One of my hobbies is thinking. No, this is not the type of self-promoting statement we are daily exhorted to put out there. It’s a statement of fact. I like to think. It keeps me off the streets and out of pool halls. I sometimes do it well and, just as often, poorly.
Ace marketing strategist Shareef Mahdavi explores the power of ideas in a recent post. He believes that coming up with good ideas is a learned behavior as much as it is “an innate gift.” To generate ideas, or at least to participate in the process of generating them, you need to give and take.
You give by proposing ideas that make products or services (or life in general) better. You take by listening to an idea instead of rejecting it. Drawing from the book What a Great Idea! 2.0 by Chic Thompson, Mahdavi suggests giving a new idea 30 seconds’ consideration, rather than the usual eight. Hard to believe, but most of us reject a new idea in eight seconds or less—about the same amount of time we spend on an uninteresting home page.
Receptivity, curiosity (of course), and the ability to open up in good old-fashioned brainstorming sessions all make it easier to be an idea generator. Mahdavi makes a special point about curiosity: every evening at the dinner table, he asks his kids about the questions they asked that day. How cool is that?
Priming your brain is a great practice. Allow yourself to be surprised by ideas whenever and wherever they land. I’ve gotten my best ideas and had the most fun with them when they caught me completely unawares.
Eric Saint-Guillain says
Nice article ! Ideas are often coming from things we heard, we red, or from some conversations. Sharing ideas can bring new point of view and develop new ideas, or move existing ideas forward.
Regards,
Eric