Adam Grant Does Boomerang Inspiration and He Doesn’t Even Know It jordanmarsh6, August 27, 2021April 5, 2023 I was listening to the “How I Built This” podcast from Guy Raz where he was interviewing Adam Grant. Adam Grant is an interesting dude. He has written a number of New York Times bestselling books, he works as a professor at the Wharton Business School, he hosts a podcast called WorkLife dedicated to helping people find meaning in work, and he passed up on investing in Warby Parker which turned out to become a multi-million-dollar company. So that last one wasn’t all that impressive, but he strikes me as a guy willing to make fun of his failures (I’ve heard him laugh about missing out on Warby Parker multiple times) while also clearly being someone capable of producing material that people really care about. Guy Raz in the “How I Built This” podcast was asking Adam how he keeps track of all his ideas and how he decides which ones to pursue. Adam responded with the textbook definition of “boomerang inspiration.” I mean the funny thing is, the “textbook” is a post on this blog. I don’t really know if it qualifies as a textbook, but that post does introduce the idea. Essentially, I’ve called boomerang inspiration the intentional awareness of ideas that excite us over and over again. They “come back” to us kind of like a boomerang. Read it here. Adam said that he carries a small notebook in his back pocket. Whenever he gets a new idea that excites him, he writes it down. He then said he transfers that idea to a word document on his computer. From time to time, he reviews that word document to remember the ideas that have come to him. He said that some ideas were so bad he had a hard time reading them back and realizing that he once thought they were good ones; however, the ones he really liked seemed to excite him the same way they did when he first thought about it. This was a good indication of the things he thought would really fulfill him. That is a robust way of tracking the things our heart desires! I have had so many different ideas come to me that I completely forget about a week or two later. I’ve gotten excited about a new kind of air freshener in a car, a basketball that could keep track of how many times you made or missed a shot, and, if you’re a regular reader of mine, the notorious fart freshener. Every time I remembered these ideas I couldn’t really understand why they ever got me so excited. But I am aware of the ideas that consistently seem like good ones to me, and that gives me a sense of confidence that they might actually be good too. I think we would do well to follow Adam Grant’s example: keep track of ideas that get you excited, and then review those ideas from time to time. If one of them consistently sticks out to you, then run with it! Self Improvement