Chris Brogan Told Me to Write This: Ten Guilty Pleasures

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. Breakup tips courtesy of Paul Simon.

100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write. Blogging advice from Chris Brogan.

Some time ago, Chris Brogan was sitting on a plane on his way home from San Francisco.

As a social media thought leader, Chris is always being asked how he thinks of things to blog about (which of course doesn't make sense to a person who is always brimming with new ideas).

So in this spontaneous moment, on the plane, he decided to brainstorm 100 ideas. And he wrote his own post, 100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write About. 

Now if you know me, you know I can't turn down a creative challenge. On my favorite TV show, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the best part was when each team would get an unrecognizable object and they would have to very quickly come up with as many uses for it as they could imagine. It is a game I still play. It works well at garage sales, especially when mechanic's and gardener's tools are present. 

So here it is, Chris. A little late: my post, based completely on one of your suggested titles: Ten Guilty Pleasures.

Ten Guilty Pleasures

Guilty pleasures are greatly underrated.

They are what feed your soul—what bring out the best in you. Sometimes they make you think about things in different ways. Help you turn old ideas into something new. And that has to be a good thing when you run businesses like you and I do.

Here are mine:

1. Shaking snow globes. When I turn a snow globe upside down and set up upright again, it takes me somewhere else, away from my office desk. It breaks up my stale thinking. Gives me a 30-second vacation, wondering about all the places in the world where it might be snowing right now.

1. Making notes with a fountain pen. This one is hard to explain. There is just something about the physical motion of writing in longhand, with wide sweeps and ink that splats out, that gets my creative juices flowing. Expensive? Yes. Messy? Definitely. Freeing? Absolutely.

1. Turning the sound off a movie and voicing new lines of dialogue for the characters. This one is good for laughing yourself sick in a very short amount of time. Bob takes one character and I take the other one in a scene. Like those silly contests where scenes are passed from one writer to another and the plot changes constantly.

1. Walking in the forest. We have a mini-woods in the back of our house. When I am stuck with an idea that isn't moving, I get my boots on and step outside. Something about the stillness—except for the squawk of the bluejays—the wet, dank smell of the ferns, the immenseness of the bright green Douglas fir branches, that centers me and forces me to follow my own thoughts.

1. Wasting time on the 'link trail.' Okay, I am an information junkie. But you never know when that next link on a website will lead you to the answer to a burning question you've had. Or raise a new question. Either one is good.

1. Reading the classics. You know, that rich, descriptive text you find in books like Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables? I justify this pleasure by telling myself that if I want to come up with sales copy that appeals to all my customers' senses, especially that all-important visual one, what could be more inspiring than reading a few chapters from a 19^th century novel?

1. Watching people and making up lives for them. This is the reality version of #3. I sit on a bench in a park or at table in a restaurant and invent lives for the strangers I see. They will have names and professions and families and problems. But I make it all up.

1. Painting with water colors. Julia Cameron, author of the phenomenal The Artist's Way, calls it taking an "artist's date." I'm working on not making it a guilty pleasure. And I don't have the goal of painting a masterpiece. Just dabbling. Creating. Celebrating my creative self.

1. Telling stories. What could be more fun than creating people and making them talk? Except maybe messing around with puppets. If I am telling my stories outside of marketing and sales copy for my clients, I feel guilty. I'm working on that one, too.

1. Writing my Morning Pages. Another one of Julia Cameron's brilliant ideas, this one isn't technically a guilty pleasure anymore. It's the one thing I do every morning: three pages of longhand writing strictly off the top of my head. It's my way of removing all the clutter from my brain so the good ideas can poke through.

All right. There you go. My 10 Guilty Pleasures. Do you have some of your own? Do they ever help you with clarity? Creativity? Sanity?

Oh, and if you blog, I challenge you to visit Chris's 100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write post and write one of your own.