Couple stories I would share here: LOSING AN ENTIRE INBOX Once while doing a work rotation in Hong Kong, I was RDP'ing back into my NYC machine and I accident

Couple stories I would share here: LOSING AN ENTIRE INBOX Once while doing a work rotation in Hong Kong, I was RDP'ing back into my NYC machine and I accidentally deleted ALL of the email in my inbox. At first, I was crushed and felt awful. I quickly moved past this thinking that if anyone really needed me for something, they would reach out again. If I lost anything crucial, I could probably go ask someone else. This was very freeing! Tim Ferriss has a similar exercise where he recommends acting as if you have $0 cash/credit card access etc every so often. This helps you a. move that state from "unknown" to "known" b. help you see that many situations seem bad only b/c you've never lived through them. IDEAS IN THE ROLODEX I was watching a documentary about the early days of Mad Magazine. They mentioned that one of the writers had a Rolodex of notecards with random ideas he had stored and organized. If they were stuck coming up with an idea, he would spin through the rolodex till he found one that worked. I've always liked this story as it's a form of decoupling (asynchronous?) idea inception from idea need. It requires more "caching" than trying to have ideas on demand with the trade off that you are not coming up with the ideas under pressure. While ideas sometimes get generated faster in the immediate need timeframe, I would imagine that also sometimes cuts the scope of those ideas. The decoupled model allows your idea generation boundaries to be much larger.