I was listening to a radio interview with a celebrated singer last night and she mentioned that she also teaches people how to sing. She said that people with a natural talent for singing are easier to teach but those without natural talent, if they work hard, can find their singing voice.
In a way, coming up with ideas, and especially business ideas, is much the same. People come up with ideas all the time. It’s part of being human.
Cast your mind back to yesterday and think how many ideas you needed to come up with to get through your life and work. Some people who we call entrepreneurs have a natural ability to come up with business ideas. They actively generate ideas or look for ideas in their communities. They have made idea identification and generation a part of their being. It’s one thing talking about something and actually being something. A good book on the subject is Siddhartha a novel by Hermann Hesse.
What should you do to become a better ideas person, particularly in business?
Think for a moment about when you are under pressure. You may find yourself in a situation where change is occurring to your life and business. You need to come up with new ideas to survive. This means that you begin and to search for new ideas.
For example, I needed a new business idea last December. Immediately I started writing in a journal and never stopped until 17 days later. My business idea did not come out of my journal writing. However, the journal writing paid off by preparing my mind to open itself up for new business ideas. How did this happen?
I was taking a leisurely walk along a main street in a coastal village. I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green so I could walk across a side road when I looked up and saw something that triggered a business idea.
So strong was my feeling about this idea that for the next two days I wrote everything down I could, what the idea was about and how I could implement it. I spent the next year producing the product in my spare time.
To get back to idea generation, we don’t always have to you wait for crises before we can come up with new business ideas. We have tools, techniques, methods, approaches, paradigms and prompts to spur new business ideas. These ideas generation tools and techniques, new ways of thinking, equip you with power to generate and develop ideas any time you wish. To find out how, get yourself a copy of “Breakthrough Ideas”, a resource, a toolbox if you will, that will show you how.
