginative frequencies.

◯◯◯

◆ The Void

Uncertainty & Humility

Analysis Destroys

Creativity evaporates under logical scrutiny like dreams upon waking. Imagination does not "make sense", its can only be experienced.

Embrace Creative Bruising

Creativity uses your entire being - every emotion, every sensation... and full-contact thinking leads to bruises. Comfortable ideation rarely reaches the good stuff.

Intervene by Doing Less

Broken dynamics cannot be fixed from within. The elements of creativity must be cultivated, not summoned on demand. Step outside the process, and return with new perspective.

Intend to Surprise

To find interesting ideas, surprising yourself is mandatory. You cannot be open to possibility and have the end in mind. Innovation emerges from giving up on specific results.

Chaos Accounting

Any creative process, of any size, is always on the brink of degeneration into argument. Carefully injecting, managing and metabolising chaos is the key. You should always have a sense of how far the current thread is from 'disintegration'.

Optionality Homeostasis

Whenever there are too many options, you have too few constraints. When the options dry up, you have too many. Make the smallest possible adjustment to constraints to restore the balance of options (which is almost always 3-7).

Rekindling

Use Gendlin's Focusing to test which ideas resonate emotionally, then carefully kindle the sparks back to a flame. Remember, maintaining fire beats restarting from ashes.

Living Handoffs

Ideas naturally expire without regular discussion; any attempt to "capture them" will kill them. Sharing ideas happens through gradual invitation into a live headspace, through mind-melding.

Bend Without Breaking

Shooting down an idea flippantly is a dangerous game. Once the bit flips on an idea, it rarely flips back. Critique like a surgeon, not demolition crew.

◆◆◆

And, the big one:

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Creative bandwidth = Energy × Trust × Communication × Alignment × Momentum. Zero anywhere zeros everything. Small improvements in weakest areas beat perfecting your strengths.

I think I could write about this topic forever, but that's enough for now. More to come soon...