Consider the condition of your mind.

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Is your mind like a wilderness? A wild mind is untamed, lacks structure, and has no intentional spaces for thinking, with no intentional systems or practices for growth.

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Is your mind like a fortress? A fortified mind is walled off, closed to new ideas. You miss out on different perspectives when overly focused on being right or proving others wrong.

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Is your mind like a city? An urbanized mind is busy, vibrant, and interconnected but chaotic. It struggles with an obsession for more at the cost of internal peace and is too distracted to attend to those around it. The urban mind is full of noise, bustling with energy, and often at odds with itself.
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Is your mind like a garden? The cultivated mind is intentionally kept and capable of incredible growth, with appropriate walls to curate thoughts and inputs. The cultivated mind weeds out chaos, practices deep presence, and nurtures the healthiest ideas.
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Seek to cultivate your mind like a garden.

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Develop a love for the process of improving your thinking, feeding your curiosity, and nurturing a passion for learning.

Reflect on your inputs. Inputs are anything you allow into your mind. Social media streams, books, conversations, and what you choose to imagine are examples of inputs.

Tend to your thoughts with care.

Learn to sit in the silence and beauty of your inner garden.

When your mind is like a garden, you can enjoy being alone in silence without the need to be productive.

Set goals to fix your mind on pursuing what is most good, true, and beautiful.

Tending to the garden of your mind ensures you will experience rich seasons of harvest.

Produce fruit with your thoughts by taking action on your values.

Carefully consider practicing a process of coming up with more and better ideas by creating structures in the garden of your mind to come up with new ideas.

Show up each day to enjoy working on the garden of your mind.

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Quotes

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"Your perceptual structures are bounded by the goals you have at hand...Tune your perceptions to your motivated goals...Without goals, there is no perception...Take a complex thing, represent it with an icon, and represent the icon with a word."

Jordan Peterson, in his video Coping with Complexity​

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"Regardless of the means you choose for capturing ideas, if you don't take seriously the thoughts that cross your mind, no one else will have the chance to either. You must learn to love your mind, to nurture it by feeding it quality ideas and thoughts, and give it time to prove what it can do."

Scott Berkun, The Dance of the Possible​
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Questions

What do you allow into your mind that is increasing chaos? What helpful wall can you create to limit or eliminate this input?

What can you do today to treat your mind like a garden?

What questions are you asking yourself regularly?

Do you have a latticework of tools for thought to help your thoughts grow over time?
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Endnote

I plan to share more of my learning, writing, and thinking process in the future, and I'm heavily exploring how to improve my process for writing, thinking more clearly, and generating more ideas.If you have an intentional practice for how you come up with ideas, write, or create whatever it is you create, I would love to hear about it.
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Live wisely,

Josh

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