What the heck is this? Intro to the Thought Factory

Spam, basically.

This past weekend, I found a new great blog.  It may even take the top spot away from Karl Denninger.  It's another finance guy, this one named James Altucher.  But his blog is unusual.  Unlike most garbage out there, the stuff he posts is useful.  One of the more popular posts appears to be How to be THE LUCKIEST GUY ON THE PLANET in 4 easy steps.  One of the daily exercises that he suggests undertaking is a mental exercise - write down lists of ideas.  Preferably original ones.  Exercise one's idea muscle.  Then as I began reading more of his posts, I realized, this guy is posting his lists.  And most of it is surprisingly worth reading.  I figure, if he can come up with lists that I want to read about, maybe I can come up with lists that someone else wants to read about.  And if nothing else, Christy and I can have a common place to do our brain exercising.  So the Thought Factory was born.

I'm an INTP.  I don't remember which personality test that comes from nor do I remember what it stands for, but I do remember that the gist is that I'm great at big picture stuff, crappy at minutiae.  Which makes sense to me - I love coming up with an idea, but I hate actually having to execute it.  Basically anything more detailed than the idea itself is minutiae to my brain, so I hate it.  And I suck at it.  So the idea of coming up with lists of ideas that never actually have to be implemented (by me at least) appeals to me a lot.  Altucher claims that after 3 months of this, the ideas got really good and that he started to feel compelled to implement some of the better ones.  We'll see if that happens here, but I'm not holding my breath.

So yea, basically this blog is a place for Christy and I to let our brains write spam to ourselves.  I will say at the outset that I don't expect every list to be one of awesomeness, nor will they even be all original ideas or all even ideas at all.  I'm sure a lot of it will be easily debunkable for a myriad of reasons.  Retorts will be welcome in the comments section, although it will be a crap-shoot as to whether or not I actually read them.  Hopefully they won't just be bulleted lists - I'd like for this process to make me a better writer too.  So, some commentary will most likely go along with the lists, although I can't promise that said commentary won't offend everyone who reads it at one point or another.  Some will be just lists of things that have been rattling around in my brain that I'd like to get out so that I can have room for something else.  I'm sure Christy's will all be awesome though, I don't think she wants to publish the non-awesome ones.