How to Input Better if You’re a Magpie who Loves Collecting Shiny Things.  

As a highly sensitive creative, you may love finding the metaphorical treasures on the roadside – odds & ends of information, interesting facts, exciting new materials to work with. 

There is something thrilling about finding a shining gem after sifting through some rubble.

One of my favorite daydreams is that one day, I will find something that I can take on the Antiques Roadshow. Everyone else thinks it’s rubbish, but once it’s appraised, its value is discovered. For me, this is not a fantasy about money, but about the ability to spot things that are valuable. 

If you’re a fellow magpie, you also feel this pull of discovery, this pull of possibilities. But sometimes others (or even, you yourself) may question this trait. 

Here are some ideas that may help.   

1. Let yourself have multiples of things you love:

High input people are often told dismissively that they are collecting “useless information.” But useless to who exactly? You may be an aspiring painter who loves collecting found objects. Sometimes, you think you’re not really a painter. You just collect all this useless stuff. Then, after a few years, you realize that what you really ARE is a multimedia artist. You were feeling pulled towards the raw materials of your work and were dismissing them. Or maybe, you’re a musician. Obviously, you want to listen to EVERYTHING an artist you love has created. It’s a source of both inspiration and nourishment for you. 

If you are a writer, it’s your ability to see juxtapositions – to link things together – which is an essential ingredient in your work. And what you read is your raw material. I have book upon book on subjects that interest me: Depth Psychology, Archetypes, Creativity. 

This is my personal archive, my library of things I treasure. 

And as a magpie, you are the collector and archiver of your own loves. 

This is not about wasting money or being a “hoarder.” This is about collecting the acorns of the natural world, or books that deepen your understanding, or sewing patterns that keep the stories of your heritage alive. 

This is your collection that helps you be creative.   

2. Cast your net wide:

Whether you are a writer, a musician or some other kind of creative, input from a wide variety of sources. It’s interesting how different people have different things to say about the same topic. For example: I am really interested in Carl Jung’s work. Reading the book Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill gave me the lay-of-the-land around Jung and Freud and playing with dream images, hearing the podcast Digital Jung introduced me to the deeper aspects of Jung’s work, and reading Women Who Run with the Wolves taught me about the Jungian interest in folktales and the symbols hidden inside. 

3. Have simple ways to access information:

I think one of the reasons we judge ourselves so harshly for our collections is when we can’t find something. Maybe, we want to share something useful with a friend & we can’t find the book. Or we know we have just the right material to make something, but can’t remember where we stored it. 

Finding simple organization methods that work for us is important. 

I store articles on Pocket and tag them with tags that are intuitive. If I take a workshop & have a video recording, I name the folder in an easy-to-remember way, like with the name of the teacher. On my bookshelves, once I started grouping books according to topic, I felt more confident in my ability to find one. 

A little high-level organization is all that is needed. As a creative type, you’re probably the kind of person who sorts things in big buckets, not someone who is going to sit and do low-level organization. And if clutter has become a problem, I love this housekeeping book because it’s written by a fellow creative, “messy” person.   

4. Go back in time:

There’s a certain bias around the new, as in “new and improved.” But looking towards the past can really help us. For example: Reading old books shows us how much we are building on top of what’s already been done. Also, in a weird way, every age has the same kinds of ideas circulating, and tapping into the past is actually very novel. 

I read psychoanalyst Marie Louise von Franz’s book The Feminine in Fairy Tales recently, and went Aha a bunch of times. It was so, so insightful! If you want to write Science Fiction & Fantasy, for example, reading a bunch of books from a psychological perspective can really deepen your understanding of symbols. Because it’s an older book, some of her ideas pushed some of my buttons (her ideas on women & sensitivity, for example). And yet, at the same time, I could also clearly see the depth of her thinking that I’ve heard so much about. 

5. Create your own rabbit trails:

Things that algorithms suggest can be interesting and relevant, but following ONLY online trails leads to uniformity, not a universe of ideas. What topics interest you right now? Maybe, you want to learn about the business of art. Maybe, you are a “nice” person and you need to learn negotiation skills. Make a list of topics you want to explore, and THEN do a Google search for books, articles, newsletters and the like. Forget about other topics for a while or nudges from social media. This is a list of YOUR curated topics.    

6. Tap into information in easily-searchable ways:

Depending on how you want to engage with it, some books are better read on a Kindle or other app, while some you want a physical copy of. Get eBooks whenever you need something at your fingertips. And think of the ways in which you can access something easily. 

If you love podcasts, like I do, then we already know that episode transcripts are often available. Sometimes, you can also ASK and get a transcript, if it’s not available online. For example: I really liked this interview with author Jenny Odell on How to do Nothing, and emailed and asked for a transcript, which I was very kindly given.    

So, these are some of the ways in which to make our information-guzzling, creatively-hopping brain feel seen and honored AND also a little more in our conscious control. You may find, as I’m doing, that once we start creating some simple structures, the same thing that we felt a little ashamed of (I am hopeless. I can’t find that book! OR Where in the world did I keep that?) becomes a quality that is our deep reservoir – a place from which we create and a place from which we help both our own self and others.  

Here’s to more creative collections for you and me! 

With love, 

Ritu 

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person & emotional empath.”

Find more about Ritu HERE.