Right now there is no better skill to posses than the ability to come up with good ideas.
What’s the reward for good ideas?
A good idea can put you and your team on an entirely different trajectory.
The problem? Most assume their idea is good and go after concepts that won't work or don't fill a pain point customers might have.
Ideas are easy to discount. They are also easy to create. The value of a good idea might not be a billion, but it could still be substantial for you.
The idea of privatizing the social experience where both parties had to agree in order to connect and be friends took FaceBook way beyond Friendster & Myspace ever reached.
Yes it's true that good ideas have the potential to change your bank account. Good ideas can also have the potential to change your body.
Just be careful the next time you're dismissing the value of an idea.
If you aren’t careful, it’s easy to lose yourself in this modern world.
The difference between our species and others, we can come up with ideas to project for our future.
Sometimes for good and unfortunately sometimes for bad.
Below are some Good Ideas from this book
Superlinear Scaling
As life gets bigger it slows down. This is a biological pattern found throughout life. We use negative quarter power scaling to explain this. It’s a logarithmic grid that shows that metabolism scales to mass to the negative quarter power, Kleiber's law.
The question in hand was, if Kleiber's law can be applied to one of life's largest creations: cities - a super organism?
What was discovered was that Kleiber's negative quarter power scaling governed the energy and transportation growth of a city living.
However, there was some data that did not obey Kleiber's law. Every data point that involved innovation or creativity - patents, R&D budgets, creative professions, inventors - followed a positive, not negative, quarter-power law.
What this meant was that a city that was ten times larger than it's neighbor wasn't just ten times more innovative, it was seventeen times more innovative. As cities get bigger, ideas are generated faster - super linear scaling.
The pace of innovation and ideas are directly related to the pool of information you are drawing from.
Some people say books are not where you get great ideas. People say you get good ideas from self-experience. But above scientist have proved that to not be the best answer.
Think of yourself as a small town and books are the pool you draw from. If you read 1 good book, your pool is too small. But if you read 50 books per year, you aren't going to be just 50x more knowledgeable, but 130x more knowledgeable. It’s exponential.
And it's not just the number of books we read that matter.
If you’re a doctor don’t just read healthcare books. Read something in the arts or humanities. Expand and you will increase your pool of knowledge.
The caveat, if you expand your knowledge to bad books it will work against you. The rate of bad ideas will increase and you won’t get ahead.
- Cultivate hunches by writing
- Keep your folders messy, disregard order
- Embrace serendipity – put yourself in places where you can run into people
- Make generative mistakes – experiments that generate new ideas
- Take up some new hobbies be eclectic.
- Frequent cafes, liquid networks you bump into friends and strangers – constant moving
- Follow the links – don’t let your fear get the best of you in new social relationships
- Let others build upon your ideas. Allow them to work – collaborate. Don’t be close lid.
- Borrow & recycle to reinvent. (Good artist copy, great artist steal).
It takes a decade to build a new idea and a decade for mass adoption. This is the pattern that most good ideas follow throughout history.
However, there are some exceptions. One that stood out was the story of YouTube, which went from idea to mass adoption within 2 years.
In essence, it turned the 10/10 rule into 1/1.
The question is how?
We seen it time and time again. We seen ideas being built, only to sort of never catch on. Some ideas might just be ahead of its time or not viewed in the right perspective.
Yes, there is a natural curve to ideas, but the best way to use them is to connect not disconnect. You cannot hoard your ideas and expect them to age to perfection.
This comes from the paradox that is often taught in school that competition is the only thing that stirs up good ideas. This isn't necessarily the case, good ideas also rise in crowds and collaborations.
The best way to approach your ideas is to look at solid other ideas and build on top of it. It cuts the curve a little.
Become part of that web of knowledge and from that web of knowledge your ideas grow.
Stock up your Kitchen
There is a time to think a lone, but too much is counter intuitive.
Isolation isn’t the answer.
In order to create an idea that changes the world or even your life, you need to rub shoulders.
You need to stumble across something or someone that lets you see from a different perspective. This lets you see the missing piece. That missing ingredient.
You need a fully stock kitchen.
What I mean by this is, you may be extremely smart, but your kitchen may not be fully stocked. Go out and get these ingredients to create something magical.
There's only so much one can do with too few ingredients.
Not only that, but having too few ingredients adds to the difficulty.
Sorry for the kitchen metaphors, but that is really how it’s going to be with ideas and your mind.
The concept of deep dive
You can’t do a marathon every day, but you can walk a bit every day.
When speaking about physical training, you really shouldn't exhaust yourself by doing something strenuous daily. For example, training such as HIIT daily has a negative impact on your goals and your central nervous system. Same can be said of doing an Ironman daily. Despite this fact, you can still stay relatively active daily.
In other words, you need different levels of intensity.
Similar to physical training, you don’t need to read a book a day. But you can read a little every day.
Not only do you need a continual flow of reading, but you need times to increase the intensity.
Perhaps once a month, take a weekend to make time to read what would take you usually 2 weeks to read. Go a little crazy at least once a year, and take a week to read dozens of books.
The idea is to get in a deep state of focus and let those new ideas, old ideas and your current thoughts coalesce and formed something unique.
What’s the current rate of your reading? And how can you incorporate an intense session? It doesn’t necessarily have to be physical books. It can be audios or videos, something that will help you in your life.
Be sure to checkout some of our other book reviews and knowledge bank.
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