Choose Yourself! (15 page)

“What a dumb idea,” a friend said. “There’s only so much reality.” Which strikes me as funny now.

The other guy said, “You’re not a big TV company. How will you get the cable companies to go for the idea?”

So I never thought about it again. I put up a fence around the idea and decided I would never be able to leap over that fence to execute on the idea. Now EVERY television channel is basically all reality all the time, or at least 50 percent of the time.

My real problem was
I didn’t have confidence
.
And I didn’t know what the next step was. In retrospect, I should’ve written down my idea, written down ten ideas for possible shows to launch with, and started pitching TV companies to get someone to partner with me on it. That would’ve been simple and not taken too much time before there was some payoff.

Note:
what might be too big for you (thinking of the next step) might not be too big for someone else. They might easily know, and not be afraid of, what the next step is.

Two examples. Someone asked me, “How do you know when an idea is too big?” I answered that an idea is too big if you can’t think of the next step. I then added that if I wanted to start an airline with more comfortable seats and Internet access and better food and cheaper prices, I might have a hard time because even if it were a good idea I wouldn’t know what to do next.

Then I read about Richard Branson.

When Virgin Records was making him a tidy profit of about $15 million a year, he decided there should be a more comfortable transatlantic airline. What the hell did he know about making an airline? Nothing. Not only that, airlines are a difficult business. Three of the best investors in history, Howard Hughes, Carl Icahn, and Warren Buffett, have crashed and burned buying airlines. Warren Buffett once said something like “The best way to make a million dollars is to start with a billion and buy an airline. “

And yet Branson came up with the idea and that very day he called up Boeing to find out what it would cost to lease an airplane. He made a great deal with them that if it didn’t work out he could return the airplane. If it
did
work out, he’d be a great customer for them. I’m assuming he made a similar call to Airbus and took the best deal. He then probably found out what it cost to lease space in the various airports he would need to use. They were probably happy with more business. And then, I’m guessing, he hired some pilots, some ground crew, and put an ad in the paper advertising his new air routes and he was in business.

Virgin Air is successful (I just flew it from New York to LA a few weeks ago), and has since spun off Virgin Galactic. So this scruffy kid, who started a record label, decided he wanted planes with more comfortable seats and is now, as a result, sending rocket ships into space.

Note the important thing: the day he came up with the idea, he also called Boeing and got a plane from them. Not only did he identify the next step, but he took it. For me, I would’ve convinced myself that the “next step” in starting an airline was probably too big for me. And then it
definitely
would’ve been too big for me. This is not quite the same as “the secret”—the idea that our thoughts can create our reality—but it’s close. Our thoughts can make our ideal reality possible. If you think you can do something, if you have confidence, if you have creativity (developed by building up your idea muscle), the big ideas become smaller and smaller. Until there is no idea too big. Nothing you can’t at least attempt. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you can’t—either way you are right.”

On a much smaller scale, I can state a few examples of my own but I’ll stick with one. I had an idea to create a financial news site that didn’t have any news but was just a site made up of various methods to come up with investment ideas. In particular, by piggybacking on the investment ideas of the greatest investors. I specced out the site on the morning I had the idea, I put the spec on elance.com, several developers contacted me with prices, and I hired one of them. Within a few weeks, version 1.0 of the site was released, stockpickr.com. Seven months and millions of unique users later, I sold the profitable company to thestreet.com.

So the question is not, when is an idea too big? It’s how do I make all ideas smaller and achievable? You do this by developing the idea muscle:

Every day, read/skim chapters from books on at least four different topics.
This morning I read from a biography of Mick Jagger; I read a chapter from
Regenesis
, a book on advances in genetic engineering, a topic I know nothing about. I read a chapter in
Tiny Beautiful Things
by Cheryl Strayed. Her other recent book,
Wild
, is an Oprah pick and was also excellent. I read a chapter from
Myths to Live By
by Joseph Campbell, and also, to waste time, I played a game of chess online.

Write down ten ideas.
About anything. It doesn’t matter if they are business ideas, book ideas, ideas for surprising your spouse in bed, ideas for what you should do if you are arrested for shoplifting, ideas for how to make a better tennis racquet, anything you want. The key is that it has to be ten or more.

You want your brain to sweat, like I mentioned earlier in the book.

Want to really sweat, and learn from my early mistakes with reality TV? Right now, list ten ideas that are “too big for me” and what the next steps might be. For instance, one idea might be “launch solar panels into outer space to more efficiently generate solar power.” Another idea might be, “genetically engineer a microbe that sucks the salt out of water.” I have no idea if that’s even possible. Another idea might be, “within one year I am going to write a book and give away a million copies for free.”

The first step would be to write the book. Then maybe I can crowd fund on kickstarter to give the book away for free. OR, I can maybe print up nano-size copies of the book so that you can only read it with a microscope but it would only cost me a couple of sheets of paper to print up a million copies. And so on. With the solar panels, I can call up SpaceX and see how much it would cost to rent space. For the microbe that desalinates…I have no idea. Can you help me?

You don’t ever have to look at these ideas again. The purpose is not to come up with a good idea. The purpose is to have thousands of ideas over time. To develop the idea muscle and turn it into a machine.

Be a transmitter.
Two farmers live side by side and drink their water from wells they’ve each built on their respective property. One farmer’s well runs out of water and he needs rain to come quickly or he will die of thirst. The other farmer did the work and dug his well so an underground stream ran right into it. His well was always filled with water and he never had to worry.

How do you find and tap this underground stream?

By making sure the other parts of your life are in balance: you have no bad emotional situations/relationships happening or you are doing your best to stay disengaged from them. You are keeping physically healthy, limiting (or eliminating) alcohol, eating well, and sleeping well. And spiritually (a word I hate because of two hundred years of meaningless connotations that have been applied to it but I can’t think of a better word), you realize that you can’t control everything in your life, cultivating a sense of surrender to the present moment as opposed to time traveling to your regrets from the past and your fears of the future.

Activate another part of your brain.
I write every day. Sometimes I need to reenergize other parts of my brain, to spark fires where things have gone dark. The other day Claudia and I took a watercolor class. I haven’t done watercolors in my life. We got there and the next thing I knew it was three hours later. My brain didn’t even notice the time passing. What did I have to show for it? The worst excuse for a sunset, some mountains, some clouds, ever done in watercolor. But my brain felt good.

Collisions.
Ideas mate with other ideas to produce idea children. Read other ideas. Compare your new ideas with your old ideas. After the Big Bang, the rest of the universe was basically created from collisions. Hydrogen atoms collided to form helium atoms, and on and on until all of the elements were created. Dead stars collided with asteroids to create planets and water and ultimately life.

Collisions are the fundamental life-giving processes of the universe. Ideas are no different. The best ideas come from collisions between newer and older ideas.

Don’t pressure yourself.
This is similar to the “burnout” issue from the chapter “How to Choose Yourself.” Sometimes you plant seeds but not every seed takes and grows into a beautiful plant. In fact, very few do. If you pressure yourself to turn every seed into the most amazingly beautiful plant the world has ever seen, then you are going to set yourself up for burnout and disappointment. You’ve consciously done all you can, now you need to let those unseen life forces go to work on the seeds. The best ones
will
sprout if you let them.

Shake things up.
I have a very strict routine every day. I wake up, read, write, exercise, eat, attend meetings (phone or live), then reverse the process: eat, write, read, and sleep. Some days I have to work on something that’s just not coming. And in those instances, I need to rejuvenate a little bit and shake things up. Do something different. Maybe I take a walk at 5 a.m. instead of reading. Maybe I sleep in four-hour shifts one day instead of eight hours straight. Maybe I spend a day writing handwritten letters instead of going on the computer. And when it comes to the work, it’s enough to just jot down some ideas, or look at what I’ve done so far, and then set it down again. Get my subconscious working on it.

Shaking things up makes the brain say, “What the hell just happened?” And while the conscious brain is confused, the subconscious slips in and drops off what it’s been working on while your conscious brain has been too busy. This is why so many people have ideas and “lightbulb” moments in the shower or when they are just about to fall asleep for a nap.

• An exercise to get your subconscious working on an idea: Write down your routine. Make it as detailed as possible. What can you change today? How can you change it?
  

List your childhood passions.
When I was six years old, I was passionately interested in both comic books and Greek mythology. In high school and college, I took five years of French and spent some time in France (even had an office there with my first business). Right now I can’t remember a single word of French except for maybe
oui
. But I remember vividly almost every comic and book I read about Greek myths from when I was six—from the very first comic (the “legion of superheroes” had to go back in time and stay with Clark’s parents in Smallville) to every comic afterward.

We only ever remember the things we are passionate about. Ultimately, these become the fields where ideas bloom and are harvested. Everything else dries up inside and dies.

Try to think back to all the things you were ever passionate about from the age of five on. You’ll be surprised how many things there were. And how many ways these passions can now be cross-fertilized and mate with each other to provide your next set of passions and ideas.

Surf the Internet.
I just saw an “infographic” (infographics are quickly becoming the new blog posts) on how to be creative. It essentially read “Turn off the computer.” Sometimes this is true. Sometimes not. With the entire world of knowledge at our fingertips, it sometimes is fun to get sucked down the rabbit hole like Alice and drift around in Wonderland. Some good places to start are brainpickings.org, thebrowser.com, and (not safe for work), extragoodshit.phlap.net. I might not get any ideas from what I see, but seeds might be planted. I find that I get a similar feeling when I go into the bookstore at a museum, pick out a bunch of books, sit down, and skim through them. It tickles the brain and lights things up that may have been dormant.

I asked people to help me come up with more ideas for coming up with ideas. Here are some of the suggestions people came up with. My thanks to all of these contributors:

Ben Nesvig:

Three things I do when struggling for idea topics:

1. Twitter Search

I’ll search phrases like:

“I wish I had”

“I just paid someone to”

“is the worst product”

“is a horrible company”

“has a terrible website”

“is my favorite website”

“does anyone know how”

With all of those terms, I’ll think of ideas on how I could fulfill their wants or how that terrible website or company could be a little less terrible.

2. Groupon

A lot of companies that use Groupons are struggling for customers and need creative ideas. I’ll take a look at the Groupon offers for that day and see if I can come up with other ways to promote the company or make their product better.

3. Hyper Focus/Freewrite

By default, everyone gives the minimum amount of attention required to complete tasks. To get ideas/insights/observations, I hyper focus. I’ll set a timer for twenty-five minutes and focus and freewrite on one single thing. That usually brings up ideas I would have never thought about.

Pat P:

Idea #10: I like to go to YouTube and put in a word relating to something I know nothing about or that I just happen to be interested in at that time and would like to know more. Then I watch a video on that subject. The risk is you waste some time watching a crappy video…the upside is unlimited. After a while your curatorial instincts get better and you know which ones from the many on any subject that YT serves up will be better than others. YT, like so much of the Internet, is an absolute treasure trove of info on nearly every subject and that, in itself, is the kernel of idea generation and mind-muscle exercise.