Read a lot and follow your curiosity. You should never stop investing in yourself.To have good ideas, we need to consume good ideas too. Your formal education isn’t the end. If anything, it’s the beginning.

Never Stop Learning

Getting stuck is normal. It’s our reaction to it that really matters.Step aside, find other projects and actively ignore the thing that got you stuck. By doing this, your subconscious creates space for ideas to grow.

Don’t Fight the Stuck

It transforms us into “perfectionists”. And that is a form of safety.We all have ideas and we should practice not rejecting them before giving them a chance.

The Fear of Rejection

"Don’t try to paint the Mona Lisa on round one. Lower your standards. Make a test product, a temporary sketch or a rough draft."

It's about pushing boundaries, failing miserably, and having the strength to stand back up again.

True Confidence

<html><body><div><div><h1>3. Beware the Resistance</h1>All creatives — be they entrepreneurs, writers or artists — know the fear of giving shape to ideas. Once we bring something into the world, it’s forever naked to rejection and criticism by millions of angry eyes.Sometimes, after publishing an article, I am so afraid that I will actively avoid all comments and email correspondence…This fear is the creative’s greatest enemy. In the <a>The War of Art</a>, Steven Pressfield gives the fear a name.He calls it Resistance.Asimov knows the Resistance too —<blockquote>The ordinary writer is bound to be assailed by insecurities as he writes. Is the sentence he has just created a sensible one? Is it expressed as well as it might be? Would it sound better if it were written differently? The ordinary writer is therefore always revising, always chopping and changing, always trying on different ways of expressing himself, and, for all I know, never being entirely satisfied.</blockquote>Self-doubt is the mind-killer.I am a relentless editor. I’ve probably tweaked and re-tweaked this article a dozen times. It still looks like shit. But I must stop now, or I’ll never publish at all.The fear of rejection makes us into “perfectionists”. But that perfectionism is just a shell. We draw into it when times are hard. It gives us safety… The safety of a lie.The truth is, all of us have ideas. Little seeds of creativity waft in through the windowsills of the mind. The difference between Asimov and the rest of us is that we reject our ideas before giving them a chance.After all, never having ideas means never having to fail.</div></div></body></html>

To match the number of novels, letters, essays and other scribblings Asimov produced in his lifetime, you would have to write a full-length novel every two weeks for 25 years. Why was Asimov able to...

Isaac Asimov on How to Never Run Out of Ideas Again

Never Stop Learning

Don’t Fight the Stuck

The Fear of Rejection

CHARLES CHU

True Confidence

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