How to Have a Good Idea?

Answer in three words. Any ideas?

I love to play this game.

Usually it’s after someone asks me the quintessential college-aged question, “… So? You’re graduating soon… what are you doing (with your life)?” To which I answer, “Well, I’d like to be an entrepreneur.” To which the response is often a raised eyebrow and, “… So? What are your ideas?” At which point I begin shifting my feet and glancing at walls and that’s when I decide to play my game:

“Okay, so, say you’re in my shoes and you want to have a good idea— about… anything. How do you have a good idea?”

It’s their turn to shift their feet and glance at walls, and usually they give me something about market gaps or structural inefficiencies, or they go off on a tangent about this incredible article they read in the Economist—

Which I quickly interrupt and say (this is my favorite part), “You’ve got three words to answer: How do you have a good idea?”

A few more sweet seconds of shifting and glancing and a hint of frustration and then I call it off. Enough games, I’ve probably drawn this out too long already.

How do you have a good idea?

Have a lot.

Or if you’re into direct-object clarity, ‘have a lot of them,’ referring to ideas. But that’s five words, which isn’t nearly as beguiling as is three.

I’ll admit— I didn’t personally come up with this game; I’m standing on the gigantic shoulders of Thomas Edison, oft-quoted as having said, “To have a great idea, have a lot of them.” I just contort his statement into a game of petty sadism.

And there is an important follow up to this statement, which is that most of your ideas suck. And by having a lot of ideas, you’re maximizing your chances of having an idea that doesn’t suck. (That’s Astro Teller, on Innovation).

Then I feel justified in saying something to the effect of, “And so, I DO have a lot of ideas, but I’ve yet to stumble upon one that doesn’t suck. But I promise you, I’m really working at it!” At which point they usually give up trying to pin me into admitting that I don’t really actually know what I’m doing with my life.

But I really do strongly believe in this principle.

And I promise you, I’m really working at it.

And despite what my gimmicky game might indicate, I do believe that a lot more goes into having a good idea than simply having a lot. After all, you wouldn’t expect to get a different answer by deploying the same mode of thinking to the same problem 1,000 times, would you?

But I also believe, as do many others, that creativity and succesful ideation are predictable enough phenomena that they can be be conciously tackled and cracked.

And so, as derived from my thus-far unsuccesful search for an idea that doesn’t suck, here are my humble insights:

• It’s all about environment. We’re humans, evolutionary masters of manipulating our environment to match our purpose. Do so, with purpose.
• For me, that means having the following things with me at all times: A notebook. A pen. Preferably a fancy one. That’s it.
• If notebooks and pens don’t fit into pockets, smartphones suffice. As do dumbphones, that dying breed.
• It’s not always so much about your external environment (except for the fancy pen) as it is about your internal environment, as in, your willingness to 1) Allow yourself to have ideas and 2) Not immediately dismiss them as not-worth-writing. The beautiful thing about having sucky ideas is that sometimes they aren’t sucky, but we can only know this in hindsight. We’re constantly limited by what we KNOW, but in the future, we will know more (mind-blower!) and perhaps we will then have the knowledge or mental maturity to think of that crucial twist that causes the shift to not-sucky.

One last thing. Another and perhaps the most powerful tool of innovation that we can draw upon is each-other. This is especially true these days, as we no longer rely on the Pony Express to ferry our queries across the nation. Facebook released this fascinating study about degrees of separation and found that it’s not even 6 degrees but now something like 4 and a half (and proved it using its sufficiently enormous data set) that separates you from every other individual in the world.

Theoretically, we have access to each other in ways that have never before even been conceivable.

However, it’s one thing to have access, and another to actually utilize it as a resource.

So utilize it. Reach out to those you admire and respect. Identify your external resources (and use a little to buy yourself a fancy pen); be a good human and modify your environment to suit your purpose; and finally, take control of your internal environment. Allow yourself to ideate, and trust that while your ideas might suck now, someday they might not.

And play the Edison game, sometime. Make sure to take it just a little too far. Just because it’s fun.

May your thoughts be written!