If you’d told me back in 2009 that by 2024 I’d have written over a thousand blog posts for this website, I’d have told you you were crazy. (I’ve published 827; the rest are drafts, but still.) I’d have thought I would have run out of ideas years ago.

Then the other day, I was flipping through Jerry Weinberg‘s book “Weinberg on Writing – The Fieldstone Method“. I remembered what Gabriele Rico, author of the best-selling “Writing the Natural Way“, called “One of the best lines of Weinberg on Writing, and one every writer should commit to memory.”

“I may run out of ideas, but I’ll never run out of new combinations of ideas.”
—Jerry Weinberg, “Weinberg on Writing – The Fieldstone Method“, Chapter 16, Putting Your Subconscious to Work

Jerry’s book uses frequent analogies to building fieldstone walls.

Every stone-built wall is unique because you build it from a unique combination and arrangement of stones. Even using the same set of stones, you can build thousands of unique walls by stacking them differently.

The same is true of creating unique combinations of ideas. As Jerry said about his famous book The Psychology of Computer Programming, written over 50 years ago and still in print: “…it’s merely a putting-together of computers and people, two topics that had previously been considered separate”.

My posts, like conferences, are containers for ideas. Yes, I do have new ideas regularly! Yet, on review, many of my posts combine core ideas about meeting design, facilitation, facilitating change, consulting, personal effectiveness, the meeting industry, leadership, and marketing in novel ways.

“I may run out of ideas, but I’ll never run out of new combinations of ideas.”

It works for me!

Attribution: Stone Wall GIF by JC Property Professionals via GIPHY