I keep a folder of frameworks. Small tools I’ve built out of other people’s ideas: a way to pressure-test positioning that started with April Dunford, a demand-creation checklist that’s mostly Rory Sutherland, a weekly question I took from Derek Sivers and kept.
They exist because of something I believe. An idea you only admire is worth very little.
The pattern I’m trying to beat is familiar. You read a good book. For an afternoon you’re sharper. You see your work differently and you’re full of intentions. Then Monday comes, and the inbox comes, and by Thursday the book is a pleasant memory and you’re working the same way you did the week before.
Inspired for an afternoon. I’ve done it a hundred times.
What changed it for me wasn’t reading more. It was doing something with the idea fast enough to change a decision. Turn the insight into a step. A checklist. A question I ask at the start of every project. A default I change so the next ten choices come out different. Something that survives a normal Tuesday.
That’s the work. Not collecting ideas, but putting them to use. Most of us have more ideas than we use. The harder thing is building the small thing that makes you act on a good one when you’re tired and busy and would rather not.
It also compounds. Underline a book and you get an afternoon. Build the tool and you get the thinking on every project after, without having to summon the willpower again. Do it long enough and the tools start to inform each other. The Dunford sharpens the Sutherland. The Sivers question catches what both missed.
So I keep building them.
If you’ve read something this year that changed how you work, not how you think but how you actually work, I’d like to hear what it was, and what you built so it stuck. That’s usually where the best conversations start.