The Kitchen Cabinet

Do you have a note on your phone filled with random ideas you swear you’ll come back to someday? Maybe it’s not a note on your phone; it could be voice memos. Screenshots. 6 different moleskins. A bunch of sticky notes around your desk. Whether you’re a musician, marketer, entrepreneur, creator, any creative really, we gotta store our ideas somewhere. For me, that’s on my notes app in a note I call “The Kitchen Cabinet.”

I had this concept a few years ago. The oldest reference to it that I can find is from 2018. But I feel like the analogy spawned a little bit before that.

The idea is simple:

Your brain = a kitchen cabinet

Your ideas = the food & ingredients you keep in your kitchen cabinet

The Cabinet

Like a kitchen cabinet, our brain only has so much space. You can only cram so many things in there. Another blog, another project, another business you might want to start, another song you hope to finish, another video you want to make. It can hold a lot of useful things, but there is a limit. Eventually you must make more room if you want to add more ideas.

This is where a lot of creatives get stuck. The issue usually isn’t that we don’t have ideas. It’s often that we have too many. When your kitchen cabinet is packed, you can barely see what's actually in there anymore. And it’s daunting to go digging for what you need from the back. It’s easy to get paralyzed. Despite having a dozen great ideas in our notes, nothing gets done. 

So you have to make room. And there’s a few ways to do that:

You can use something.

Take the idea and actually make the thing. Write that blog, finish that song, start that business, film the video. Even if it doesn’t turn out how you imagined at least it’s not sitting on the shelf taking up mental space.

You can throw something away.

Some ideas just aren’t that good. Or maybe they expired and just don’t make sense anymore. That’s totally fine. Not every idea has to turn into something. But there is a third option I like even more. 

You can give the idea away. Like giving some eggs or a cup of sugar to a neighbor, you can share your ideas with others. 

I think we get weirdly protective over ideas sometimes. But like one of my favorite sayings sometimes you have to kill your babies and move on. In this case, it’s giving your baby up for adoption so it can find a better home… Horrible analogy. Let’s stick to kitchen cabinets… 

If you have an idea that’s been sitting untouched in your cabinet for five years, maybe somebody else should cook with it.

Ingredients

These are the ideas. Like a kitchen cabinet, not all ingredients are the same. 

Some are fresh and you know immediately what to do with it. Some ideas are complete “just add water” meals that don’t take a lot of effort. 

And others are like that emergency can of beans you bought, knowing it will last 5 years, so in case you run out of food you can survive on that can of beans you stashed away.

Some ideas have expiration dates and need to be used up before they go to waste. Some ideas aren’t useful by themselves and need a few other ingredients to become something. 

You might have that one sentence sitting in your notes that on its own doesn’t seem like much. But then one day you hear something, or read something, or are talking with a friend and then that old idea connects with a new one and now you have something useful.

Some ideas are just waiting for another ingredient. 

And the best way to find that is to have an active kitchen cabinet, one that’s being used. Which leads me to my final point of this analogy:

Filing the Cabinet

An empty cabinet isn’t very useful either. You need ideas. And just like when you need ingredients what do you do? You go shopping. And in life we can go shopping for ideas.

Read a book, watch a movie, go listen to a genre of music you don’t usually listen to, go outside, take a long bike ride. 

Your cabinet becomes full the more you make stuff, and use stuff.

Collaborating might be one of the best ways to fill the cabinet because someone else might bring the ingredients you don’t always have. They have a different cabinet they are pulling from and that can make something special.

You bring your cabinet, they bring theirs, and now you can make things neither of you could have made alone.

The best kitchen cabinets are the ones being used. Fill your cabinet, so you can empty it. Empty your cabinet so you can fill it. 

There’s a difference between storing ideas and hoarding ideas. 

You don’t need to use every ingredient. You don’t need to make every idea. But keep your cabinet active. Don’t let it sit there full of ingredients that never get used. 

And remember, every once in a while, go shopping. 

Make it a great day or not, the choice is yours.

T