10 Ideas a Day
Write 10 bad ideas every day to build an unstoppable creativity muscle.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 98%
10 Ideas a Day is Altucher's signature daily practice: write ten ideas every day, and expect most of them to be bad. Creativity, he argues, is a muscle that atrophies as fast as leg muscles after two weeks off your feet. Because you can't write 3,650 good ideas a year, you aim for bad ones — the point is to exercise the muscle, not to strike gold. He never even rereads the lists. When he later needs genuine creativity, it comes easily because the muscle is strong, and directed lists ('10 ideas for LinkedIn') have opened doors to consulting and speaking gigs.
Origin
Altucher calls this the single most important thing in his book 'Skip the Line.' He uses a waiter's pad because it fits his pocket, and credits the practice with launching his hedge-fund career and his relationships with LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Quora.
Core principles
- 01Creativity is a muscle that atrophies without daily use.
- 02The goal is exercising the muscle, not producing a good idea.
- 03Aim for bad ideas — you can't produce thousands of good ones, and the pressure kills the habit.
- 04A strong idea muscle makes real creativity easy when you genuinely need it.
How to run it
- 1
Get a pocket pad
Use a small, easy pad — Altucher uses a waiter's pad because it fits in a pocket and suits quick bullet points.
- 2
Write 10 ideas daily
Every day, write ten ideas on any topic. Consistency is the entire point.
- 3
Let them be bad
Deliberately aim for bad ideas. Trying to write only good ideas creates pressure that breaks the habit and defeats the muscle-building purpose.
Pro tip Altucher never even looks at the ideas again — the writing itself is the workout.
- 4
Point some lists at real targets
Occasionally direct a list — 10 ideas for Google, 10 for LinkedIn — and send it to someone there.
Pro tip Sending his best ideas cold is how Altucher became a consultant and speaker at LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Quora.
In the wild
With no Harvard or Goldman Sachs pedigree, a broke Altucher wrote software and cold-emailed famous investors ideas drawn from his 10-ideas-a-day practice.
→ Some investors liked his ideas and put money into his brand-new fund, launching a whole investing career.
Altucher wrote lists like '10 ideas for LinkedIn' and '10 ideas for Google' and sent them to people at those companies, despite being a nobody at the time.
→ He became a consultant and paid speaker at LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Quora.
Common mistakes
Trying to write only good ideas
Demanding good ideas creates pressure that kills the daily habit; the exercise depends on permitting bad ideas.
Treating the list as the deliverable
The value is in exercising the creativity muscle, not the ideas themselves — Altucher never rereads them.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone who wants reliable on-demand creativity for business, writing, or problem-solving.
Not ideal for
People seeking a one-off brainstorm rather than a long-term daily discipline.
From the transcript
“creativity is a muscle... same with the creativity muscle so every day I take a waiter pad... and I write 10 bad ideas”
“if there's anything in that book that's important that's the most important thing is writing 10 ideas a day”
From the episode
James Altucher: Debunking the 10,000-Hour Myth, How to Master Any Skill
James Altucher