Discover idea generation can take your life to the next level
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you 10-minute lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the importance of writing down new ideas every day. I got this tip from James Altucher, so make sure to check out his books like Choose Yourself and his podcast The James Altucher Show. I got this tip from his book Choose Yourself and I’ve been following it for about three years and it is something that has changed my life. I like this tip because it exposes to new ideas that I can implement in life.
When I’m writing down my ideas, I’m doing a brain dump and writing down any ideas. I might say that I’m going to live in Georgia the country or I might say that I’m only going to eat fruit. A lot of my ideas are not very good and I’m just looking for the 1-2 ideas for the month to make a real difference in my life. A lot of genius comes just producing a lot of stuff. For a talk show host to do their monologue, and tell five jokes, the writers have to come up with 600 jokes and they select the five best ones. And sometimes they are not even good, but they tend to do a good job and keeping the show moving forward. So if they have to produce 600 jokes for one show, how many ideas do you have to produce that can change your life.
Since I’ve been doing this for the past three years, I get a lot of compliments on how I have so many ideas. Plus by doing all this training, when I hear people speak, it gives me ideas that I can share with them. If you are tired of generating ideas for yourself, you can generate ideas for your company, a friend, a co-worker, a corporation, or anybody really and just share the ideas with them. If they use them, great. If they don’t, don’t worry about it because all you can focus on is on your inputs, which is creating ideas.
Once you create your ideas for the day, take some time to see if anyone of those ideas should be executed and then the next day you can just write ten ideas on how to make that idea successful. For example, I came up with an idea for my cousin to sell these Mexican Themed Holiday Decoration Boxes. Then from there I picked out one holiday and decided what needs to be in that box, then the next day, I wrote down the ideas to actually sell those boxes. So one idea can lead to other ideas and from there you have to decide if you want to execute on that idea of not. Ideas are a dime a dozen and if you’re able to execute on an idea. that is where the real value is at.
James Altucher talked about how he uses waiter pads to write down his ideas, I use Evernote. I just create a notebook where I place all my ideas and it’s just super easy to find them. Plus they are digitized so if I want to do a quick search, then I can quickly find them. If you like writing down stuff on paper, Evernote has a cool feature with its premium version where it can scan your paper and it will recognize your handwriting and then you don’t have to keep a bunch of paper lying around the house. I usually write my ten ideas after I finish my morning reading sessions. This just my routine now and I used to write my ten ideas when I was at the gym riding a stationary bike. I feel like you should write down your ideas in the morning because at night that’s when I’m the least energized when it comes to thinking creatively but whatever works for you, that’s what you should do.
Writing down new ideas, also keeps me feeling young because I’m always looking for a connection on how to mix everything. There is a great Ted talk by Matt Ridley and he talks about how when we stop mixing ideas, we stop progressing as a civilization. He talks about how there was this one tribe that was cut off from Australia and all other civilization. While Australia was able to trade with other tribes from Asia still, they were able to progress as a society, but the isolated tribe actually went backward in their development. So I’m a big fan of free trade because of this reason. We can learn from anybody and take away something that can make us better. Plus if you think about it, America is such a great place for innovation because we are so diverse and we have different ideas spreading around. That’s why I like to interact with different groups. So when I’m thinking of ideas, I like to see how I can combine different fields into one, kind of like creating Asian fusion meals like Korean tacos or burritos. You can create something pretty delicious by combining two different fields or three. I think it is amazing when you’re able to see that this one thing over here will work so well in this area cause then since no one else is doing it you created a nice little niche for yourself. So don’t cut off your ideas from interacting with each other and also don’t feel bad about taking someone else’s ideas because there are no original ideas out there, they have just been reorganized to fit today’s audience.
To recap today’s episode, make sure you write 10 new ideas every day. Know when and where you’re going to write those ideas and don’t worry about perfection because that doesn’t exist. Genius comes from trying out a lot of different ideas.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode.
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