Hello, and welcome to the Creativity Flywheel course!

In this video course, we're going to learn about an important framework that's going to take the stress out of creating for you. It's going to power the flow of information into and then out of your PKM system, and it's going to allow you to get more out of your notes and ideas.

I'm going to teach you the principles that you need to build a system for creativity because if you understand how the system works, then it can make the act of creating effortless — regardless of whether you think of yourself as creative or not.

Personally, for a long time, I believed that I was not creative. I thought creativity was a genetic trait that I just wasn't born with. But then I read Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, and I realized that creativity is actually a system, and all systems have three parts:

1. Inputs - what you feed into the system
2. Process - the way that you work with the input
3. Output - what comes out of the system.

When you create something new (output), you're simply connecting (process) dots (input) in a way that hasn't been done before.

So, instead of beating myself up about my lack of creative output, I realized that the way to be more creative was simply to collect better dots. So I started reading books more consistently, picking books that spoke to a pain point or problem that I was facing.

This one change instantly made creating 10x easier.

But then I started thinking about the process. Now, at the time, I was responsible for a blog post and podcast episode every week, and a new productivity video course every single month, and I had been doing that consistently for quite a while. And as I was thinking, I was trying to figure out, "How was I able to create so consistently?" As I thought about the different pieces of my creative systems and how they all fit together, I came up with this model that I call the Creativity Flywheel.

In this video course, we're gonna dig into how that flywheel works so that you can make more of your notes and ideas and you can make the act of creating effortless in your life.

There are five steps to the creativity flywheel:

1. Capture
2. Curate
3. Cultivate
4. Connect
5. Create

We're going to dive into each one in its own separate video. But at the beginning here, I want to just help you understand briefly how it all fits together. So, let's go over the different parts of the creativity flywheel, and I'll show you briefly how they work.

The first step of the Creativity Flywheel is to Capture what resonates. This is similar to the first step in GTD (or Getting Things Done) so there's a good chance you're doing this already, but I want to encourage you not to just capture something because it has your attention. Instead, capture the things that you believe will be useful.

That leads to the second step, which is to Curate what's useful. One common PKM mistake that I see people make is they set up all these automated ways to dump everything they capture into their connected note-taking app. And the problem with this is that the more low-quality notes and ideas that you add to your personal knowledge management system, the lower the quality of the output that you get from it. Garbage in, garbage out.

But what makes collecting quality ideas tricky is that you can't judge the quality of an idea the moment that you have it. So you need to think of yourself as the curator in the museum of your mind. Now, what makes museum collections valuable is not just what's there, but also what's not there, and the things that don't make the cut end up increasing the value of the ones that do.

The third step is to Cultivate your ideas by giving them the right environment that they need to grow. When you have an idea, you're not really sure what it is yet. It's kind of like a seed, and you need to plant that seed in the ground and give it the essential ingredients that it needs to develop, like sunlight, water, time, etc., before you know what it really is. And your PKM system is a lot like a greenhouse for your ideas. Once you plant them, you need to let them mature before you start to see the fruit of those ideas.

One of the worst things you can do for an idea is to try to make something out of it before it has time to ripen. When you have a system for developing your ideas, though, you don't feel that pressure to force an idea before it's ready. You know you've got more to choose from because you know that the flywheel is just going to continue to spin.

The fourth step is to Connect your ideas and give them context. In his classic book, How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler talks about four different levels of reading. I want to talk about real briefly here because they illustrate an important point. The first is elementary reading, which is where you consider what this sentence says. The second is inspectional reading, where you consider what this book is about. The third is analytical reading, where you start to ask organized questions to grok the author's arguments. The fourth one is syntopical reading, and this is where you consider those arguments in the context of the other books that you've read.

Now, no book contains the total answer to what you're looking for. And no one idea is the penultimate version of that idea. Ideas and notes gain exponentially more value when they are connected and they're given this broader context. Now, there are lots of different ways that you can do that. However, the most important piece here is the last step, which is to create something new from those component pieces.

I like to think of ideas as individual mental Lego blocks. The pieces may not look all that unique or special, but when you combine them together, you end up creating something new and original. The truth is, everything's a remix. The trick is to have good pieces to work with.

Once you have those pieces, it's up to you to make something new out of them. Now a word of caution here. One of the biggest mistakes people make with PKM is that they collect a bunch of things, but they don't ever make anything new out of them. I firmly believe that your mind is like a water wheel: Information has to flow in (that's the Capture phase), and the information must flow out (that's the Create phase).

If there's no flow (there's no output), the flywheel stops turning.

Now, the output does not need to be a blog post, YouTube video, podcast episode, or something public like that. Sometimes, the output is something that no one will ever see. But that output then creates the seeds for the things that are important, the things that are going to resonate, that you're going to capture. So that's what keeps the flywheel spinning.

So that is the Creativity Flywheel in a nutshell. As we go through this course, I want you to be thinking about the apps and tools that you're going to use at each step.

You probably already have a system in place, so you likely won't need to make big, major, sweeping changes. But you will need to get clear about what job you've hired each app to do so that you can use them intentionally to get and keep your Creativity Flywheel spinning.