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💡 The Big Idea: Make More of Your Ideas with a Mind Map

Great ideas are constructed, not discovered.

And the process for developing my ideas usually includes mind mapping.

I estimate that each hour I spend mind mapping beforehand saves me 2 hours when I start writing.

In this newsletter, I want to share how mind mapping can help you sharpen your creative saw.

Why Mind Mapping Works

Your brain is always making connections.

Unfortunately, those connections are not always linear in nature. Sometimes inspiration comes when connecting ideas across two totally different domains.

Let me give you an example from Leonard da Vinci in the 1500s.

Leonardo was standing by a well, tossing pebbles into the water. It just so happened that one stone he tossed hit the water at the exact moment a church sounded nearby. As he was watching the ripples created by the stones spread out until they disappeared, he made the connection that sound waves worked the same way.

These kinds of connections are always exciting to me. That’s why I personally keep all my notes in one Obsidian vault so I can connect things across multiple domains.

But the principle here is that thought doesn’t always follow a linear path (A → B → C → D). Sometimes you need to be able to jump from A to D.

And your brain is actually very good at that, using a process called radiant thinking.

With radiant thinking, you can have more than one connection for each thought, idea, or concept (or note). It’s how your brain naturally works.

So while I was taught how to outline my papers in school, I’ve fully embraced mind mapping as a way of developing my ideas now.

This allows me to see all sides of the problem at once. My brain is free to explore connections from all angles (not just top-down like in an outline), which helps me be more creative.

For me, this is the process of sharpening my mental saw. It makes the actual work of creating much easier when I sit down to write.

How to Make a Mind Map

Making a mind map is fairly simple:

• First, put your main idea or subject in the middle
• Next, draw lines out from your main idea with related or supporting ideas
• Continue adding details where appropriate as you think of them under the appropriate branches of your mind map
• Connect related ideas across your mind map by drawing a line between them

The beautiful thing about mind mapping is that you don’t need to know where things are going to go when you start. Simply follow the process listed above and let your brain wander. Just keep adding things in the appropriate place as you think of them, and your mind map (as well as your thinking around the concept you’re exploring) will begin to evolve right before your eyes.

Here’s an example mind map from an article I wrote for The Sweet Setup a while back on the Best Mind Mapping app:

When I started, I put the name of the article in the middle. Then I started creating branches for the major section (i.e. what is mind mapping, the criteria we used to pick our favorite, all of the major features we liked in the winner, etc.). As I found additional details I wanted to include, I just added them to the mind map. Then, when I was done brainstorming, I sat down to write the article, and I already had an idea about how everything would tie together.

That’s why I said at the top that each hour I spend mind mapping saves me 2 hours when I sit down to write.

The process of mind mapping helps me to solidify my thinking on the topic so that by the time I sit down at the keyboard, the words just flow.

Mind Mapping & The Creativity Flywheel

Over the years, I’ve deconstructed my creative process and created a framework I call The Creativity Flywheel. I wrote about this in a previous newsletter (click here if you want to dive deeper), but briefly, there are 5 stages (or 5 C’s) of The Creativity Flywheel:

1. Capture what has your attention
2. Curate and keep what’s useful
3. Cultivate your ideas by giving them ideal conditions to develop
4. Connect your ideas to others in your collection
5. Create something new from the component pieces

Here’s a visual representation of The Creativity Flywheel:

For me, mind mapping fits firmly in the Cultivate phase of The Creativity Flywheel. Mind mapping is a great way to develop your ideas and help you find out what you really have to work with.

😎 Something Cool: Obsidian Tasks 7.8 (& 7.9!)

The pace of development for the Obsidian Tasks plugin is truly astounding. It seems like there is a new version every couple of weeks lately.

And this time around, version 7.8 adds a feature that fixes one of the nagging issues I’ve had with this plugin around repeating tasks. (EDIT: the day before this newsletter goes out, the team actually released version 7.9 with some additional minor recurring task improvements as well — a mere 6 days later.)

In the past, when you completed a repeating task, the old task was marked as complete, and a new task was added right above the original. This led to some incredibly messy-looking notes. For example, here’s my Chronological Bible Reading Plan so far this year:

But now, with version 7.8, you can actually set what you want to happen to the original task upon completion! Just use the 🏁 emoji and keep or delete (based on whether you want to retain the original task).

Doesn’t look like it’s built into the Tasks modal window yet (you’ll have to add it by hand for now), but it does work with Auto-suggest.

I have a feeling I’ll be using 🏁 delete quite a bit.

📚 Book Notes: Mind Map Mastery by Tony Buzan

Tony Buzan is often the one credited with the idea of radiant thinking and is considered by many to be the godfather of mind mapping. So, if you want to dive deeper into the topic, why not go to the source? And a while back, he wrote a book called Mind Map Mastery that covers just about everything you’d ever care to know about mind maps.

It’s a little sensational at times, but it’s a pretty great resource. And if you want to listen to my review first, we covered this one a while back for Bookworm.

If you want to download my mind map book notes for Mind Map Mastery (see what I did there? 😉), click here.

— Mike

P.S. Quick update on the done-for-you Pro Vault: I just finished the writing for the tutorials! The next step is to seed this to some beta testers and let them try to break it for a couple of weeks 😂 But it's complete enough that last week I recorded a roughly 20-minute visual tour as an unlisted YouTube video if you want to see it in action.