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The 25 Best Ideas of 2025
Explore the 25 best ideas of 2025 that reshape work, creativity, and life. Discover insights on productivity, habits, and leveraging AI to enhance your daily routines. Join the journey to think better and live intentionally!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Every year, I read extensively—books, articles, podcasts, YouTube videos—hoping some of it sticks. But reading alone isn't enough. The real value comes when you save the best ideas, revisit them later, and let them connect in unexpected ways.
That's why I love Readwise. It's where all my highlights live—every book I've underlined, every article that made me stop and think, every podcast insight I wanted to remember. It's like having a second brain that surfaces old ideas at just the right moment.
As 2025 came to a close, I went back through my entire Readwise library and pulled out the 25 ideas that hit hardest this year. These aren't random productivity hacks or trendy advice. They're the frameworks, principles, and insights that actually changed how I think about work, creativity, learning, and life.
I've gathered 25 ideas that genuinely changed how I approach work, creativity, and life this year—here they are.
Here are the 25 best ideas from my reading in 2025:
1. Design a "10X vision" for your life and work, then back‑plan 2026.
Think in terms of where you want to be at 10X scale, then work backward to define deadlines, big rocks, and checkpoints so this year becomes a deliberate step in that direction, echoing the idea of preloading your perfect year.
2. Treat time as a multiplier of your habits.
What you repeatedly do this year will compound; "good habits make time your ally, bad habits make time your enemy," as James Clear reminds you in his reflection on time and habits
3. See your career as 12 big "shots," not an endless ladder.
If you have ~50 working years and spend a few years per major project, you only get a limited number of real shots, so each 2025 decision should expand your capabilities, relationships, and artifacts as described in the 12 shots framework.
4. Obsess over inputs, not outcomes.
Better sources, better questions, and better daily practices eventually yield better results; "the edge is in the inputs," as summarized in James clear article on where advantage really comes from.
5. Protect deep focus as your most future‑proof skill.
As automation spreads, the most valuable jobs require creative problem‑solving and human ingenuity that only come from sustained attention, which is why Nir Eyal stresses that attention and focus are the raw materials of creativity in his book Indistractable.
6. Use AI as your "free PhD," not just a quick answer machine.
With the right prompts, you can get strategic planning, learning curves, decision trees, and differentiated instruction when used thoughtfully.
7. Practice divergent thinking without self‑censorship.
During ideation, tell your mind: generate as many ideas as possible, no evaluation; criticism too early is how your saboteurs enter, as Shirzad Chamine explains when he talks about protecting your Sage’s power to innovate in his book Positive Intelligence.
8. Set aside "Yes, and…" sessions for fresh perspectives.
Pick an area of life or work and write non‑stop ideas for ten minutes, always building with “yes, and…” and no judgement, following the idea‑generation exercise suggested in the book Positive Intelligence.
9. Honor curiosity as a resource that usually decays with age.
The NASA‑backed creativity test showed that almost all five‑year‑olds score highly on divergent thinking, but by adulthood fewer than 2% do, suggesting that knowledge and schooling often suppress curiosity as discussed in the large‑scale curiosity study.
10. Combine disciplines to escape career plateaus.
As you advance, technical skill alone stops being enough; you need product thinking, project execution, and people skills in combination, as Josh Swords points out when describing how the biggest gains come from combining disciplines.
11. Let your writing expose the inconsistency of your thoughts.
Your mind lives in "perpetual approximation mode"; ideas feel coherent until you try to write them and see the gaps, which is why Kupajo sees writing as a way to expose, not just clarify, your thinking.
12. Anchor every project in a strong "why" and a real problem.
Great products have a clear why, solve a problem many people feel, and are ideas you can't let go of—more like painkillers than vitamins, as Tony Fadell's advice on painkiller ideas and the virus of doubt emphasizes.
13. Use storytelling that contrasts pain with possibility.
Like Steve Jobs did with the iPhone, remind people of an annoying problem, create a "virus of doubt," and then show how your solution shifts their experience.
14. Treat setbacks as prompts to invent new scenarios of upside.
When something goes wrong in 2026, train yourself to list at least three ways it could become a gift or opportunity, echoing Chamine's suggestion to reframe bad situations.
15. Be ruthless about what you trade your attention for.
"What you trade your attention for is what your life becomes," which means 2026 is shaped far more by your daily focus than your stated goals, as James Clear notes about the life‑shaping power of attention.
16. Respect the long game of reputation in a hyper‑connected era.
Warren Buffett's reminder that it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it is even truer now.
17. Remember how historically rich your default life already is.
The comforts you take for granted—heat on demand, clean water, basic safety—would have been "the wealth of kings" in 1800, a perspective captured in Charles Mann's reflection on modern comforts as royal wealth.
18. Create your future rather than predict it.
Abraham Lincoln's line that "the best way to predict your future is to create it" becomes a design principle: use this year to deliberately shape habits, artifacts, and relationships that pull your life in the direction you want.
19. Use the "heaven–earth–human" lens to choose your next move.
Good shots feel intuitively right, have external traction, offer asymmetric upside, and position you for better future shots; bad shots feel forced, have high downside, and don't grow you, a distinction the shot evaluation criteria make very clear (referenced in 12 shots article).
20. Apply the red paperclip principle: start with what you already have.
Most people already have enough skills, network, or tools to make their next move; you can trade up through momentum and relationships, as illustrated by the red paperclip to house story (referenced in 12 shots article).
21. Build a "digital brain" instead of collecting random links.
We live in an era of information abundance, but the challenge is sense‑making; tools should help you remember, connect, and explore ideas to truly think better, not just store more, as Andrew Nalband argues about the need for better thinking tools.
22. Keep your future self in mind with everything you capture.
Notes, tasks, and plans should be written so that your future self can easily understand and act on them; don't sacrifice clarity for brevity, as Ryder Carroll advises about making notes legible to your future self in The Bullet Journal Method.
23. Treat writing online as your primary leverage.
In a world saturated with content, thoughtful writing is still "the simplest yet most impactful way to share ideas online" and explore new topics, build an audience, and clarify your thinking. Thanks to Anne‑Laure Le Cunff notes about reasons to write online.
24. Start a 2025 newsletter as a laboratory, not a megaphone.
Instead of chasing size, use a newsletter to test small ideas, see which ones resonate, and refine your voice, following the spirit of "creating artifacts, experiments, and artworks" that make you feel you've truly lived from the 12 shots in life.
25. Assume AI will be a full-time collaborator by 2026—and prepare now.
Wisereads note on pivotal AI years point out that even "conservative extrapolation" suggests models will work autonomously for full days and match human experts across industries by 2026, so 2025 was the year to learn how to delegate, supervise, and collaborate with AI.
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