# Ep. 243 — in the Weeds!

## Metadata
- Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]]
- Full Title: Ep. 243 — in the Weeds!
- Category: #podcasts
- URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/8a91cb23-4cbe-4699-b8a2-41e74ae5da2a
## Highlights
- Notebook Fallacy: Too much energy organizing ideas, too little extracting value from them
Summary:
Writers at a high level know that ideas are cheap and not worth hoarding.
They understand that writing good books is incredibly difficult. As they move up the hierarchy of people who create ideas for a living, they realize that the execution is more important than coming up with ideas.
The key to creative output is not the careful maintenance and tracking of potential ideas, but rather the extraction of value from ideas.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Writers at a high level are not trying to hoard their book ideas. Ideas are cheap. Writing good books is incredibly difficult. And so this is what I've come to realize. I'm sure this is not universal. I'm sure there's a lot of professional thinkers who have complicated systems for tracking potential ideas. I'm just saying it's also not universal. And I know a lot of people who don't and I don't. And the higher I move up the hierarchy of people who create ideas for a living and have some impact, the more my attention turns towards the execution and the more of the coming up with The idea seems like the easy part. When it's time to come up with something like, yeah, this thing has caught my attention. I can't really ignore it. Let's do that. So anyways, those are my two cents. If we want to invent a term for this because, hey, that's what I do, we can call this belief that the key to creative output is the careful maintenance and tracking of potential ideas. We can call this the notebook fallacy. Too much energy put on the organization of ideas, not enough energy put on the extraction of value from ideas. That's actually where all the action is. ([Time 0:11:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2659ed93-eace-44f6-9950-b588e2e6c24c))