Making Your Ideas Bloom: Cultivating Your Mind Garden

I recently created a video talking about the concept of a mind garden and how I dedicated a small amount of time each week to improving mine.

Why?

Information, articles, ideas, quotes, brainstorming…all great stuff, but like a real garden, if you let it go untended for too long it becomes a jungle.

A little bit of tending here and there goes a long ways and helps you create connections, improve your sources, and so much more.

Mind Gardening

The video I mentioned in the intro is about 5 minutes long and can be seen here:

If you’re looking for exactly what I do and what I recommend, go ahead and check it out - I think it’s worth the watch 😀

What I’d like to talk about today is more the reasoning behind it and why you should take a few of the actions.

Think of this email as the overview and “big picture” and watch the video for the details and action items.

Recommended

You Get What You Grow

Extending the mind garden analogy a bit - you get what you grow.

Presumably you’re already gathering articles and information in some fashion - I mentioned Readwise Reader above as a great way to help you have a single repository for this, but there are many tools so use the one that works best for you.

However, just ingesting or saving tons of articles won’t help you make connections, solve problems, or really do anything.

The next step is to actually review your gathered information from time to time and decide what’s worth investing your time into, what can be set aside, and what might need to be deleted.

Like any practice, consistency is key. Doing this on a regular basis will give you much better returns than the occasional review. Also, this should be something you enjoy doing and look forward to - if you don’t like checking out the info you’ve saved and adding some notes or connections to the best info you come across, it might not be the best habit to try and build right now.

A helpful tip: getting used to the idea of treating your saved content like a stream and not a bucket can be a great way to not turn a helpful habit into a swamp of FOMO.

Lastly, just like a real garden, sometimes you have to do some weeding. Your content gathering results in a living, changing thing. Over time your interests may change, an author may change their topics or stance, so don’t be afraid to remove a source from your mind garden. You can always add it back later.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas on how you can improve your relationship with the content you come across and use to improve your life, business, creativity, and learning.

Extra Extra

• Speaking of mind gardens, I first came across the term from Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Great article that covers some additional angles and ideas here.

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