💡Stealing Great Ideas
Hey friends, it’s Samuel! 👋
Or Sam if we know each other.
Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share bite-sized doses of marketing goodness for marketing people.
Today’s topic — collecting great ideas.
In the journey to become a complete digital marketer, we need to learn the art of collecting great ideas.
The reason for reverse engineering is simple:
Uncover what makes great things great, and repeat it for yourself.
I’ve come up with a simple framework for reverse engineering:
Collecting
Identifying
Recreating
Personalising
Today’s topic will be focused on COLLECTING.
📁 Building a collecting habit
I have a friend who copies great ad copy into her notebook.
My friend Matt Barker would save his inspiration into his Notion board.
I screenshot and save every great ad, LinkedIn post or tweet that I like.
If you already highlight, save or bookmark stuff on the web, this isn’t groundbreaking to you.
Now let’s use it to inspire our next big idea.
Why do we need to collecting habit?
Finding ideas that resonate with you
Saving the ideas when inspiration strikes
Turning great ideas into replicable recipes
When you start collecting ideas it is all about finding ideas that resonate for you.
Why?
Inspiration strikes at the moment the ideas appear in your head.
That’s often when you see something brilliant or majestic:
Watching a great movie
Reading a great book
Coming across a brilliant ad campaign
Reading a great tweet/LinkedIn post
When we don’t collect ideas at the moment of inspiration, these ideas leave our head in a train of thought.
In a blink it’s gone.
Don’t let ideas fade into the nothingness.
Get into a habit of capturing.
How do we capture great ideas?
We need a capturing tool.
The thing I’ve learned from the GTD method is that we all need an INBOX.
What’s an inbox?
A place to dump all our great ideas.
A physical inbox would literally be just that — an inbox. 📨
A digital inbox could be a notes app or something like Notion.
Whatever it is, use it religiously.
This is now your basis for capturing.
Next week — identifying ingredients of a great idea.
🔍 CASE STUDIES
Here are great examples of collections:
Want to start an analog version?
Austin Kleon has a cool one in his journal:
📝 SUMMARY — Stealing Great Ideas
The big idea:
Start a collection of great ideas.
Why?
Inspiration strikes the moment the ideas appear in your head.
Build a habit of collecting great ideas:
Have a capture tool (physical or digital)
Save ideas into these tools
Build a habit of capturing
Hope that this helps!
Hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter. Subscribe or share it.
Til next week,
Samuel
☕️ The Good Stuff
Pull yourself a shot and grab a mug. Let’s dive in to this weeks’ good stuff.
📺 YOUTUBE — There’s plenty of tutorials on how to use Notion. Here’s a great one from Jeff Su.
🐦 TWEET — A brilliant tweet by David Perell that also illustrates that to be great at producing ideas, we need to collect and connect them.
🖊 Quote of the Week
We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. - Steve Jobs
🪃 Throwback
Catch up with last week’s newsletter.
