5 Mental Exercises to Help You Identify Opportunities Hidden in Plain Sight

Maverick Lin

Published in

The Compounding

7 min readMay 24, 2020

I recently finished Tina Seelig’s What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World.

And wow, was I blown away.

The book is brimming with captivating real-world stories and actionable advice on how to challenge conventional assumptions, wholeheartedly embrace problems and problem-solving, and to see the world as full of opportunities and possibilities.

My Aha!-moment came when I read that after the students participated in the classes’ projects, they realized that the world was full of possibilities and that

“…they would never have an excuse for being broke, since there is always a nearby problem to be solved.”

That’s a pretty powerful message to internalize- with the mindset that the world is brimming with opportunities just begging to be solved by those insightful enough, the world is your oyster.

So I decided to extract some action items from the book- in this case, exercises and challenges that I could incorporate into my daily habit of training to become an idea machine (a concept popularized by James Altucher).

Below are 5 such mental exercises:

Five-Dollar Challenge: suppose you are only given an inital investment of $5 and 2 hours. How would you about making the most money?
The Upside-Down: take an industry (circus, airlines, sporting events) and list out all the common assumptions. Turn those assumptions upside down and imagine the exact opposite of each one.
Invert, Always Invert: come up with a problem and identify the BEST and WORST ideas. Throw out the BEST ideas and turn the WORST ideas into a fabulous idea.
Tell Me About Your Wallet: take out your wallet and decide what you love or hate about it. Ask your friends/family what they hate about their wallets. Then design a new wallet that addresses their problems.
Gimme Your Garbage: look at ideas that others have discarded and try to find ways to turn them into something useful.

Let’s dive into each of these exercises in a little more detail.

1. Five-Dollar Challenge

One of the projects that the author poses to her class is this:

Suppose you are given a seed investment of $5 and 2 hours. What would you do to earn money?

The first group of responses can be classified as Standard Responses:

Small Chance, Big Reward: go to Las Vegas (put it on all red at the roulette table) and hope for a small chance to win a big reward, or buy a lottery ticket
Earn a Few Extra Bucks: open up a lemonade stand or a car wash

These are your typical responses and they probably won’t get you anywhere… especially within the 2 hours timeframe.

The other group of responses is Beyond Standard Responses: these students realized that focusing on the money framed the problem too tightly- the $5 funding is basically nothing.

The reframed problem now becomes: how to make money if you started with absolutely nothing?

The solutions suddenly became much more creative:

One team booked reservations and sold them to customers who wanted to avoid a long wait.
Another team offered to measure bicycle pressure for free and if needed, added air for $1 and asked for donations.
Another team realized that the most previous resource was their 3-minute presentation time and sold it to a company that wanted to recruit students in the class. The group created a 3-minute “commercial” for the company and showed it during the presentation. Ingenious.

2. The Upside-Down

During the 1980s, the circus industry was in trouble- performances were boring and predictable, the audience size was shrinking, and animal treatment was under attack. It certainly was not a good time to start a new circus- unless you were a street performer in Canada called Guy Laliberte.

Guy started Cirque du Soleil by challenging every assumption about what a circus could be and turned a dying industry into an opportunity. Think about what a traditional circus involves: a big tent, animals, cheap tickets, simulatnesous performing acts, playful music, clowns, etc.

What if we flipped these assumptions? Then we get: small tent, no animals, expensive tickets, one performing act, elegant music, no clowns, etc.

Now what do we get? A brand-new type of circus- Cirque du Soleil (which is still around now and the largest contemporary circus producer in the world with almost $1 billion in revenue in 2018).

Once we’ve seen how this exercise of taking the opposite of every assumption can be applied to the circus industry, it isn’t too hard to apply it to other industries and institutions (e.g. fast-food restaurants, hotels, travel, healthcare, etc).

The hardest and most important part is to take the time to clearly identify every assumption.

3. Invert, Always Invert

While working on an exercise to help a utility company save energy, the students were given the task of coming up with the BEST and WORST ideas for the given problem.

The BEST ideas were then shredded (to the dismay of the students) and the WORST ideas were passed around so they could be turned into great ideas.

One of the “worst” ideas for saving energy was to give each employee a limit for how much energy he/she used to charge extra if he/she exceeded the limit.

The team that was tasked with this idea realized that it might not be a terrible idea- the employees should have a quota, but if they use less, they get their money back and if they use more, they have to pay extra. They can even sell energy credits to incentivize their co-workers to save energy.

The main idea is that there are no bad ideas- even the ones that seem terrible have potential to be turned into a great idea.

4. Tell Me About Your Wallet

During this exercise, participants were asked to pair up, take out their wallets, and discuss what they loved/hated about their wallets.

The discussion revealed how each person used his/her wallet and more importantly, the interesting adaptations that people developed to get around a wallet’s limitations- whether it be the size, clunkiness, lack of a coin purse, etc.

One major realization was: pretty much no one is completely happy with his/her wallet- there is always something that can be fixed or improved.

The last step was to quickly develop a wallet prototype in 30 minutes for the other person, using common materials like paper, tape, markers, paper clips, etc. The wallet was then “pitched” to the other person and usually, the new wallet solved their biggest problems.

The main takeaways are that:

The wallet doesn’t just mean a wallet- it could be a car, water bottle, shirt, etc. It just shows us that problems are everywhere.
It doesn’t take much effort to uncover these problems- people are generally happy to tell you about their problems.
By experimenting, you can quickly develop a prototype that doesn’t require a lot of upfront commitment in work, resources, or time.

5. Gimme Your Garbage

Looking through ideas and projects that others have thrown out or discarded can have tremendous value. Sometimes the ideas are discarded because they don’t fully appreciate the value, or because they don’t have time to fully explore and develop them.

When Michael Dearing was first at eBay (online auction) site, he was given a role he wasn’t partciulary excited for and decided to look through features that had been designed but then ignored or abandoned. He saw that there was a new feature that let customers add a photo to their listing for an extra 25 cents- but only 10% of the customers were using this feature.

Michael analyzed the benefits of this feature and realized that products with photos sold faster and at a higher price than products without photos. Armed with this data, he started marketing the photo service more heavily, eventually increasing the adoption rate from 10% to 60%, which resulted in $300 million additional revenue for eBay.

By looking through ideas that were ignored, Michael was able to exploit a previously untapped gold mine.

Conclusion

We live in a world full of possibilities- yet the majority of us walk through life oblivious to these opportunities.

As Charlie Munger put it, try not be the “one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”

I felt that I was that one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest- except in this case, I was the one-eyed man walking around in the world, unable to see the world overflowing with possibilities.

Hopefully these exercises will help train you to see the world with fresh eyes, encourage you to turn conventional thinking on its head, and identify opportunities you would have missed before.

Did you enjoy this?

Maybe check out my weekly newsletter: The Compounding.

It’s a collection of interesting pieces from my week that have piqued my interest, usually about investing, technology, philosophy, health, psychology, and global trends. Pretty much anything that I’ve found engaging. Also included are new articles, book notes, and cheatsheets I’ve recently completed.