For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

But counter-examples do exist: Make Magazine; Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain; workout videos; etc.

You can tell that I want you to stop and think about stock here. I feel like we all got really good at flow, really fast. But flow is ephemeral, while stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein. And the real magic trick is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. The hybrid strategy.

You know those movie scenes where two characters miss each other by just a fraction of a second, and how it’s so frustrating to watch? You want to reach into the screen and go: Hey, stop! Just slow down. He’s coming around the corner! Well, that’s life—except in life, it’s multiplied a million-fold in every dimension. You can miss somebody not just by a second, but by a century. You can miss somebody not just by a couple of steps, but by the span of a continent. Media evens the odds. Media lets you clone pieces of yourself and send them out into the world to have conversations on your behalf. Even while you’re sleeping, your media —your books, your blog posts, your tweets—it’s on the march. It’s out there trying to making connections. Mostly it’s failing, but that’s okay: these days, copies are cheap. We’re all Jamie Madrox now.

When you work in public, you create an emissary (media cyborg style) that then walks the earth, teaching others to do your kind of work as well. And that is transcendently cool.

In Super Mario Maker, players pay for a software product that invites labor: making Super Mario Bros. levels for other owners of the software to play. Playbor isn’t for just games either: It also describes the digital economy more broadly. When you post to Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, for example, your leisure (sharing with friends) doubles as unpaid work for social-network services, which use the results to sow others’ leisure. Likewise, when you feel obliged to check work email or Slack at all hours, you confuse work with leisure until no boundary exists between the two.

All you need to do to turn your ideas into new articles or other works is start organizing and expanding on them. Since implementing this method, I've been impressed by how effortlessly it allows new ideas to flow. Even a few ideas from a couple books dropped into a topic form a jumping off point for a bunch of other ideas, and make it easier to get past writer's block.