Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Ethan writes a weekly newsletter about birdwatching — for people stuck in the city.
It started in a rough year, when a robin outside his window became the bright spot of his days.
He's sure anyone can fall for birds — you just have to slow down and look.
Ethan's readers want exactly that — a little wonder, squeezed into a packed week.
⛳️ Problem:
Ethan used to have more ideas than he could ever write.
Now the well's bone dry — every week he stares at a blank page and no idea comes.
The harder he scrolls for inspiration, the emptier he feels. That's rough.
His struggle:
He's drowning in other people's content, so his mind never gets a moment to think for itself.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Input Diet
Picture a friend talking to you at a loud party.
You can't hear them, because the blaring music drowns their voice out.
Turn the music down, and their words come through clear.
Spoiler: they'd been talking the whole time.
That's what Dan Koe figured out the hard way.
He built a one-person business that reportedly earns millions a year, all on his own ideas.
When his ideas for newsletters and courses ran dry,
he found the problem wasn't too few inputs — it was too many.
When the ideas dry up, our instinct is to consume more — more scrolling, more podcasts, more feeds.
But that noise crowds out your own thoughts, so nothing original can form inside of us.
So do the opposite — cut the inputs, sit in silence, and let your own ideas surface.
Ideas don't come from more input. They come from space to think.
Turn down the noise, get a little quiet, and let your mind wander freely — the well fills back up.
🚗 So Ethan tried it his way.
Here's Ethan and his birdwatching newsletter, bone dry for weeks, again.
The more he scrolled for inspiration, the longer the page stayed blank.
So he did the opposite of scrolling — he cut the noise.
He deleted the feeds for a week and left his phone inside on his walks.
At first the quiet felt uncomfortable, almost boring, with nothing to fill it.
Get this — while he watched a sparrow in silence, three issue ideas showed up out of nowhere.
Turns out, the ideas had been there all along, buried under everyone else's noise.
By week's end he had a full month of issues — from paying attention, not consuming more.
Just like that.
He didn't need more input or a smarter way to consume it.
He needed less noise, and the quiet to finally hear his own ideas.
🧸 A dry spell isn't too few inputs — it's too many. Cut the noise, and your ideas come back.
The prompt below designs a short "input diet" so your own ideas can surface again.
You just tell it what you make and where your noise comes from.
🏄♀️ The prompt
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Update your input values in the prompt, or just run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use the example values and give you an output.
CONTEXT:
- (use what's available, fall back to the inline values)
- If my Voice Profile exists, write in that voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If my ICP / Audience doc exists, target that reader. Otherwise, use the audience below.
Inputs:
What I make, and the dry spell I'm in (be honest about how empty it feels):
{e.g. a weekly birdwatching newsletter — I've had zero ideas for weeks}
Where my noise comes from (the feeds, apps, and inputs I fill the quiet with):
{e.g. endless scrolling, five newsletters, three podcasts a day}
When my best ideas used to come (the quiet moments I've squeezed out):
{e.g. on slow walks, before I started bringing my phone everywhere}
For Outcome: {e.g. a short input diet plus a plan to make space, so my ideas come back}
Outputs:
1. The cut list — the specific inputs to pause for a week, ranked by how much noise each one adds.
2. The space plan — 2-3 quiet, boredom-friendly moments to protect each day (walk, no phone, etc.).
3. The capture habit — a simple way to catch the ideas that surface, so I don't lose them.
4. The first make — one small thing to create from the quiet this week, before consuming anything new.
Then name the ONE input I lean on most that's actually crowding out my own ideas.
That's it, my fellow misfits!
Yours 'helping you build a smart AI sidekick so you can work less and enjoy life more' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️