"The idea muscle is like any other muscle: if you don’t use it, you lose it. Leg muscles atrophy after just two weeks of non-use. You actually need physical therapy to walk again. And yet, how often do we really use our creativity? Come up with ideas. Write down ten ideas a day. Does that mean you use them? No! It’s just practice. Throw them out. But I guarantee within six months you will be an idea machine." — James Altucher, a hedge fund manager, entrepreneur, bestselling author, venture capitalist and podcaster, founder or cofounder of more than 20 companies (and 17 times he's failed at company-building, he says), publisher of eleven books, and frequent contributor to popular publications.
After more than a decade I may not be an idea machine, but I write things, inelegant, overwritten, nonsensical this-or-thats perhaps, but about my favorite subjects (M 'n' m) who I love powerfully – so powerfully I can selfishly harness the energy to force into exercise this supposed idea/creativity muscle. I do, in fact, fear it will atrophy. I fear tight spaces too, and panic attacks, and many things, but my worry that everything can wither isn't unreasonable; technically everything does, my loved ones, your loved ones, even institutions and ideas themselves go through summers and winters, if history is evidence. But maybe that's where God comes in. And life is good and I'm grateful, especially for M 'n' m.
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