Question Everything: 5x5 idea warm-up: grateful, proud, forgive

As I've previously reported, the Idea Habit has been by far the most fun, successful, and useful goal that I've implemented this month. Thinking back on it, I went through 3 phases.

A fun phase where I was just experimenting with it. I look back and the ideas were just terrible. However, it was relatively easy to get ideas out into Evernote because I wasn't pressuring myself.
A frustration phase. I started subconsciously thinking, "my idea topic and my ideas need to be really good," especially because I started sharing my ideas with other people. Thus it would sometimes take up to an hour to accomplish my habit- and most of it was just trying to come up with a good theme for my ideas. And stress just makes my ideas worse. What a waste.
A self-improvement phase. Out of my frustration I started thinking about the process of generating ideas so that I could make myself more efficient. I started deliberately exposing myself to inspirations, reading about creativity, and trying out new environments for creativity (various cafes, nature walks, in a push-up position, etc).

Throughout phase 3, I also started thinking about how to expand my Idea Habit to become more than just a daily exercise. Idea topics such as "How Google Glasses might affect biological laboratory research" and "top 10 animals I'd like to ride" certainly are interesting, but have rather narrow application. While the Idea Habit is worthy in its own right, I feel it has the potential to affect everything else I want to accomplish.

Thus I have just today introduced "5x5 Idea Warm-Up Time" to start off my daily idea sessions. I come up with 5 ideas for 5 idea lists, for a total of 25. These are important topics that are worth thinking about every day, but because I am thinking about them everyday, I don't pressure myself to make them really good ideas. At the same time, it just gets my idea juices flowing so I don't get stuck for an hour just trying to come up with a topic.

1) 5 things I'm grateful for (i.e. brainstorming things I can do for other people)

2) 5 things I'm proud of (i.e. what are my strengths and how can I maintain them)

3) 5 things I forgive myself for (i.e. what are my weaknesses and how can get better)

4) 5 new things I can try today that I've never done before

5) 5 things I can do today to make myself a better scientist and thinker

Again, if these ideas suck, so what? It just takes 1 good idea out of 100 to make a difference in my life. I'm going to limit this 10-15 minutes per session so that I can move on to my main idea list of the day.

Separately, I've also started coming up with 5 ideas for experiments while I'm doing my morning routine of writing out all the experiments I need to do in a day. Usually I end up doing one of them that I otherwise don't "need" to do.

Starting off with a "lite" version of whatever you need to accomplish is generally applicable. It's pretty much a combination of two eternal motivation pearls: 1) tell yourself you're going to just start your task, dedicating just 5 minutes to it and 2) break your task up into smaller chunks. Aren't feeling social but you're going to an important social event? Just start talking to someone, accept that it's going to be awkward, and give it your best shot. Feeling tired but you are committed to working out everyday? Just start doing your routine with lighter weights. Don't waste time stretching- it's just procrastination and there isn't any evidence of benefit. Just start, just start, just start.

In completely unrelated news, I donated blood this week.