Notice What Repeats
On average, sea turtles lay 110 eggs in a single clutch and average between two and eight clutches per season. After roughly 60 days under the warm sand, the baby sea turtles hatch and dig their way up onto the surface of the beach, where they make a run for their lives towards the ocean. Three out of every 10 hatchlings never make it to the sea, and even when they do escape the beaks of seabirds, they remain at the bottom of the food chain until they reach a certain size. In the end, only 1 in 1000 sea turtles grows to adulthood.
Ideas are like the hatchlings; only a handful will be of note, and only the most resilient survive.
In a previous issue, you learned to create what’s missing from the world. That’s because you want to find the intersection of what's unique to you and valuable to others. You want to find your one-in-a-thousand idea. And a good place to start is to notice what repeats. Which of your ideas keep coming up and won’t leave you alone? Sift through your psyche for the ideas that are core to who you are. Those are the ones that will survive the predation of opposition and skepticism and competition. Just as in the animal kingdom, your fittest ideas are the ones that survive. Your core ideas will reveal themselves over and over again — persisting. You won’t be able to avoid them.
Not only does history erase all that is mediocre, time filters out everything that’s not truly important to you. If an idea isn’t aligned with your personal philosophy or deeply rooted in your psyche, you are bound to forget about it, given enough time. Notice the ideas that repeat, and focus on those.
Look through your notes, listen to what people say about you, observe what your mind automatically defaults to when daydreaming, or find patterns in what you enjoy talking about. Like the motifs of a fairytale, your recurring ideas are hints that reveal the fabric of how you think and who you are. The ideas that repeat color your view of the world.
If an idea keeps appearing to you, let it be a sign of the world reflecting your identity back at you. If you find a pattern in your insights, that's a strong signal of what you need to write about. Just like how familiar landmarks reappear on a well-trodden path in the forest, these core ideas serve as affirmations of your deepest convictions and trusty constants amid the constant flux of your journey.
