Ideas, Ideas, Ideas
I recently read James Altucher’s book Choose Yourself, an entrepreneurship/creativity guide to becoming your own boss and owning your own work. Altucher says you “should only write about things you either love or hate,” and his blog is a representation of that. He’s the opinionated voice behind NYC Is Dead Forever… Here’s Why, which I wrote about last spring, and is a chess master, hedge fund manager, author and self-described failure. The book was a good, short read.
The book also revolutionized how I think about ideas.
I’ve always thought of ideas as something that strike you in the moment, and if you’re lucky you jot them down, revisit them later, and turn them into something special. Altucher turns that on its head – here’s what he said in a blog post that inspired the book:
“Many people need idea therapy. Not so that they can come up with great ideas right this second (although maybe you will) but so that people can come up with ideas when they need them: when their car is stuck, when their house blows up, when they are fired from their job, when their spouse betrays them, when they go bankrupt or lose a big customer, or lose a client, or go out of business, or get sick.”
Essentially, you need to force yourself to come up with ideas all the time, not just when you’re feeling particularly spontaneous.
“Take a waiter’s pad. Go to a local café. Maybe read an inspirational book for ten to twenty minutes. Then start writing down ideas.”
Choose Yourself was that inspirational book. Last week, feeling particularly uninspired and like I would never write anything again, I decided to spend 30 uninterrupted minutes with a notepad, jotting down ideas. I set myself a target of 25 ideas, to make my brain sweat:
“If I say, ‘write down ten ideas for books you can write’ I bet you can easily write down four or five. I can write down four or five right now. But at six it starts to get hard. ‘Hmmm,’ you think, ‘what else can I come up with?’ This is when the brain is sweating… Somewhere around idea number six, your brain starts to sweat. This means it’s building up. Break through this. Come up with ten ideas.”
It was challenging. 30 minutes is a long time, and 25 ideas is a lot. My brain was sweating. But it was also reassuring. I could come up with 25 ideas if needed. And that was just one half hour. What if I did that every week, or every day?
Out of those 25 ideas, two are things I’m going to put some time into this coming week. Not bad for a 30 minute exercise!
New Shoes and GI Distress
Running websites love to call bathroom emergencies “GI (gastro-intestinal) Distress.” I guess it’s a code way of saying “I was going to sh*t myself.” Regardless of the name, anyone who’s run for an extended period of time knows the feeling.
To avoid those type of emergencies, I’ve always employed a double bathroom rule: I go to the bathroom once when I wake up, and then once more before I head out. This helps avoid situations where you think you’re fine, only to get that kick to your stomach halfway through a run, far from any toilet. Give the double bathroom a shot if you haven’t.
Anyway, this morning I didn’t do that. Whoops. I went out for a 10-mile run to Prospect Park and was deep into the park’s 3.5-mile loop when I felt the first cramping signs of “distress.” And each time I passed a bathroom that was either padlocked or without toilet paper, that distress increased. It’s an awful, desperate feeling. I think I’d rather have an injury than run through stomach pain, because it’s all I can think about when it happens. It consumes the run.
Always go twice.
Also, I got new running shoes two weeks ago and have been breaking them in since, to mixed results. Usually I love the first few runs in a new pair, because of how springy they typically feel compared to the worn-down pair I had been using, but this time around the shoes just didn’t feel right. I switched from Asics GT-2000s, which I’d been using for a few years, to Saucony Guides, the shoes I started running in back in 2016 and a great marathon/distance shoe. In the interim, the style of the Guides had changed a lot and I wasn’t confident that my size would be the same, but they were on sale and my three pair-per-year appetite gets expensive.
For a normal person, these might be tiny, insignificant issues. Anne, for example, can buy the wrong size running shoes and be perfectly happy running on them for months. But I get inside my own head, and every little change or potential for wiggle room spells doom for my running. I’m a bit of a nut about it.
This morning’s run, on top of being an all-time bathroom disaster, was the first time that the new shoes felt good. And they felt really good. So good that I hardly noticed them at all, which is exactly the role you want your running shoes to play. Maybe I was too distracted by other things to notice imaginary discomfort with the shoes. Maybe breaking them in actually did away with real discomfort. Who knows.
Runners are a strange bunch. But in a sport with really only one piece of “equipment,” it pays to get the shoes just right.