by Chris Brogan
It is also never exposed to a marketplace of bad ideas. Just as one never truly knows what is funny until one discovers what is not funny and why (like an experienced comedian), one doesn’t truly understand how a successful idea becomes successful until one sees similar ideas fail.
The magic of the amateur, or the beginner, is that he can benefit from beginner’s luck—the way random individuals can have massive YouTube successes with tens of millions of views, and so on. (They usually try to re-create their one success over and over again. Sometimes this works, but more often it’s just sad.) Everyone else needs a process of constant refinement, of exposure to embarrassment and error, in order to galvanize their mind and keep the learning process going.
After a while, you learn that successful idea creation is not an accident. It follows a process. You must recognize a good idea in your head and then mold it like clay until it’s ready for public consumption. As you do this more often, you get better at doing it quickly, until you can become a Seth Godin–esque character, able to send out 150-word snippets that reach one hundred thousand people each day. Becoming this refined isn’t obvious, easy, or quick. It takes years. We just want to take you part of the way. Then you can keep refining yourself, all while working on the other Impact Attributes. Do it well enough, and you’ll be able to recognize the best ideas and get them out there.
One Framework for Making Better Ideas
Ideas are sometimes tricky and quirky things. They don’t just show up when you want them. One way to bring about an idea is to build a simple framework for helping your ideas serve your needs. Let’s walk through this.
1. What’s the goal of the idea? First, it’s important to understand why you need a new idea in the first place. What are you trying to accomplish? Here’s a typical goal: I need to make more money. But herein is the first lesson for having better ideas: Be more specific, or it becomes pointless. Maybe you don’t just need to make more money; you need to make more money with fewer hours and preferably without as much custom or repeat work.
2. How does this idea fit my existing framework? Does it? Let’s say your goal is to make more money without as much custom or repeat work, but you’re a music tutor. Well, your core job isn’t really built for mass production, but if you created a series of online video courses instead, you could accomplish this goal. You can see how it fits together. This is where ideas start to get better.
3. How much work does this idea add to my life? One way to have better ideas is to understand how they fit into the framework of your existing life. For instance, Chris had a business idea he thought would be great, but when he did the math, it turned out to be twenty hours of work a week for only a little more revenue. In considering your ideas, you must factor in their impact on the rest of your world.
4. What will it take to accomplish this idea? People sometimes have great ideas that start with “Step 1: Buy an NBA basketball team.” While this is ambitious, it might be a bit difficult to get past that first step. List what it will take to get your idea going. If possible, list milestones and daily bite-size ways to accomplish it. When we wrote this book, we made the goal one thousand good words a day. With two authors, that gets the book finished in a reasonable amount of time, and it gave us something simple to measure against.
5. What additional resources do I need to make this idea work? This is another area in which you must work out the details. For instance, let’s say you are hoping to become a successful real estate professional in Palm Springs, but you’ve lived your entire life in Mumbai. You should make some connections in Palm Springs so you can start networking and learning about the people and culture. What other resources would you need? You’d need a real estate license for California. You’d need to start finding buyers and sellers. You’d need some contacts. Looking into the resources helps any idea get better.
6. How will I know whether to keep going or quit? One book that we both agree is a critical read for anyone in the business world is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. In this book, he introduces us to the term “pivot,” which refers to the moment when a start-up has to decide whether to press on with its original plan or “pivot” and take on a new angle. The same can be done with your own personal ideas, your business ideas, or whatever. How will you know whether to keep following the plan you’ve created versus pivoting into a new approach?
7. When will I be done? Is the idea temporary? What makes it a “success” or a “failure”? And is there a specific timetable for the idea’s usefulness? For instance, if you’re thinking about whom you could take to the prom but you’re forty, you might have missed your window on that one (we’re just saying).
Obviously, this framework doesn’t work for every idea, but give it a shot before you throw it out. Let’s review the seven questions without our commentary:
1. What’s the goal of the idea?
2. How does this idea fit my existing framework?
3. How much work does this idea add to my life?
4. What will it take to accomplish this idea?
5. What additional resources do I need to make this idea work?
6. How will I know whether to keep going or quit?
7. When will I be done?
What do you think about this? Does it work for you? Push this up against some of your current ideas and let us know.
Recognizing a Good Idea
Once you’ve exposed yourself to the bad-idea marketplace by creating many more ideas than usual through mind maps, freewriting, and other methods, you’ll have a much better understanding of why certain ideas fail and others do well. Consistently exposing your ideas will refine that skill, but once you’ve gotten there, how will you know whether you’ve connected with something that’s amazing or something that’s simply not bad? This is what we want to help you find out.
Good ideas have many formats, and there have been many books written about how they work, including the amazing Made to Stick. But instead of reading assignments, we’ll give you a short primer on how ideas are sticky, spreadable, and interesting—in other words, when ideas are really good.
Good ideas make you feel…something, anything! If an idea leaves you feeling flat, then it is flatlining. You can love it or hate it, but it must make you feel something in order to make you finish reading or watching it, and more so to share it. Julien’s book The Flinch was short enough to read in an hour, by design, creating a positive feeling in readers along the way and asking them to spread its ideas at the end. It worked, to the tune of thirty-five thousand readers in the first week.
Good ideas attach themselves to other concepts in the brain. With existing ideas to grip on to, your idea can hold on to the audience in a much more permanent way. This is what happens when we use CREATE as an acronym for our Impact Attributes—it may seem contrived, but it is simply good idea design. Chris often calls this “giving your idea handles,” because it lets people take the concept and make it their own—putting it in their own mind map alongside the concepts that best suit them.
Good ideas fulfill a need. Highly efficient ideas help people fill a blank space in their head, whether they know it exists or not. Your opinions may be helpful and interesting, but unless they are specifically useful to your audience, you are not building something of significant or lasting value.
Method 2: Have More Ideas
Idea Storms
First, let us explain that the term “IdeaStorm” is owned by Dell and is loosely based on what LEGO has done with “Mindstorms.” The idea is simple: Let everyone share ideas, let everyone vote on ideas, and see what rises to the top. It’s brilliant in its simplicity. Just reread this paragraph before going on, and you’ll see the value. Many thoughts working on the ideas. Many people able to vote.
This is James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds in action. It’s something we understand very well: If there are more ideas, there’s a chance we will get to a better answer first. It’s a good and proven concept, but there’s one caution.
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It works much better once the initial or baseline ideas are put in place. In IdeaStorm, Dell invites customers to improve on existing designs or to help fill holes in a system that is already laid out. In Mindstorms, LEGO aficionados communicate augmentations and adjustments to ideas already released.
We have seen no cases where traditional “brainstorming” or its variants work at the beginning of the process. Without some sense of context, a framework, or a notion of where to begin, letting loose a lot of ideas into unplotted space isn’t effective.
To this point, save the “storms” for when you’ve got a bit of a framework going, and then let them loose.
Storming Your Ideas
The concept is this: Expose your developed or somewhat developed idea to others to improve it. What’s required to make this happen?
A preexisting idea that feels developed enough to share.
An idea that can serve others. An idea that serves only you is less likely to be worked upon by anyone other than you.
An “ecosystem” that allows your idea to be part of something larger, where others can own a part of the experience.
Flexibility in how other people’s ideas can augment yours. It might be an idea that serves a secondary part of your plans, but that might still be quite helpful.
In most cases, status rewards rather than financial rewards. In the “storm” communities that build around ideas, people more often seek recognition for their ability to solve a problem or create a valuable idea.
There are lots of ways that a system like this can go wrong:
Trying to build a false or incongruous reward system.
Seeking help when your idea doesn’t have a community.
Changing the reward system midstream.
Gumming it all up with improper legal interaction.
Communicating poorly.
Your Mileage May Vary
If you’re fortunate enough to have a community around your product or service or idea, then you can try to start your own kind of idea storm. If not, don’t fret. There are still ways to make your ideas better. You’ll just have to do more of it yourself.
The Shotgun Blast
There is a lot of garbage on the Internet, true, but it is also becoming the largest repository of amazing information in the world. The garbage that comes out of this process is a by-product, a necessary part of the process that creates genius.
If you personally want to create something amazing, the best strategy is to act like the Internet does. You have to be comfortable with creating garbage in order to have some measure of awesome stuff.
The Web’s tolerance for garbage is as high as can be—so anything can go on it—and the best stuff ends up there as a result. Reddit works, as we discussed earlier, because the bad stuff disappears very quickly. Your ability to be comfortable with less-than-perfect content will be directly proportionate to the amazing things you create. In other words, creating today’s garbage is an important aspect of creating tomorrow’s gold.
This is really about letting the audience decide what is good or bad and curating less. It is a shotgun approach, or as publishers are fond of saying, “Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.” Some publishers have even started to act like this, and Lord knows some of the greatest companies of our time have too.
As you begin this process, prepare to be surprised. The reactions you will get won’t be what you expect.
You’ll find that the most emotional, most opinionated, and least censored posts become the most liked—though they also tend to be the least well designed.
Once you see what emotion you are able to create and what emotion your audience tends to respond to, it’s time to create smart content around those feelings and wrap smart ideas around them.
CONTRAST: A QUICK DEFINITION
When we talk about Contrast in this section, we do it from several angles. In each case, we’re talking about how one makes something stand out from everything else. Certain schools require you to wear a uniform every day. If you chose to look different from others, how would you do this while still adhering to the school rules?
You might dye your hair, if that were permissible in the rules. You might tie your tie in a jaunty or perky way. You might choose to accessorize with a very interesting backpack or book cover. Who knows? But that’s what we mean by “Contrast.”
How Two Different Hotels Use Twitter
We like Christopher Lynn and the team at the Colonnade Hotel in Boston. They are community-minded types and have done a lot to contribute to the Boston-area social media scene. In thinking of a pair of businesses to contrast, we looked up another hotel (chosen absolutely at random) and looked at each of the two hotels’ last twenty tweets. Because we are about to criticize the other hotel, we shall remove its name from the comparisons.
Hotel A (not the Colonnade) used its last twenty tweets this way:
Inviting people to prebook for an upcoming event.
Praising its restaurant’s views and food (in that order).
Offering a package add-on to get chocolates and other things.
Sharing a TwitPic from the hotel.
Cross-promoting its Facebook page.
Promoting its wedding offerings.
Promoting its events for all of 2012.
Promoting its Google+ page.
Promoting its cake. (We’re not making this up.)
Sharing a TwitPic from the hotel.
Forget it. We couldn’t bear to make you see the next ten tweets. Let’s stop at nine.
By contrast, here’s what the @Colonnade stream did for its last nine tweets:
Pointing to a song by the Killers (showing its musical tastes).
Responding to a guest who tweeted thanks.
Tweeting more song lyrics.
Tweeting about the Boston Red Sox (showing community).
Tweeting twice from the Red Sox game.
Retweeting a guest praising a recent event there.
Tweeting again about the Red Sox (again, community related).
Recommending a JetBlue promotion for Boston-area folks.
Wishing Fenway Park a happy hundredth birthday.
The first hotel talked all about itself. The Colonnade showed its personality with its musical choices, promoted the Boston Red Sox celebrating Fenway Park’s hundredth year (which was big news for its area), and had a few tweets back and forth with guests. It took us forty-one tweets to find something self-promotional. We thought we saw something about twenty-four tweets in, but it turned out the Colonnade was promoting an independent wedding photographer who was shooting a wedding at the hotel. It promoted her site and praised her for her abilities, thus nudging people to use her for their own projects.
Ask yourself: Which hotel would you rather visit? Now, let’s be real. Most people don’t think to check the Facebook or Twitter stream of a hotel they’re visiting. They might not even care. But by simply looking at the Colonnade’s sharp Contrast in not promoting itself tirelessly, you get a sense of what you could do with your own business, your own ideas, and your own information sharing or messages.
You can think of Contrast in lots of ways. Look at what competitors say, along with others in your space. Avoid almost all of the words they use. You might use a few specific phrases so search engines find you more easily, but beyond that, don’t do it. If your competitors all say, “We value our customer,” don’t ever say that. If they say, “We are next-generation technology,” strike it from your vocabulary.
Think about what else you want to be known for, apart from your primary function. If you’re a financial planner, instead of just talking about that, you can say, “I do financial planning for the kinds of people who ride fast motorcycles and think vacations should involve bruises and scars.” Can you imagine the difference in which prospects will buy from you?
One interesting way to look at Contrast is that it helps you predisqualify potential interactions. Imagine you run a restaurant that serves o
nly premium beer, wine, and spirits. There’s not a single drop of common, domestic beer to be found on the premises. If you talked about that online, on your menus, and in other materials, people who preferred premium adult beverages would most certainly identify themselves and those who loved a great can of Pabst Blue Ribbon would know that this wasn’t their restaurant.
Eliminate useless or silly words and phrases when considering your Contrast. If you run an accounting firm and you try to tell people that you’re accurate and efficient, you’re saying what everyone else says. If you say, “We’re so good, we do your taxes in pen,” people will get it and maybe appreciate the humor.
Realize that in life and business, it’s always what stands out that gets remembered. If everyone competes on price, but you are the only one raging about your incredible customer service, then that’s what we’ll remember. (Rackspace Web hosting does this quite well.)
Contrast is understanding more about ideas, understanding their shape, understanding what you need to do to get an idea absorbed by those who need it. We’ve dedicated a lot of pages to this, because in our minds, if the idea doesn’t stand out in a sea of other ideas and thoughts, then it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a great platform and a strong community. This is what needs to happen first.
Ideas and Bravery
Sofia Walker was three years old when she came face-to-face with a large male lion. She had her hands out in front of her and a big smile on her face when the lion reared up and started swiping his paws at her in rapid succession. Yes, there was glass between Sophia and the lion. She was at a zoo in New Zealand. But when you look at the video, you see a three-year-old girl barely flinching when a lion goes into attack mode.