THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO BECOMING AN IDEA MACHINE
When I was at my absolute lowest, both financially, physically, psychologically, and more, I started writing ten ideas a day.
IDEAS ARE THE CURRENCY OF LIFE. Not money. Money gets depleted until you go broke. But good ideas buy you good experiences, buy you better ideas, buy you better experiences, buy you more time, save your life. Financial wealth is a side effect of the “runner’s high” of your idea muscle.
When I started writing 10 ideas a day (or less sometimes, or more sometimes) i wasn't always trying to come up with the next great idea (although that would've been nice) but I wanted to exercise my "creativity muscle" (or "idea muscle" or "Possibility muscle" - whatever you want to call it) had become atrophied.
Lightning doesn't strike and suddenly you come up with one idea that will save your life.
After I started writing down ten ideas a day , after a few weeks I started to feel more excited about life. I started to share ideas with others. I started to work on new things based on my ideas.
This created more opportunities for me over the years than I possible could've imagined.
This list (and it's more than ten) are some of the ideas about ideas that are important to know on your path to becoming an idea machine.
IDEAS ARE THE CURRENCY OF LIFE. Not money. Money gets depleted until you go broke. But good ideas buy you good experiences, buy you better ideas, buy you better experiences, buy you more time, save your life. Financial wealth is a side effect of the “runner’s high” of your idea muscle.
When I started writing 10 ideas a day (or less sometimes, or more sometimes) i wasn't always trying to come up with the next great idea (although that would've been nice) but I wanted to exercise my "creativity muscle" (or "idea muscle" or "Possibility muscle" - whatever you want to call it) had become atrophied.
Lightning doesn't strike and suddenly you come up with one idea that will save your life.
After I started writing down ten ideas a day , after a few weeks I started to feel more excited about life. I started to share ideas with others. I started to work on new things based on my ideas.
This created more opportunities for me over the years than I possible could've imagined.
This list (and it's more than ten) are some of the ideas about ideas that are important to know on your path to becoming an idea machine.
1. WHAT DO YOU MEAN – “IDEA MACHINE”?
Every situation you are in, you will have a ton of ideas. Any question you are asked, you will know the response. Every meeting you are at, you will take the meeting so far out of the box you’ll be on another planet, if you are stuck on a desert highway – you will figure the way out, if you need to make money you’ll come up with 50 ideas to make money, and so on.
After I started exercising the idea muscle, it was like a magic power had unleashed inside of me. It’s ok if you don’t believe me. Or maybe you think it’s bragging. There are many times when I don’t have ideas. But that’s when I stop practicing what I am about to advocate.
Try it for yourself. I’m not selling anything here. I have no reason for you to try this. I just want to share my exerience. It’s like part of your brain is opened up and a constant flow of stuff, both good and bad, gets dropped in there.
2. HOW DO YOU START EXERCISING THE IDEA MUSCLE?
You can use this site to write the ideas, list them public or private.
You can use the "prompt suggestions" (see above) to kickstart a list.
You can search other people's ideas to maybe make your own list perhaps triggered off of theirs.
Test the functionality of the site, explore it, and you will see many ways to start exercising the muscle.
But, guaranteed, after doing this for a few weeks, will feel the neurons on your brain lighting up and allowing you to tap into the creative part of your brain.
3. IS THERE ANY SCIENCE TO THIS
According to Robert Epstein, a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, "anyone can cultivate creativity" and there is no evidence that one person is more creative than another. He recommends creativity become a habit and suggests a few ways to cultivate more creativity:
A) Capture your new ideas. Keep an idea notebook or voice recorder with you, type in new thoughts on your laptop or write ideas down on a napkin.
B) Seek out challenging tasks. Take on projects that don't necessarily have a solution—such as trying to figure out how to make your dog fly or how to build a perfect model of the brain. This causes old ideas to compete, which helps generate new ones.
C) Broaden your knowledge. Take a class outside psychology or read journals in unrelated fields, suggests Epstein. This makes more diverse knowledge available for interconnection, he says, which is the basis for all creative thought. "Ask for permission to sit in on lectures for a class on 12th century architecture and take notes," he suggests. "You'll do better in psychology and life if you broaden your knowledge."
D) Surround yourself with interesting things and people. Regular dinners with diverse and interesting friends and a work space festooned with out-of-the-ordinary objects will help you develop more original ideas, Epstein says. You can also keep your thoughts lively by taking a trip to an art museum or attending an opera—anything that stimulates new thinking.
Our goal in making this website is to allow people to track all of these activities, share them, search others idea lists, and begin the process of ever-improving this important skill.
4. WHY TEN IDEAS?
But ten ideas seems to be the number where people's brains really begin to "sweat".
If I say, “write down ten ideas for books you can write” I bet you can easily write down four or five. I can write down four or five right now. But at six it starts to get hard. “Hmmm,” you think, “what else can I come up with?”
This is when the brain is sweating.
Note that when you exercise in the gym, your muscles don’t start to build until you break a sweat. Your metabolism doesn’t improve when you run until you sweat. Your body doesn’t break down the old and build the new until it is sweating.
The poisons and toxins in your body don’t leave until you sweat.
The same thing happens with the idea muscle. Somewhere around idea number six, your brain starts to sweat. This means it’s building up. Break through this.
5. WHAT IF I CAN'T COME UP WITH TEN IDEAS?
Or make the list an easier list. Instead of writing "10 ways I can improve jet propulsion for rockets to Mars" write "10 new things I'm grateful for today".
One technique I have found useful is: if you can't come up with ten ideas, come up with 20. It will put less importance per idea and sometimes make it easier.
Like ten ways to get to mars:
A) make a ladder to Mars. B) make an elevator. C) Build space stations every 1/100 of the way so you don't need to fly all the way to Mars. D) Use quantum entanglement so that your particles get entangled with particles on Mars (credit to Michio Kaku's analysis of the Star Trek teleporter). etc
In other words, horribly bad ideas but have fun with it. It's just exercise!
6. HOW DO I KNOW IF AN IDEA IS A GOOD IDEA OR BAD IDEA?
Let’s say you come up with ten ideas a day. In a year you will have come up with 3,650 ideas. Maybe more if you are trying to do 20 ideas a day.
It’s unlikely that you came up with 3,650 GOOD ideas (after you become an idea machine your ratio goes up but probably in the beginning your ratio of bad ideas to good is around 1000:1).
Don’t put pressure on yourself to come up with good ideas. The key right now is just to have good ideas. When Tiger Woods is practicing he doesn’t get disappointed himself if he doesn’t hit a hole in one every shot. You’re just practicing here.
Practice doesn’t make perfect. But practice makes permanent. So that later on when you do need good ideas to save your life, you know you will be a fountain of them.
When there’s a tidal wave of good ideas coming out of you, you only need a cup of water out of that to quench your thirst.
7. HOW DO I EXECUTE ON MY IDEAS?
Activating the idea machine is how you turn the lights on so you can get home. But you don’t need to do any more than that.
One of my favorite examples: Richard Branson didn’t like the service on some airline he was flying. So he had an idea: I’m going to start a new airline. How the heck can a magazine publisher start an airline from scratch with no money?
His first step. He called Boeing to see if they had an airplane he could lease.
No idea is so big you can’t take the first step. If the first step seems to hard, make it simpler. And don’t worry again if the idea is bad. This is all practice.
For instance, let’s say one of my ideas is: “I want to be a brain surgeon”. My first step: I would buy a bunch of books on how to do brain surgery. I don’t have to plan my whole way through medical school.
Wait!? Did I just say I would be a brain surgeon without a medical degree? No. I simply had a bad idea and the first step I would take if I was going to “execute” on that idea. And, yes, I’m absolutely confident I would be able to do successful brain surgery before someone throws me in jail (hence, the bad idea aspect of it).
A real life example: In 2006 I had ten ideas for websites I wanted to build. I knew how to program but didn’t want to. So my first step was to find a site like Elance and then put the spec up and find programmers in India who could make the websites for me. One of them I paid $2000 to develop and sold for $10,000,000 9 months later. (this is not bragging – I went dead broke about 2 years after that).
Nine of the ten ideas were BAD. But you only need one.
8. BUT IF I'M COMING UP WITH A BUSINESS IDEA HOW DO I KNOW IF I'M ON THE RIGHT TRACK?
Here’s my favorite example. A company called Odeo was a software company to help people set up podcasts. Since I do a podcast now this seems like a great idea to me. So they raised a ton of money from professional venture capitalists.
Then one of their programmers started working on a side project. The side project got a little traction but not much. But the CEO of Odeo decided to switch strategies and go full force into the side project without having a clue if it would work.
He felt bad since this isn’t what the investors invested in. So he called up all of the investors, some of the best investors on the planet, and described the side project to them and all the traction they were getting, etc and then made an offer, “Since this is a different direction, I’d be willing to buy all of your shares back so nobody will lose any money.”
100% of his investors said, “YES! GIVE IT BACK!” and so he bought all of his investors’ shares back. Now, Ev Williams, the founder of Twitter (which was the side project), is a billionaire as a result.
Nobody knew. Nobody knows. You have to try multiple ideas and see which ones gets the excitement of customers, employees, and you can see that people are legitimately using it and excited by it.
9. WHEN SHOULD I STOP EXECUTING ON AN IDEA I THOUGHT WAS GOOD?
Then, on the day I was going to close the fundraising round I woke up shaking. I had this vision of myself a year from now explaining to all of the investors why it wasn’t going to work. I returned all the money. I was out the money I had spent to create the website.
I can guess why it was a bad idea (people on dating sites want to be anonymous, for instance) but I didn’t really know. I just knew I had to return the money.
When your idea muscle is developed and the other legs of the daily practice are fully developed (Phyiscal, Emotional, Spiritual) you’ll have a better idea when you should shut things down. When you are shutting them down for the right reasons. When you are “failing quickly” as opposed to self-sabotage or fear of success or you’re just stupid.
10. AREN'T IDEAS A DIME A DOZEN AND EXECUTION IS EVERYTHING?:
If I say, "I want to start a website that is the Uber of manicurists" then maybe the next day's list is steps to make that website:
A) what is the front page look like for manicurists. What is the front page for people who need manicures?
B) Use fiverr to find a programmer who can program the "find the nearest available manicurists"
C) Spec out how the payments and tipping and reviews will work.
D) Should we just build the infrastructure so now we can make the "Uber of X" rather than limit it to manicurists
And so on.
Again, once you get good at ideas, you'll get good at execution ideas. You can't be good at execution if you are not good at having ideas.
11. Are all of your ideas business ideas?
12. What are some types of idea lists I can make?
OLD TO NEW: 10 old ideas I can make new. (Dorothy, Wall Street, etc). Similar to idea sex.
10 ridiculous things I would invent (the smart toilet, etc).
10 books I can write (The Choose Yourself Guide to an Alternative Education, etc).
10 business ideas for Google / Amazon / Twitter / you
10 people I can send ideas to
10 podcast ideas I can do. Or videos I can shoot. (“Lunch with James”, a video podcast where I just have lunch with people over Skype and we chat).
10 industries I can remove the middleman.
10 Things I Disagree With that everyone else assumes is religion (college, home ownership, voting, doctors). Or, for any one of those ideas. 10 ideas why!
10 ways to make old posts of mine and make books out of them
10 ways I can surprise Robyn. (Actually, more like 100 ways. That’s hard work!)
10 items I can put on my “10 list ideas I usually write” list
10 people I want to be friends with and I figure out what the next steps are to contact them (Azaelia Banks, I’m coming after you! Larry Page better watch out also.)
10 things I learned yesterday.
10 things I can do differently today. Right down my entire routine from beginning to end as detailed as possible and change one thing and make it better.
10 chapters for my next book
10 ways I can save time. For instance, don’t watch TV, drink, have stupid business calls, don’t play chess during the day, don’t have dinner (I definitely will not starve), don’t go into the city to meet one person for coffee, don’t waste time being angry at that person who did X, Y, and Z to you, and so on.
10 Things I Learned from X. Where X is someone I’ve spoke to recently or read a book by recently. I’ve written posts on this about the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Steve Jobs, Bukowski, the Dalai Lama, Superman, Freakonomics, etc.
Random: 10 Things Women Totally Don’t Know About Men
Today’s list: 10 More Alternative to College I can Add to my book: “40 Alternatives to College”.
10 Things I’m Interested in Getting Better At (and then 10 ways I can get better at each one).
10 things I was interested in as a kid that might be fun to explore now. (Like, maybe I can write that “Son of Dr. Strange” comic I’ve always been planning. And now I need 10 plot ideas).
A problem I have and ten ways I might try and solve it. This has saved me with the IRS countless times. Unfortunately, the Department of Motor Vehicles is impervious to my super powers.
13. Do I give ideas away for free? Why should I make idea lists public?
I read recently one person said to give HALF of your ideas away for free and make them pay for the other half.
This is very bad. This guarantees you will only come up with bad ideas. Because you will hoard your ideas. You will develop a SCARCITY COMPLEX around your ideas.
Ideas are infinite. But once you define your capacity of good ideas (“half”) then they instantly become finite for you. Not for anyone else. But just for you, your ideas will be finite.
If you stick to an abundance mentality, and be grateful for the ideas that are flowing through you, then they will be infinite. Where they come from, nobody knows. But they will be infinite and lucrative for you.
So give ideas for free, and then when you meet, give more ideas. And if someone wants to pay you and your gut feels this is a good fit, then give even more ideas.
14. Other benefits of giving ideas away for free:
B) You might be invited to write about or talk about your ideas. For instance, when I sent ideas to Amazon about their self-publishing business, they invited me to come to Seattle and check out what they were doing.
C) It will create unexpected opportunities for you. When I sent Jim Cramer 10 ideas for articles he should write about he invited me to write them myself his website, thestreet.com. That was my first writing job and four years later, thestreet.com even bought a company I started.
D) People like people who have an abundance mentality. You become "the source".
15. But can I keep my ideas private?
16. Is it worth it to become an idea machine?
Or a set of idea lists.
When I wrote my last book "Skip the line" I made a list of books I wanted to write.
Then I picked that one and I made a list of chapters I wanted to write.
Then for each chapter I made a list of points I wanted to make in that chapter.
Then I sent it to an agent who loved it and she got me a nice advance for it and a year later it came out.
That's been the process of almost everything I've ever done, including this website you are using right now.
It's been worth it to me.
BUT also to others. Almost every day in the past ten years at least one or two people (every day) have written me asking I have a website to keep track of ideas. That led me to spec-ing out this website and ultimately creating it and releasing it. We all hope you enjoy it.
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