3 Stages Idea Jon Acuff

@jonacuff | jonacuff.
com
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THE 3 STAGES OF EVERY AWESOME IDEA
Ive run three half-marathons in my life.

The first one was one of the worst days Ive ever experienced.
You know how people say you hit a wall when you run? I hit
mine at mile one. It took forever, despite the energy jellybeans I
consumed. My knees hurt, my head hurt, my pride even hurt as I
watched marathon runners lap me.
When I finished, I was too weak to drive home. I finally made it
back and sat in the bathtub for two hours. The water had long gone
cold, the temperature falling as I lay there like a dead man. My wife
made me crawl out of the tub because she had to run some errands
and was certain I would drown in my weakened state.
Why was it such a miserable experience? I ran it out of spite.
One day my wife and her friend were talking about half-marathons.
I jokingly said that I could run one, and they laughed at me. I took
their laughter as a bit of a challenge and decided that I was going to
run a half-marathon.
So I ran about four times, bought new shoes, and proceeded to die
for approximately 13.1 miles in Alpharetta, Georgia. That was my
first half-marathon. The second two were very differenttwo of the
best days of my life. Why?
I trained. I followed a program. I ran regularly. I ate better. I focused
on my strength and conditioning. I was prepared. I felt great during
the races and was able to go out to dinner to celebrate. It was awesome.
All because I had trained.
Now its easy to laugh at my first race. Its foolish to think you could
wake up one morning and just run a half-marathon without any
@JONACUFF | J O N AC U F F.CO M
serious preparation. But the truth is, thats how most of us treat our
dreams. With little or no preparation, we sit down with a blank piece
of paper or an open laptop and say, Go!
We wait there for a few frustrating minutes or hours, then give up.
Our dream is dumb. It will never work. We dont have any good ideas,
so we put the dream back on the shelf for another day or another year.
But what if working on your dream wasnt that complicated? What
if you didnt have to fear the blank piece of paper? What if big dreams
were built from a thousand small ideas?
I believe they are.
Though we long for a eureka momentfor a lightning strike of
unexpected brilliancethats not how dreams really work. The
Wright brothers started with a kite, not a plane. Our ideas need to
grow and change and mature.
And if thats going to happen, we need to change the way we think
about ideas.
In this guide, were going to discuss and dissect three very simple
stages every successful idea goes through. I didnt create these. I just
observed them during thousands of hours of experimentation. From
massive companies like The Home Depot to small businesses and
individuals with dreams, Ive worked on these same three steps.
Call it the creative process or the idea habitthe name doesnt
matter a whole lot. The results do, and if you want to get results with
your ideas, this is the path to take.
The 3 Stages of Ideas

Having spent twelve years in corporate America,
I have lost my taste for complicated acronyms,
so we re going to keep this one simple. The
three stages well discuss are Imagine, Capture,
and Execute.
That forms ICE, which you should be able
to remember because in high school I shaved
stripes into my eyebrow so that I could look
more like Vanilla Ice. I was incredibly street as
a freshman. So if you ever forget this acronym,
please just recall me being mercilessly mocked in
a high school cafeteria.
STAGE 1: IMAGINE
To talk about Imagine, we need a new definition of creativity. And its
my favorite definition. Dorothy Parker said it in the 1960s: Creativity
is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
Your mind has to be wild. You have to fill it with all kinds of differ-
ent topics from all kinds of different sourceshow a restaurant menu
is written, something your kid said, something a boss at work men-
tioned in the hall, a book you read, a song that inspires youand you
fill it, fill it, fill it.
You create this rich, wild amount of ideas in your head. And you
have the ability to look and see the relationships between them, to
see how theyre connected in a fresh way somebody else hasnt seen
before. That, for me, is the definition of creativity.
Knowing that, how do you work on Imagine? How do you deliber-
ately create and generate more ideas for your dream?
Here are some ways I think you can focus on the Imagine step.
MAKE THINKING TIME VALUABLE TIME

Be honeston your calendar next week, do you have a block of time
simply marked thinking? In between all your meetings and your
other commitments, do you have scheduled thinking time?
Most of us dont have that set aside because we dont think of
thinking time as productive time. You cant put thinking time in an
Excel spreadsheet. You cant easily measure the return on investment
of thinking.
Gordon MacKenzie wrote about that in his brilliant book Orbiting

the Giant Hairball. He compared creativity to a milk production
ceremony. Most people look at a cow chewing grass and think hes
not doing much. They dont see that thats a productive part of the
cow making milk. They just look at the milk pumping. How many
gallons did he produce? They dont look at the grass the cow chewed
over and over and over again, and they dont see how thats valuable.
But the chewing is critical to the milk. In the same way, thinking
time matters for us.
Thats why we have such great ideas in the shower.
Have you ever had a shower idea? Do you know why that happens?
It happens because thats the only time youre quiet enough for
great ideas to sneak up on you.
I wrote a blog post about that once. And you know what the
comments were? People said, We need to get shower markers, or,
You need to come up with a system to write those down, which
wasnt what I had in mind.
The point of that post was to get people to look in their week and
create a shower moment. To ask the question, How do I create a
shower moment in my week?
Maybe its a commute for you. On your commute, thats when the
idea sneaks up on you. But our best ideas have to sneak up on us
because we usually dont give them time to come. So, during your
week, make thinking time valuable time. Respect thinking time. Itll
change the way you view generating ideas.
CREATE YOUR OWN THINK TANK

I do this in a couple of different ways. First, if Im going to write
about something on Wednesday morning, I start thinking about it a
little on Tuesday night.
Or Ill say, Tomorrow, as I drive to work, Im going to think about
these two things. Or, Im going to think about these three things
all day, to just let them rumble in the back of my mind and see what
I get. (If it sounds weird, imagine a time when you were worrying
about something. Did it seem like that nagging thought stayed with
you all day? Of course it did. Were just going to use the minds ability
to let something simmer in a positive way.)
I learned this lesson from my friends dad, whos a really successful
lawyer. He was worried that his kids wouldnt grow up understanding
what it meant to work hard because hed been so successful. They
didnt have to struggle the way he had as a kid.
So he made them get horrible summer jobs to teach them les-
sons. My friends job was to work on an assembly line performing
just one action for eight hours a day. He said boredom was the
worst part. Thats when he realized he needed to start planning his
thinking time.
So, maybe at 2 p.m. hed start thinking about tennis. For the next
hour, he would just think about tennis while doing his routine stuff
on the assembly line. Thats what got him through the day.
I think we need to do the same thing sometimes. If you really care
about these ideas, give them room in your head. Its like throwing
out a crab trap for ideas. Some nights, you pull it up, and there are
amazing ideas in there. Sometimes, theres nothing to show for your
thinking, and thats okay. But if you give some time and space to the
amazing machine called your brain, youll start to generate ideas.
Thats how you create your own think tank.
BE AWESOME LATER
Have you ever had an idea you thought was good? You liked the idea,
and it seemed reasonable, maybe even a little amazing. But then,
when you went to write it down, you couldnt. Before your pen even
hit paper, you stopped yourself and self-edited. The idea never saw
the light of day.
Thats the great temptation in the Imagine stage of ideas.
Dont confuse idea generation with idea critique. This isnt the time
for you to critique your ideas. You shouldnt ask these ideas to be
good right now. Were focused on productivity. Were focused on
quantity, not quality.
Quality will come later. Thats one of the principles I use all the
time with my writing. When I do a first draft, I say, Later Jon will
be amazing. Today Jon will just be productive. And I give Today Jon
the freedom to just write. He can be awesome later. So when youre
in Imagine mode, dont try to analyze your ideas.
Suspend the part of you that wants to critique ideas, because youll
frighten them from coming out.
GET A BILLION DOLLARS OF RESEARCH FOR FREE

How do you do that? You deconstruct advertising. I have a back-
ground in advertising. And I can tell you that when an ad is put
together, you spend weeks, if not months, with focus groups. You
study words and colors. You spend tens of thousands of dollars, if

not hundreds of thousands of dollars, figuring out what to say in an
ad, and then you share it with the world.
So I can tell you that its possible to deconstruct a finished ad.
Its essentially a process of reverse engineering. You find somebody
who is speaking to your audience and say, Why do they use those
words? Why do they use that picture? What do they know that I
dont know? What idea is hidden in this? And I used to do that all
the time.
An example is the IT campaign eBay did a few years ago that
focused on spelling out the word IT using a variety of products you
can get on eBay.
A few decades ago, there were ten companies that made ten
products. Theyd say, Heres what were selling this year. Come
buy it. But now, because of the Internet and globalization, the
consumer has the power. So, eBay doesnt say, Here are 10,000
things we have. They say, Well be your it. Whatever your it is,
come and get it here. Youre in control, not us. Come tell us what
you want us to be.
Volkswagen did that too. During the eBay campaign, a Volkswagen
ad said their station wagon offered 70 cubic feet of you. They
didnt show a kayak. They didnt show a dog. They didnt show
any particular activity, because they just wanted you to go find it
with them.
I recognized the technique in the two ads and used it when I
did a project for a client who was planning a marriage seminar.
I told them, If you try to tell consumers to come have this type
of marriageand make them learn your vocabularytheyre not

going to come to the event. You have to invite them into the it . . .
into that conversation.
Some of the questions you can ask yourself:
Whos currently speaking to my dreams audience?
Whos advertising to them?
What companies are doing ads similar to what Im working on?
For example, I can say with some degree of confidence that Chris
Guillebeau, Tim Ferriss, and Scott Stratten are doing the kind of
work Id like to do. Instead of arrogantly thinking Im the only one
out there doing this, I can study those guys as the experts they are.
Dont think big companies are the only people you can learn from.
Everybody can teach you something if youre deliberate about doing
your research.
RECOGNIZE THE BEST SOURCE OF IDEAS

Whats the best source? Your own life. We have such a hard time
seeing how were interesting, or that what matters to us could matter
to others. The talent we have the hardest time recognizing is our
own. And so, sometimes we dont realize that our own lives are great
sources of ideas.
That happened to me while I was preparing this guide. I asked
my wife, Hey, what should I tell people about generating ideas?
She responded, Whats the process you use? I hadnt even thought
about that.
You see this all the time in the business world. Someone will
interview a successful entrepreneur and ask, Why did you start
this company? Shell reply, Well, I had a problem and thought that
maybe I wasnt the only one who had that same issue.
She was right. If its exciting to you, chances are its exciting to a
whole lot of other people. If its frustrating to you, chances are other
people are frustrated by it too.
To start seeing your own ideas as valuable ideas, ask yourself some
of these questions:
What specific things made me frustrated last week?
What am I excited about right now?
If I had to write a blog about my life, what would the first post be?
Can I search my own life for an idea?
MAKE SMALL INVESTMENTS IN BIG IDEAS

Generating ideas costs a lot less than you think. It really does. But
most of us dont have an idea budget. Most of us dont have a line
item or a cash envelope for idea generation.
We dont think about investing in ideas that way, do we? To help
me, I bought The New Yorker on DVD. You can get 4,100 issues of
The New Yorker printed on DVD for $11. Thats half a million pages
of content and ideas, searchable and indexable, for $11. You can get
that same DVD used for $4.
A lot of people ask me where I get my ideas. Its a great question,
because sometimes we tend to think they just show up magically.
Like an adorable dove named Cornelius drops them off.
Ideas dont just come to me. I feed them. I try to curate them. I try
to collect them. And thats what I want you to do too.
Imagine what you could do if you set a $25 idea budget every
month. Where would you invest that? If the dream really matters to
you, then its worth $25 a month, isnt it? Thats when youll start to
really see some change.
CONCLUSION
Now, if Im you, the pushback Id give to this particular section is,
Well, that whole imagine thing probably works for a writer, but my
dream is different. I want to be a nurse. I think thats a completely
fair challenge.
So lets imagine your passion is raw food. A friend of mines mom had
an amazing experience during cancer treatment with eating raw food.
And now, thats her passion. If she came to me and said, Hey, how do I
generate ideas? How do I imagine, if raw food is my passion? Where do
I go for research? Well, clearly, the first place you go is online.
I Googled the phrase raw food and got 145 million results. That
feels like an okay place to start. Id read other blogs about raw food.
Id plug into communities about raw food. Id watch YouTube videos
on the subject.
Once I got tired of virtual research, Id go to Barnes & Noble and
look at magazines about raw food. Id look at Mens Health. How do
they describe a raw food recipe? Id look at cookbooks. Id look at all
these different sources.
But lets pretend that maybe you live somewhere where you dont
have a Barnes & Noble or you dont have the Internet. You dont
even have a library. Where would you go? Youd go to one of the best
places for research: real people.
Id talk to my friends and ask them, Hey, when you go to a

restaurant, how is it different at Chipotlewhere you build it piece
by pieceversus ordering a whole meal at a traditional restaurant?
What do you think about when I say raw food? What adjectives on
the menu change the way you order? You know, have you ever looked
at a menu, seen the phrase rock crab, and thought, Oh, rock crab. This
is fresh. That crab was on a rock at some point in his life, you know.
Probably like an hour ago. You could gather information and ideas
from something as simple as talking to people about their dinner.
The point is, the world is rich with knowledge if well just take the
time to pay attention.
STAGE 2: CAPTURE
Why is the Capture stage so critical? Well, this hit me a few years
ago. I had a bunch of different ideas, but my wife kept throwing them
away because they looked a lot like trash. Which is understandable
because they were trash, literally. I would write down random ideas
on Post-it notes and the backs of envelopes. She would scoop them
all up in a pile and throw them away.
Eventually I got tired of telling my wife she was throwing away great
American novels. I started doing two things: idea folders and notebooks.
The idea folders came from a guy named Jim, whom I met during
my years at The Home Depot. Up until that moment, I thought I
was really into ideas. I thought I was Jon Creativity and knew
everything there was to know about idea generation. I was wrong.
One afternoon, I saw Jim rip a photo out of a magazine and put it into
a plastic sheet within a binder. That seemed like strange behavior. I asked
him about it and he said, Well, maybe one day well shoot a product like
that. This is a really neat angle, so Im just going to put it in there.
Over the years, Jim had built up a custom library of ideas that he
used in client meeting after client meeting.
That same week, I started to keep my own binders. I had eighteen
different binders based on different topics: pharmaceutical, medical,
automotive. I did that because my passion at the time was advertising.
Every time I had an idea, Id put it in that folder so I could go back
to it later. That was one of the things that helped me start to capture
all of my ideas.
Next, I wrote things down in notebooks. I personally chose Moleskines

because they make your idea automatically feel 33% cooler. I dont
know if you have a Moleskine notebook. But, if you do, you feel like
youre French, and youre very much like Hemingway in that moment.
Whenever I had an idea, I would grab my notebook and scribble it
down. That was a good start, but I realized a problem. It only works
if you only have one notebook, ever.
The minute you have two notebooks, you start to lose your ideas.
The minute you have ten, the ideas are gone. You havent physically
lost them. But if you cant find an idea, its gone.
So, despite my love for these notebooks, I had a bit of a dilemma.
Once I had a stack of them, I couldnt go, Okay, whats that idea I
had about ski boats? and easily flip through one of them to find it.
You cant index a stack of notebooks. You cant readily search them.
So I didnt physically lose ideas, but I did lose them.
Thats when I started to use different apps on my iPhone to serve as
my capture method.
The most popular program is called Evernote. Its free, which is a
great price. You can certainly upgrade if you feel like you need the
enhanced version. Evernote also connects to all my other devices.
When I capture something in my iPhone, it goes to my laptop.
I can take a photo. I can take a voice recording. I can write down a
note. And its a little like The Jetsons because, when you take a photo
of a white board where youve written all your ideas, it indexes every
one of those words. So, later, you can type in red and it will pull up
that photo with the word red highlighted. Same thing if you take a
photo of a whole page of notes.
Bottom line: I dont know what your capture method is going to be.
Im not sure how youll build it, but it needs to at least include these
three characteristics:
MAKE IT PERSONAL
It has to be custom-designed to the way you work. Theres no such
thing as a one-size-fits-all capture system. If youre a high-detail
person, make yours about the detail. If youre a visual person, figure
out a way to make your method visual.
MAKE IT EASY
If your system is not easy to use, itll become a hiding place. During
moments when youre afraid to move forward on an idea, youll just
spin your wheels in the Capture part of the process as a way to avoid
doing what you dont want to do. Youll overcomplicate it if youre
not careful. Thats the great temptation as you capture ideas. Dont
make a ridiculously complex system.
MAKE IT CONSISTENT
You know which diet doesnt work? The fifteen diets you tried in one
summer. You know which diet does work? The one you stayed faithful
to. Its the same with idea capture. Certainly, dont lock yourself into
something that doesnt work in the name of consistency though. Be
flexible, yet consistent.
Capturing is an extremely important stage of the idea process.
Dont overlook it.
STAGE 3: EXECUTE
This is the most difficult stage, but if you really want to change the
world, you have to execute. So how do I do that? Whats my process
with execution?
Let me walk you through what I do in a normal day of writing.
Now, writing is the thing I need to execute, but yours may be
different. Your execution list might include returning client calls
or fulfilling orders or painting. Execution can come in a thousand
different shapes and sizes.
The first thing I do is gather all the resources I need for whatever
Im going to write that day. I dont want resource gathering to impact
writing time. I try my best to keep that sacred. So Ill find all the
pieces I need, gather any research online, and get it all together.
Then, Ill find an empty office in the Dave Ramsey building, a spot
where I cant be easily found and people dont come ask questions. Im
a people person, but when its time for me to write, I need to focus.
Next, Ill turn everything off. Ill turn Twitter off, and Ill turn
the Internet off. I dont have the willpower to have those open and
talking to me. Like, the little envelope that says I have a new email is
intoxicating to me. Who sent it? What is it about? That envelope is
one of my greatest enemies. So Ill turn off Outlook.
The reality is Im not a brain surgeon, but maybe you are. You
might need to be accessible twenty-four hours a day. But I can wait
an hour to have email access. Rarely have I come back after two hours
and realized, Oh my gosh, seven people died because I was offline this
afternoon. I had a sense that people were dying while I was executing
my dream. But man, I thought itd be, like, four at the most.
So I turn everything off, and I pick music like Explosions in the Sky
or other instrumental music. I cant listen to lyrics while Im trying
to write, because I hear those words instead of my own. But I need
some music. I always wear headphones, too, because for some reason
the act of putting on a pair of headphones helps me get into the zone.
Then I set a timer on my iPhone for an hour or two. And while
that countdown timer is going, I execute. There are six principles I
usually apply to any given moment in which I have to execute.
MAKE WAR AGAINST DISTRACTIONS

Fight Shiny Object Syndrome. Fight it with everything youve got.
Distractions are going to come. Make war against them, and dont
get surprised by the same distraction twice. If it happens, come up
with a plan to eliminate it.
Dont be surprised if you keep looking at your email when its
open. If you know that about yourself, then close your email. You
might even try a software program like Antisocial. After you buy
this program, you set a timer and it blocks you from Twitter and
Facebook. It blocks you from a free service! My friend says he cant
write without it. So figure out your willpower threshold and fight
those distractions.
CREATE A PLACE TO EXECUTE

We get this with other parts of our life, dont we? Place matters.
Theres such a thing as geographical momentum.
You go to the beach and you suddenly want to eat a shaved ice or
go swimming. Thats probably not going to be the best place for you
to execute. If I get off a plane in Pensacola, Florida, Im smelling
coconut, not ideas being executed.
So you need to create a place to execute your ideas. Where is it
going to be? It could be Starbucks for you. Maybe you need energy
and laughter and people around. For me, I need to be quiet. I need
my space to be like my fortress of solitude.
Once you get good at it, your place can go mobile. My place is now
in airplanes. I put the headphones on. I put the music on. I dont have
Internet. Then, its time to execute.
CREATE CLEAR DISTINCTIONS

When you start to execute, stage oneImaginemight try to come
back. Like an adorable puppy, brainstorming gets loud and playful:
Hey, I got some new ideas for you. You love new ideas, right?
Sure, but that time is done. This is execute time. Youll still come
up with amazing ideas and think, If I dont get them right this second,
Ill lose them forever. No, no, noyou wont. Youll lose the ones
youre executing.
So make that clear distinction. This is execution time. The time to
imagine is behind youfor right now, anyway. Let it go.
CREATE FAKE DEADLINES

I had a friend who wanted to be a public speaker, and he said, Im
really good at preparing a speech when people invite me to come
speak in places. But other times, I dont do anything.
I said, Well then, you need to start a video blog where, every
Friday, you give a three-minute speech. Lets create a fake deadline.
Im motivated by deadlines. You probably are, too. You know how
this workshow productive are you two days before vacation? You
knock it out. You clear your calendar, or you clear your inbox. You
get it done because that vacation is coming.
I create fake deadlines all the time. And if that doesnt work, add an
audience. The reason Im able to write my blog Stuff Christians Like
so often is that I have a lot of people holding me accountable for that.
The reality is, if I dont do it that day, nobody dies. Its not that big of
a deal. But I dont want to let them down. Im trying to serve them
with this dream.
So create a fake deadline. And, when possible, add an audience for
accountability.
BUILD THE RIGHT SIZE BOWL

The Parkinsons Law principle says, Work expands so as to fill the
time available for its completion.
Heres how I see that: I love to write. Its my dream, and we all love
to work on our dreams. Youll do it for ten hours if you give yourself
ten hours. But guess what? For me, whether I give myself four hours
or two hours, what I accomplish is pretty similar. That is, the amount
of work I get done tends to shrink and stretch given how much time
I give myself. If I know I only have an hour to write, I tend to hustle
and write quickly. If I know I have three hours, I tend to take my time
and slowly go about things. The end result is surprisingly similar,
with roughly the same amount of words produced.
So I have to build the right size bowl because Ill grow to the size
of the bowl. Figure out the right bowl size for you. Set the right time
limit so you dont waste time.
FOCUS ON THE RIGHT BEACH

I went down to Panama City Beach to speak at a conference once,
and I finished in the morning. I had six hours of free time that after-
noon, and I was on the 18th floor of the hotel, overlooking the beau-
tiful water. I thought, Youve got to go to the beach when youre here.
Youve got to at least go for a little while.
But then I remembered, Im going to the beach with my family in a
month. And if I really want to be plugged in with them, I dont want
to be writing my blogs then. So Im going to focus on that beach.
Im going to ignore the one thats right in front of me and execute.
That afternoon, I wrote six blog posts because I looked at the long-
term beach.
ICE is simple. Its just three steps: Imagine, Capture, and Execute.
Youre not just crossing things off a to-do list when you focus
on using ICE. Youre writing a new story using the power of ideas,
imagination, and planning.
Make sure its a story youll be proud to read someday.
Beyond ICE
TIPS AND TRICKS FOR TURNING
IDEAS INTO ACTIONS
As you walk through the ICE method, you
will undoubtedly find yourself needing to make
some decisions. Which projects do you focus on?
Which ideas do you execute? Which things do
you ignore?
To help you along the way, Ive included a few
tips that have helped me learn how to make better
decisions in the last few years.
THREE WAYS TO MAKE SURE

ALL YOUR GOALS FAIL
Everyone always talks about accomplishing your goals.
But how do you make sure they fail? How do you make sure you
never finish a single goal you have all year?
Here are three ways:
PLAN THEM IN A VACUUM

Make sure when you plan a goal, you do it in complete isolation.
Dont look at your calendar or any other projects youll have going
on in the same season you plan to accomplish a new goal. For
instance, one time I ran a race. In the months leading up to it, I
didnt take into account that Id be training for a half-marathon
during the same weeks that I would be traveling for speaking gigs,
moving with my family, writing the hardest book Ive ever written,
and touring to promote that book. Accomplishing the training goal
I came up with would require me having zero other activities going
on in my life.
BELIEVE IN PERFECT OR NOT AT ALL

If you cant do a particular step of your plan perfectly, dont do it at
all. When Id come home late on a Saturday night after being out of
town for forty-eight hours, Id tell myself, Im supposed to run nine
miles tomorrow, but I cant be out of town and then tell my kids, Ive
missed you, but Daddy needs to run for two hours. So instead, I wont
run at all. It was either the full nine miles or nothing at all, as if
running a fast three miles would not have helped.
DONT MIX GRACE WITH GOALS

Hold yourself to the same results you planned from the beginning
of the project, regardless of if everything leading up to the project
changed. Make sure you dont give yourself the grace to change a
goal or tweak a goal or even quit a goal if a more important one
arises. My goal with the half-marathon was to run it in 2:10. Thats
a ten-minute-mile pace and very possible if I had trained intensely
for thirteen weeks instead of running casually for seven weeks.
Regardless, I wasnt going to give my goal any grace. My plan was to
go out, run the first four miles at about a 9:30 pace, completely tire
myself out for the next three miles, then throw up at mile seven.
Hopefully, youll learn from my mistakes. Hopefully, as you work
on your next goal you wont do any of these things and will instead
plan ahead, quit believing in all or nothing, and give yourself copious
amounts of grace.
ONE QUESTION TO ASK AS YOU EXECUTE

One night we had an influential musician over to our house for
dinner. Wed never met before but had bumped into each other on
Twitter a few times and have a lot of mutual friends.
After he went home and my wife and I were getting ready to go
to bed, I wrote a tweet that said, Great day with @__________, an
artist who inspires me to be a better me. Then I asked myself a three-
letter word that has the power to radically improve every blog and
tweet you ever write:
Why?
Why was I tweeting that? Why was I writing and sharing that
thought with people? What was my real motive behind that simple
sentence?
The truth is, I wrote that tweet so people who follow me would
see I had dinner with someone cool and would then by nature of
association think I was cool too. That was an ego tweet. Even worse,
it was dressed up as if it were a compliment to that musician. In
addition to hiding my true meaning behind the tweet, I also got to
pretend that I was being kind to him at the same time. But thats not
true, because if I wanted to thank him for inspiring me, I could have
sent him a direct message or a text message.
And I wasnt tweeting his name so that other people would be
exposed to his music and discover him. If that had been my motive,
there was no reason to mention that we had spent some time together.
I could have added a link to his site and said, I love the new album
by @_______. If you havent heard it, you need to!
I didnt send the tweet that night because I took the time to ask
why. I stopped to ask what my real motive was. There have been
other times when, despite brilliant books like Start with Why by
Simon Sinek and a history of ego-driven mistakes, Ive just tweeted
or just blogged without asking why.
Want to improve your blog posts? Want to improve your tweets?
Want to improve your conversations with neighbors? Want to
improve everything you decide to execute?
Take the time to ask yourself why. You might not like the answer,
but why always pays dividends if well take the time to listen.
DRAW SOME MONSTERS

When you see someone who has acquired some degree of success,
its easy to assume their passion found them, like a pure white
unicorn unexpectedly showing up in their backyard. They were
having coffee in the kitchen and just looked out the window over
the sink to see a dazzling white horse with a horn standing by
the birdbath.
In wonder, they stepped outside. As they approached, it gently
moved away, turning back to make sure they were following. Then,
like a surreal Lassie, it led them deep into the forest. The magical
creature eventually led them to a beautiful treasure chest. And thats
how Stephen King became an author.
Thats not really how it happens. I wish it did. But nobody
stumbles onto their dream like that. I used to constantly try to have
touchdown moments. Have you ever seen a movie where a football
falls at a fans feet? The fan picks it up and inexplicably throws a 50-
yard touchdown. The coach sees it, they immediately put a uniform
on the fan, and he wins the game. Hooray!
Finding out what youre meant to do is rarely like that. A lot of
times, finding out what youre supposed to do comes at the end of a
lot of failure. In fact, sometimes you have to draw monsters.
Thats how things happened for Maurice Sendak. He was the author
of Where the Wild Things Are, which became a treasured childhood
book and a popular movie. Maurice is known all over the world for
his book. Whats interesting is that it was accidental.
When he initially sat down to create Where the Wild Things Are, he
planned to populate the island in the story with horses. Max, the lit-
tle boy who runs away from home to the island of the monsters, was
originally supposed to go play with horses. The only problem was,
try as he might, Sendak couldnt draw horses. They just wouldnt
come out right. So as a last resort, he drew monsters.
It turned out he was awesome at drawing monsters. He drew
monsters like few people on the planet. He was designed to draw
monsters.
Can you imagine the book being as popular or celebrated if Max
had romped about the jungle with a bunch of horses? Can you
imagine how boring the movie would have been with common-
looking ponies?
Thankfully, Maurice failed so that he could succeed. He bombed
his way to finding his thing.
And you might too. The only question is, when it comes to chasing
your dream . . .
Are you ready to draw some monsters?
FUZZY GOALS
How do you take a goal from fuzzy and undefined to crystal clear
and actionable?
Heres how I handled one of my goals. I wanted to have a more grate-
ful heart one year. I think being ungrateful and entitled would be an
amazing way to wreck the fun opportunities Im getting right now. I

wanted to be focused and deliberate about having a grateful heart, but
could a goal get fuzzier than that? Where do you even begin on that?
The first thing I did was ask myself, What actions would a person
with a grateful heart be known for? Then I came up with a list:
1. Theyd tell people thank you.

2. Theyd send out handwritten thank-you notes.
3. Theyd slow down during the middle of a busy day to make
sure they hadnt taken anything for granted due to the push
and pace of life.
Then I took that list, and I applied the items to my own life. For
instance, lets look at number 3. I run around like crazy when Im
traveling to a speaking engagement. Im nervous and excited and
focused on delivering an amazing speech. It would be really easy for
me to completely rush by the hard work that my team is doing to set
up the conferences I get to speak at. How can I make sure I have a
grateful heart in real-life situations like that?
Next, I took those real-life scenarios and turned them into actions.
For instance, one of my goals this year is to empty my thank-you
note box. It has 100 cards in it. The best part is that I dont have to
write 100 fake cards just to meet my goal. In a year, I will run into
way more than 100 people to whom I need to write a sincere, honest
thank-you card.
Next December, instead of looking at my incredibly fuzzy goal
of having a grateful heart, I can look at a hopefully empty box of
thank-you cards and know that I hit one of the metrics that mattered
to me.
Is walking from fuzzy goal to real action easy to do? Not always,
but I promise that the clearer your goals are, the more likely you are
to actually finish them.
DONT OVERKILL
When I was a kid, my grandmother had a simple rule about taking
us out to dinner: Shed pay for your meal if you ate the whole thing.
What I learned early on was that my eyes were often bigger than my
stomach. Especially at cafeteria-style restaurants where I could grab
plates of food as I walked down the aisle. Spaghetti? Yes. Hamburger?
Yes. Bread sticks? Yes. Cake? Yes. Pie? Yes. I grabbed and grabbed
and grabbed until I could barely carry my tray. It was too much, and
trying to eat everything usually made me sick.
The same thing happens with our goals. We brainstorm crazy lists
of resolutions and try to accomplish all of them. We dont come
up with a collection of five great goals. Instead, we come up with a
collection of fifty good goals. Then they all clamor for our attention
at once, and we drop all of them.
This year, instead of listing twenty-five things youre going to knock
out, I challenge you to be a surgeon with your list of resolutions.
Cut and edit and remove again and again. As you look at your short
list of goals, you might even feel lazy. I did this week as I worked on
my next set of goals. One of my goals is to read one nonfiction book
a month. Thats only twelve books! Last year I started at least three
times that amount. But how many did I actually finish? Probably less
than twelve.
I know it sounds crazy, but the voice of laziness is going to pipe
up as you get ready to execute. Fear hates the idea of you finishing
something that matters to you, and fear will use any distraction to
knock you off course. Ignore that voice. Having only a few goals
doesnt make you lazy. It makes you focused.
And if you only remember one thing from this idea, remember
this: The worst thing that happens if you start with too few goals
is that, midyear, you realize you completed them all and you get to
add more.
The worst thing that happens if you start with too many goals is
you get overwhelmed and quit working on all of them.
MY FAVORITE WAY TO MAKE DECISIONS

One day, my wife and I bought a house in Franklin, Tennessee. There
were other houses that were available that were bigger. There were
other houses available that were newer. But we chose a smaller, older
house. Why?
Because our kids can walk to school, and weve started to make
decisions based on the lore of their childhood. Weve started
to ask ourselves, What story do we want our kids to tell when
theyre grown up? Which of these decisions will add to the lore of
their childhood?
And when we were looking for houses, we realized our kids will
never say in their 30s, When we were growing up, we had amazing
closets in our house. The closet space was just so ample. Nobody
says that.
Our kids will, however, say, We could walk to school. So we made
a lore decision. We thought about the story theyll tell.
Today, tomorrow, next week, you will face countless decisions.
You will have a million choices before you. And in some of those
situations youll have the chance to make a lore decision, to pick
the option that will create a story youre proud of, youre excited
about, and youll remember. When you have that chance, make
that choice.

3 Stages Idea Jon Acuff

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Ive run three half-marathons in my life.

The 3 Stages of Ideas

MAKE THINKING TIME VALUABLE TIME

Gordon MacKenzie wrote about that in his brilliant book Orbiting

CREATE YOUR OWN THINK TANK

GET A BILLION DOLLARS OF RESEARCH FOR FREE

study words and colors. You spend tens of thousands of dollars, if

of marriageand make them learn your vocabularytheyre not

RECOGNIZE THE BEST SOURCE OF IDEAS

MAKE SMALL INVESTMENTS IN BIG IDEAS

Id talk to my friends and ask them, Hey, when you go to a

Next, I wrote things down in notebooks. I personally chose Moleskines

MAKE WAR AGAINST DISTRACTIONS

CREATE A PLACE TO EXECUTE

CREATE CLEAR DISTINCTIONS

CREATE FAKE DEADLINES

BUILD THE RIGHT SIZE BOWL

FOCUS ON THE RIGHT BEACH

THREE WAYS TO MAKE SURE

PLAN THEM IN A VACUUM

BELIEVE IN PERFECT OR NOT AT ALL

DONT MIX GRACE WITH GOALS

ONE QUESTION TO ASK AS YOU EXECUTE

DRAW SOME MONSTERS

amazing way to wreck the fun opportunities Im getting right now. I

1. Theyd tell people thank you.

MY FAVORITE WAY TO MAKE DECISIONS

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