Everyone wishes they had that $B idea
My 5 month research-backed process will make sure you can.
I am about to give you a worksheet that will generate creative breakthroughs for you. The kind that lead to industry changing Uber-like inventions. Yes, it sounds like a lofty promise.
But if you bear with me, I’ve spent 5 months on this journey and tested my assumptions — so I’ll live up to this promise.
Lately I’ve been obsessed with trying to uncover a system, a recipe even, that will enable me to come up with creative ideas on demand.
In other words, I’ve been in search of a method to systematise creative thought.
A repeatable process. A step by step guide. As it relates to business, and product innovation.
Being able to tap into those precise creative leaps that lead to industry-changing breakthroughs as, and when, I need. Instead of gazing at the stars and waiting for the muse to strike.
Because, we all know, that asshole rarely does.
Unfortunately every time I’ve been hit with a problem all I’ve had is Jay-Z that bastard ringing in my ear, saying
“You got 99 problems, but an answer ain’t one”. Thanks buddy.
The issue is, it is ubiquitously believed that creativity stems from some magical non-methodical journey to look out into the esoteric. In hope that a superpower will be momentarily tapped, that will bless you with an answer.
In this game of creative idea generation you apparently can’t play the role of seeker…you must be the receiver.
Maria Popova has dedicated years and an entire website towards this quest.
I don’t doubt this belief. However if you are able to be lead to the vicinity of gold, to a place where the likelihood is great, you are more likely to strike. As opposed to you aimlessly meandering and hoping to serendipitously stumble upon it.
The Seth Godins, the Ev Williams, the Neil Gaimans of the world seemingly have this gold detector that helps them strike creative gold more often than others. As if the heavens are always open to them and they are consistently showered with creative fairy dust.
Hence these individuals, and other greats, must do something, even the slightest glimpse of a system must exist, that enables them to harness these creative powers.
…even if they don’t know it themselves.
This desire lead down a very deep, 19 week, obsessive journey to find the answer.
Below is my essay on what I uncovered.
You’ll have access to a worksheet to a process called 3 Cycles of Creation (a name I coined) that will lead to insights that you may spend months pounding the pavement, or even worse, never arrive at.
Hence I implore you to bear with the length of this post, I could have turned this into a Kindle book, the equivalent of 50-odd pages with a 12pt font, or a Udemy course and potentially made a few thousand.
But I’ve giving it to you for free in hope that it reaches more people than it would through the above channels.
With a promise from you that if you find it valuable that you share it with others.
Let’s go.
Musk, Da Vinci, de Bono & Three Workshops.
Actionable Steps On 100+ Hours of Research
I’ve summated hundreds of hours of research into the most key points, so if you are hungry to jump straight in instead of understanding what lead to the process — click below and you can download the worksheet right away.
The first question I asked was “what answers already exist?”
Edward de Bono
Known for the 6 thinking hats theory, de Bono comes up as the ringleader of contemporary creativity theorists. From my many searches, his name was the most widely quoted. The father of creative thinking.
So from reading the father’s key books, scouring notes from his exclusive classes, and watching his videos.
The key techniques he has devised that help trigger the mind to output creative solutions boil down to the following:
- Reversing the problem — see the problem you are trying to solve in the opposite way you’re seeing it now,
- Free-associating with random words — to make a wild jump, use random words to generate previously invisible associations,
- Break down to concepts — go back to the underlying concept you’re trying to solve,
- Provocation — provoke the solution, people, ideas, etc. and see what comes up,
- Challenging — see what is already working and challenge it, and the theory he is best known for,
- 6 Thinking Hats -
The 6 Thinking Hats is a problem solving structure that allows you to compartmentalise the various modes of thought (your factual mind, your emotional mind, your optimistic mind, your creative mind etc.). Each category has its own coloured metaphorical “thinking hat”. Putting on different hats lets you zero in on a particular thinking process. And as a team, lets you, systematically arrive at a solution.
For me, my unwavering interest is in uncovering a methodology to help generate creative leaps in value. De Bono presents many examples of all the above doing just that.
…However, unsurprisingly, they are all after the fact.
Authors are known to present examples of successful innovations, and then explain it using a model that neatly encompasses that innovation. Essentially interpreting innovation through their lens.
So, was it really this technique that he applied to arrive at these solutions?
Or is it the hashing of a system thereafter that sounds plausible and helps position him as the expert?
I don’t know.
And all methods he presents are essentially an array of “hacks” that help promote orthogonal thinking. There isn’t a definitive step by step process of sorts. So, I took what I could, tucked the scepticism under my arm...
And, continued.
James Webb Young (1939)
Advertising man James Webb Young’s how-to manual in the 30s was the seminal work on demystifying the creativity process, which was influenced by the earlier work of Graham Wallace (1926).
Till this day, his 5-step creativity process is quoted by many. Including the likes of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, who have referred to, or expanded on his work.
The process he outlines is summated below.
Young is of the belief that the production of ideas is “just as definite a process as the production of Fords” — one that can be learned and controlled. There are principles that underlie all ideation.
“What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.” — James Webb Young
The process seems common sense today, and 80 years on, it is Young’s work that is the reason for this being the case. Hence, as an overview or general framework of the process of idea generation, it is true and everlasting.
But when it comes to being put to the litmus test of being actionable — it lacks greatly.
The high-level nature of it (being more in the clouds than in the dirt), it doesn’t hold a person’s hand through the process, or is granular enough, that it will guarantee an output of valuable ideas. It is more-so a scenic fly-over, as opposed to the guide that grabs you by the shoulder and takes you trekking through it. Making sure you end up on the other side.
So from 1930s to 2016.
Design Thinking
The latest buzzword strategy, and seemingly the holy grail of a startup’s innovation process — the design thinking process (aka agile, or lean thinking).
Stanford University, Google, and IDEO being the main drivers to reignite the trend tracing back to 1969.
“Design thinking is a formal method for practical, creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result.” — Nigel Cross
So I reeled in a mate and went through d.school’s crash course to get into the trenches of this.
Design thinking takes place through a process of synthesis and divergent thinking. What this means in layman terms, analysis is where we take a substantial whole, and through some process break it down into components. Synthesis, through divergent thinking, does the opposite — where you take separate components and meld them into forming a coherent whole.
Broken into 5 steps:
- Empathise — see the problem from the viewpoint of your customer,
- Define — be 200% clear,
- Ideate — free-flow ideas, design things, and converge upon a solution,
- Prototype — create something you can test, and,
- Test.
This framework, no doubt, minimises wastage in the innovation process, and helps generate rapid feedback such that it will align the person on a path towards greater likelihood of success.
But the pre-requisite to all of this is the idea itself. If you are unable to see WHAT to sketch, WHAT to design, and WHICH direction to look. The execution of it is irrelevant. Hence the efficacy of design thinking, or any other startup framework, is low as a definitive ideation process doesn’t exist.
We fail to see the value in the idea, the hunch, the creative breakthrough itself. We believe ideas will just appear.
The most amazing execution can’t transform a crappy idea.
So, I guess my next step was obvious. I must go to the source. Finding out how the greatest creators, inventors, and innovators do it.
Elon Musk, Picasso, Leonardo Da Vinci, Walt Disney, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos
Now without going so deep into the weeds that I uncover your cure to insomnia.
I will summarise into two words the 100s of pages of research (including biographies), hours of video interviews, and conversations with those who know a lot more about these people that I could hope to uncover:
First Principles.
It was a real a-Ha moment of this whole journey, when I saw this reoccurring pattern. Which in retrospect should not really have been that surprising as it seems stupidly obvious, and is so often mentioned.
But a resonating characteristic with these luminaries, one that was uncannily similar, is their motivation to continually ask WHY.
And ask more often and persistently than others.
Navi Radjou, and Simon Sinek highlight this eloquently in their TED talks.
This involves removing existing assumptions, patterns, norms, and chiselling everything down to the absolute first principles. The basics, empirical knowledge, which is not established on any other assumption, or parameter.
In even simpler terms, “WHAT YOU ARE SURE IS TRUE, that’s your first principle. Rest is assumptions. Reason up from there.” — Elon Musk
Other patterns emerged such as,
- an incubation phase,
- having access to a varying skill-set,
- mitigating risk, and,
- regular experimentation,
All playing a strong role in influencing my final process.
3 other nuggets of gold along the way (that needed to be mentioned)
A David Perkins, a professor at Harvard University, showed that 90% of the errors of thinking are errors of perception — not logic. Perception is about how you look at things. What you have to ask yourself is: “I’m looking at the problem this way, but is there another way of looking at it?”
B. Learn lots of skills — this advice appeared repeatedly throughout my journey. Diverse experiences allow for divergent thinking and increases the capacity for innovation. It’s important to approach new activities with an open mind and maintain a lifelong desire to store materials in the “idea-producer’s reservoir”.
C. Daily ideation (e.g. 10 ideas a day practice of James Altucher) — creative thinking is a skill. To turn it into an ingrained behaviour, a default, as opposed to when you are boning up on it for an immediate purpose. A daily ideation practice promotes creative thinking as the mind’s default operating system.
Testing My Assumptions In The Real World — 4 x Creative Thinking Workshops
So at this stage of the journey, with enough research to back my claims, I had an inkling on what the framework should like if we were to systematise creative thought to output leaps in value.
I had essentially reverse engineered it. But…
“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth” – Mike Tyson
Hence I put it to test in the real world.
I organised 4 different creative thinking workshops
Attending these were creatives that came from an array of different worlds. Artists, entrepreneurs, writers, executives, and managers. Lured with a promise that they would walk away with an inventive solution they would not achieve otherwise.
I had 28 people attend the workshops in total. Not a large number, but the results were statistically convincing that I had adequate validation.
- Each person had a business/work related obstacle, some battling it longer than others.
- They wrote the problem down prior to the workshop, so we could debrief, hold them accountable, and evaluate as a group thereafter.
- They then went through a structured process step by step that would spit out an answer. The process that I’ll be outlining below.
Each workshop proved to be more successful than the previous, as I tweaked the structure slightly and observed what was happening each time.
I am not under the egomaniac assumption that I’ve finally unlocked the mystery which has puzzled artists, inventors, and creators alike since the dawn of human thought. How creativity works will remain one of humanity’s most unanswerable questions.
However I can confidently say that this process will take it one step further. All attendees left with creative value that they would not have generated otherwise. And potentially saved them months, or even years, of pavement pounding. Doing it through creativity instead of inefficient hustle.
And that, my friend, is #realtalk.
I’ll be publishing interviews with the attendees on my Instagram — so keep an eye and ear out.
So without further ado, here is the recipe to generate creative breakthroughs on demand.
Click here to download the worksheet and get your hands dirty.
There is a detailed real-life example thereafter to show you this in action, so fear not, your hand will be held throughout the process.
The are essentially 7 steps you must follow in a particular order. To help you remember the steps, I’ve turned them into the phrase “Coughing Sir?”
C — Clarify via twitter
O — Observe the space
F — Break down to First Principles
9 — Go through the 9 Question Trail
S — Enter Success Vision
I — Incubation period
R — Read
Cof9sir = Coughing Sir.
And going through all these steps forms one cycle. Rinse and repeat 3 times as below for the best outcome:
- Cycle 1 — To be done by yourself,
- Cycle 2 — To be done with a partner, someone with as much experience and as mutually exclusive a skill-set from yours as possible, and,
- Cycle 3 — A week later. Re-visited by yourself.
So in simple terms, you do the Cof9sir process 3 times. Once individually, once in a pair, and and once with a significant gap of time in between.
Hunches, and great ideas, don’t come from sitting within the four walls of your office and hashing something out. It is a combination of extracting what’s inside your head, the heads of others, environmental inputs, and having access to a method that systematically merges them all into one creative leap in value.
This is the reasoning behind the 3 cycles.
Now that you’re up to speed on the high level framework, let me dive deep and outline each step. Providing a thorough explanation of the purpose and implementation of each step.
C: Clarify The Problem
Have your problem at the forefront of your mind. Make it real, concrete, and ridiculously clear.
A great deal of the time you don’t know what problem you are actually trying to solve. You think you do, but more often than not, you don’t.
Our minds today are accustomed to being bombarded with simultaneous inputs and being able to dive deep into one input can be a challenge.
So to clarify the problem, constraints are your best friend. So, as step 1, I suggest you open up Twitter, or restrict yourself to 140 characters in some other manner, and type out your problem in the below format:
“I need/want/feel/find it difficult to [whatever your problem is]”.
O: Observe your market, your space
Listen. See what’s happening right now. This is to allow direction to your solution. To see the trends. To see activity. To look for the white space.
Do this in the same sphere as your problem, be specific to your space, and industry, the less generic, and more niche, the better.
Find out what people are doing more of?
What aren’t they doing now that they were before?
Where is their attention right now?
Where are they going?
What are they talking about?
What isn’t being met?
Follow this line of questioning.
Don’t create any solutions just yet, be the detective who is gathering enough data points. This step, even though it may seem vague, is imperative in uncovering where the hidden value resides and is a prerequisite for the introspective journey you’re about to take.
Even when you think you’re done, keep going. You want to continue to look for the gaps, and by searching in the crevices, you will prime your mind to output solutions in areas where it is likely value resides. As opposed to irrelevant tangents.
The best way to do this step is to allow free reign to use social media to prowl the activity of others.
Some tools: Google’s keyword tool. Google trends. App Store. Google Play Store. Instagram hashtags. Twitter conversations. Facebook groups/trends/shares. Ebay completed listings. Items in demand. Amazon best sellers.
F: First Principles
Remove all assumptions. Go to first principles. This will uncover the actual problem you’re trying to solve, or alter the problem completely.
Ask what, why, and how repeatedly. To the point that you cannot continue asking.
The aim is to break down the problem into the most fundamental components. To find the real truth. The core.
This is teased down by asking “why” and “what” repeatedly. To challenge every assumption. It is a matter of intuitively feeling when you have arrived at the underlying principle, or you’ve reached the core. At that moment you can stop asking any further.
A couple of questions that can shortcut this whole process…
“What are you sure about?”
“What is the core function?”
9: 9 Question Trail
Your mind is now primed. Here’s where pathways between different areas of your expertise will merge, and your knowledge will be leveraged to promote this orthogonal, lateral mode of thinking. And ideas will start to appear.
Go through the below list of questions and exercises. Note down the idea that comes to mind after asking each question. Each step will refine and improve it further.
- What is your problem in reverse? Try different variations of the problem. Example — Starbucks Coffee wants to increase its company’s revenue, changed to, clients want to increase Starbucks company revenue.
- Is there another valuable problem you can solve simultaneously with this one? Example — We also wants to bring down cost, so clients want to increase our company’s revenue while bringing down our costs.
- What would the worst experience look like? What would the best experience look like? Example — Blue Bottle Cafe realised the worst customer experience would be to compromise on the quality of the coffee, and the best would be to heighten the perception of quality by taking seemingly obsessive measures to produce each cup of coffee.
Bonus — How could you dramatically raise the experience beyond expectations? Or the opposite, completely remove the experience to provide a highly functional solution? Example — BMW (re:form) or Rolls Royce is an example of a brand that is the pinnacle of customer experience. Walmart is that of pure function.
- What happens before, what happens after? Example — Uber saw that the inconvenience of having to call for a taxi, explain your location, and have no idea how far your driver was before even getting in the taxi. Then after the ride, having to carry cash or make a payment through your card. While keeping your friends in tune with how far you are, could all be merged into one.
- What can you eliminate that is taken for granted? Example — Medium, the blogging platform, realised that the need for a website to blog was taken for granted, an open platform for everyone to blog may be much more effective.
- What is everyone doing right now? How could you do the complete opposite? Example — Everyone was making things bigger in the audio space, bigger speakers, subwoofers etc. Sony made something smaller — the portable walkman.
- What are the alternatives to what you offer? Outside of your industry. Example — The alternative to going to an AMC Theatres cinema isn’t going to another cinema, it could be going to a Restaurant, going out for a few drinks, going to a friend’s place. Businesses like Soccer golf, and RolleyGolf are examples of activities formed on this premise of looking for alternatives across industries.
- Could you reach a different buyer? There are buyers and users in the chain that the solution may appeal to even more than what is considered the norm. Example — Canon created the desktop copier to move upstream from the corporate purchasers, which had been the industry norm for many years, to the users themselves.
- How would it look if you made it 10x bigger? Think ten times. Multiply by 10 what you’re thinking right now. 10 times bigger typically means 1,000 times the value, without the associated increase in cost. Hence asking this question typically requires innovation to be tapped into, instead of just an incremental improvement. Example — Google [X] and Astro Teller who are in charge of the moonshot division to bring magical, audacious ideas into reality. Because they are looking to unlock incredible value, it demands the need to think creatively and innovate.
S: Success Vision
See it from the eyes of someone successful. How would their solution look?
Our creativity is limited by our experiences, our skills, and our learnings. What Austin Kleon can leverage as an artist to create a NY Times Bestseller, we are likely not able to.
But there may be a way we can momentarily tap into Austin and others’ way of thinking.
Watching interviews, listening to, and immersing yourself with the thoughts and viewpoints of someone whom you believe would have an incredible solution to this problem can allow you perspective that you wouldn’t achieve yourself.
It is a cheat to essentially jump into the shoes of this successful person, and think the way they do, even momentarily. We are wired to mirror behaviour. So go deep, and visualise yourself as this successful person. Try to be them.
Then outline what would his/her solution be.
Rapid fire ask right after this to get to the real value,
- How could this be simpler? Even simpler.
- How could this be easier? Even easier.
I: Incubate
BREAK AWAY. You have to break away at this point, completely detach. If you continue to ideate, you will actually hamper your results. You are deep enough in the weeds, it is time to now see the forest.
Programming your mind like a missile homing device, where your brain will now observe the world and gather inputs specifically related to your problem. Through the tasks you engage in, your environment, and those you meet, you’ll be a deletion machine that removes all else but that which leads to your answer.
What I’ve noticed is complete immersion in another activity will break you away and allow for these connections to emerge faster than any other way.
Play Baseball.
Do Yoga.
Knitting.
Whatever moves you.
Do something to get you into a state of flow and detached from the problem solving mode.
For me, it is typically moments of silence where I find the answer.
Meditation works best. I always come up with insights during a state of complete presence and meditating for extended periods of time. Which scientifically has something to do with an increase in alpha brain waves, and these brain waves are responsible for creativity.
But you are not me, so do whatever works best for you.
R: Read
The final step is to become a bookworm.
I like to repeat things, so here it is, creative breakthroughs and hunches result from being able to leverage your own, and other people’s experiences and insights.
Reading, once you’ve detached yourself from analysis mode, is one of the fastest ways to achieve this. Read lots, and at length.
In terms of the specific category — I find non-fiction strategic and actionable type of content helps me the most. But others have pointed out the fact that fiction is an imagination of divergent ideas, it hence, does a better job of connecting the dots for them. Again, to each their own.
So my only suggestion would be to pick up something that will let you visit the mindset and thoughts of another person. Something to get you in another person’s skin, see the world from their eyes.
This could include blogs, books, movies, videos (TED talk types), and anything else that ticks the above box.
And that one complete cycle of “Coughing Sir?”
By now you would have dominated and one-hit-punched any creative blocks.
And in the process you would have told Jay-Z to sit the _ down.
You can stop here if you are satisfied (most times you will be, but there is a reason there are 3 cycles to this process, and you will not extract true value until you complete all three).
That choice is yours.
The second round will involve someone outside of your industry. Someone sharp, with great experience, but experience that is in a space completely detached from yours. This will extract hunches from a new worldview.
Then, the last, third cycle is where those small tweaks are generated. Small tweaks that lead to unique breakthroughs.
Where you’ve had time to allow multiple inputs to influence the output. And the greatest breakthroughs are iterative and will come from the smallest clicks, where something that already seems valuable jumps over to something incredible.
As you continue with life, you can revert back and repeat a cycle whenever you want. The bigger the gap in time between each, the more likely you are to uncover something new.
But for now, to make it easy for you to refer to the steps and keep it all in one place, download the worksheet below and see my example below.
The Process In Action: Story Art by Jasky
How this process lead to my own creative breakthrough.
I like to be held accountable, because it is all good and well to give you this step by step process and brand it as the holy grail. Many have:
- Brian Tracy (link),
- Jack Canfield (link),
- James Altucher (link)
- Michael Hyatt (link),
- Gary Vaynerchuk (link),
It will always sound plausible on paper, because you don’t have to prove it works. In real life however it’ll get its ass kicked.
That’s not how I roll.
So here is one cycle of the process in action which lead to my latest venture called Story Art by Jasky which you can follow on Instagram @sikkant. Please actually take a second to follow, if you’ve come this far and extracted all this value, it is really my one ask.
Summary:
I’ll summarise the entire section below if you’ve had enough of reading and you can always refer back —
Cycle #1 my problem was trying to cut through the noise with my writing and have my messages reach more people. It lead me to realising the best way to cut through the noise is to actually change the format, tell a story, and make it easy to digest. Observing trends meant imagery and video was the best means of promotion. At the end of the cycle I was convinced on the idea of writing stories with comic illustrations to support them.
Cycle #2 I reeled in an illustrator to go through the second cycle with me. He gave me the idea of creating art, paintings, collectibles that people purchase. But combining it with story would really transform the value, experience and novelty.
Cycle #3 was critical in generating that small tweak to refine the market position and actually promote Story Art as its own category. Furthermore to piggyback an existing position in the market, I realised targeting the self-indulgent world of contemporary art would make story art its antithesis. Creating a position where those against that world, those that don’t understand it, or are familiar with it, this will be their go-to.
I’ll walk you through the first cycle so you can do the same with yours.
Cycle #1
C — Clarity
My problem expressed as a tweet:
O — Observe
- People are reading more, more bloggers today than there ever were.
- People are consuming a lot more personal development material — top stories on Medium 50% are personal development
- 5 out of the top 20 Amazon best sellers this year are self-help
- Attention is on real-life stories. Authenticity with storytelling is reigning supreme. Snapchat, Instagram and other social media engagement is a testament to this.
- The greatest selling self-help book of all time Chicken Soup for the Soul is a collection of true inspirational stories (130 million sales), storytelling is evergreen.
- Collectibles, physical products, are on the rise — popularity of FujiFilm INSTAX. Seth Godin is releasing a collectible form book combining a number of his blog posts from over the years.
- Video is grabbing a lot more attention. With Facebook profiles allowing videos and stats indicating as much. Instagram on the rise. Note — more people are watching video without sound.
- Not as many people are willing to put their face on video and talk to the camera as they are about taking a curated selfie and writing text to accomodate it.
- Live video is growing as a trend.
- Words without images don’t convert as well. Advertising stats are indicating people prefer images over just words. Plus, high quality graphics are much easier to create, with the rise of online softwares democratising design.
- Long-form quality content is more in demand — i.e. podcasts. Most popular podcasts are the longest form possible. Plus stats indicate that longer blog posts are more popular.
- There is a need to be different, be unique through fashion, health, expression. As seen by purchasing activities via Shopify.
- Entrepreneurship is fashionable.
- Twitter is full of support of causes. People are looking for positivity, and groups they can connect with in the world.
- Websites are no longer important — the brand overrides the need for a website.
- Health, meditation, and stress decreasing activities are on the rise.
F — First Principles
“I want to find a way to cut through the noise with my writing…”
Why is there so much noise? I am one of many that are writing about the same category of topics. There are a lot morepeople blogging and writing on the internet.
Why are you one of many? Even though I know I bring more value through my writing than most others, there is nothing that is really making my messages stand out for them to be read by the audience that I want to reach.
Why isn’t it standing out? I don’t have something that catches people’s attention right away. I am not presenting my ideas in a unique format. I am writing blog articles that muddle up with everyone else. Nor do I have a big passionate following.
Why don’t you have a unique format? It is the norm of how everyone presents them.
Why is it the norm? It is the way that has worked for others for years.
Why has it worked? People wanted to read shorter, more concise ideas from real people instead of journalists and media. People wanted to consume content real time that was relevant.
What is the core function of your writing? It is to simplify complex topics to lead to an impactful insight, lesson or truth that gets people to take action, or positively impact their life.
So is writing articles the only way to do this? No.
And if enough value exists, will people will pay for that value? Yes.
Why are they not paying now? Because what I write is easily replaceable, and it isn’t convention to pay for blogs. The resistance would be incredibly high.
What you sure about? People want to read to improve their lives and be entertained. And for the past 5,000+ years storytelling has been the everlasting way of sharing ideas and messages with people.
Takeaways — writing is about spreading messages, storytelling has been spreading messages since forever, and if the format of how the message is delivered is changed, and there is enough value, people will pay.
9: 9 Question Trail.
- What is your problem in reverse? Try different variations of the problem. — How can my writing reduce the noise? Why is my writing adding to the noise? How do I make my writing seem less noisy?
IDEA: Change your content to a different format, try story. - Is there another valuable problem you can solve along with this one, at the same time? — How can I also generate revenue from this work? How can I have some sort of a revenue model, with potential to turn into a business, and be a sustainable practice.
IDEA: Make it collectible. A book. A form that people are accustomed to purchasing. - What would the worst experience look like? What would the best experience look like? — Worst experience would be a long, draining post with a lot of fluff, incredibly self-boasting salesy material, and no takeaway. Also a clickbait title that doesn’t live up to its headline. Nothing new, nothing surprising, and nothing valuable.
Best experience would be a simple to the point, something surprising, yet entertaining, full of incredible value they can’t get anywhere else, visually pleasing post that has huge value. One that changes the person’s life thereafter. Plus, something that will be referred to again and again.
IDEA: Short stories with a valuable surprising takeaway that changes people’s thinking. Displayed in a beautiful format. - What happens before, what happens after? — Before a person is browsing online and comes across something that catches their attention. Afterwards, if the article is valuable, they share it with their friends.
IDEA: Use image to make it more likely to capture the attention of someone browsing around. A comic strip that illustrates the story. Share-ability of a story is greater than that of any other format. - What can you eliminate that is taken for granted? — A single place like a website is taken for granted with blogging, or sharing ideas. People are, and should be, able to consume information on whichever platform they are on at the moment.
IDEA: Automate the sharing of your message on multiple platforms. Structure it in a way that gives you focus on one main channel, but makes it accessible to everyone on whichever channel they prefer. Use various social networking channels to draw that audience towards one. - What is everyone doing right now? How could you do the complete opposite? — Everyone is writing for quantity. Producing more and more content to stay front of mind. I would do the opposite by providing quality, never sharing anything that is of surface value, only going deep evergreen-type.
Everyone is also writing from a 1-st person perspective. Whereas, I will share the same message packaged in a story, unrelated to me, but that deeply resonates with people on a similar level.
Everyone is writing even when they are promoting. People are fearful of getting in front of the camera. I will engage those that don’t want to read through video.
IDEA: Focus on quality, share your messages through writing and accompany then with video. Find ways to add value through multiple channels. - What are the alternatives to what you offer? Don’t think inside your industry. — Alternatives are to read a book. To attend seminars. To watch videos. To take courses.
IDEA: Use video as a means of promoting your message. So it provides both channels in one. And also creates value through another medium. - Could you position your offer to someone else in the chain? — Instead of trying to cut through the noise and reach individuals, I can make it easier to reach them by partnering with influencers who already cut through the noise due to their influence. Leverage their brand equity.
IDEA: Position an aspect of your writing to reach influencers. With enough value provided to them, they will help you reach the audience through their influence. - How would it look if you made it 10x bigger? Think ten times. Multiply by 10 what you’re thinking right now. 10 times bigger typically means 1,000 times the value, without the associated increase in cost. — Get the world involved to create the content and improve ideas for you.
IDEA: Have the world submit the most impactful messages of their life, find artists to submit their works to coincide with these messages. Essentially make the world help create more stories, so it is a collaborative project which has an increased likelihood of reaching the masses.
Bonus — How could you dramatically raise the experience beyond expectations? Or completely remove the experience and provide a highly functional solution? — Make it a collectible. One that is beautiful. That people want to put in their house for other to see, or want to share with others. Make it feel valuable.
IDEA: A coffee table comic book full of impactful stories.
S: Success Vision
Immersing myself in many interviews, startup school podcast, Chase Jarvis Creative Live sessions, and personal vlogs completely transformed my look on the monetisation side of this project. If Seth were to take action on this he would be ready for the long cut. Be in it for the long game, not the quick shortcut to rapid takeover.
In fact I reached out to him (below) and he told me to start with many bad ideas. So even though this new approach “may not work”. It is a long game of generosity and adding value.
Rapid Fire
- How could this be simpler? Even simpler.
IDEA: Drawing comics is quite challenging, and takes a great deal of time to do. So maybe have them drawn in black and white and simple stick figures, like C&H?
Hence I purchased a WACOM tablet hoping that would be the answer.
- How could it be easier? Even easier.
IDEA: I will have to improve my ability to sketch and draw, which is likely to become too big a commitment and for me to pass in on it. It is better for me to hire someone to do it? Find freelancers and unearthed artists so that it wouldn’t be time, or cost prohibitive.
I: Incubate
Breaking away. I let the problem solving gears turn in my head for the next couple of days. Here are some insights that I can pinpoint, others may have iteratively grown over these days but these are the ones I can relate back to a specific event or time.
- While at Bikram Yoga, it came to me that Aesop’s fables are still circulating to this day (written 600BC). There is obviously some impactful underlying truth that they touch, one that I should look out for.
- I was was listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast where he mentioned that a question he asks himself is “How could this be easier?” (leveraging ones strengths instead of focusing on improving weaknesses) — I realised that my strength was not drawing, it was writing, and marketing. This venture should leverage the skill of illustrators, who are great at what they do.
- Tuning into ʎǝɹdsɐ ǝʌɐp, Dave McClure (Startup Founders Podcast), and Chris Sacca (with Bill Simmons) I pondered on the value of branding — this venture needed to strengthen my personal brand, so that regardless of whether it succeeds or not, I will have benefited.
- Just going for a long walk, I was inundated with ideas of stories and lessons that I could write about, as I observed people, and came across different inputs from the environment. It was incredible to see how powerful the mind is once it is primed to seek out something specific. My reminder list on my phone was filled with story ideas.
R: Read
There were many reading selections, and to prevent a never-ending post, the key outcomes were achieved by those below:
Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power — allowed me into the minds of some of the most powerful and strategic rulers of all time. Marketing strategies flooded in, and I’ll list a few examples here that may prove valuable for your own purposes.
- Law 6 — “the quality of attention is irrelevant” more content and being front of mind is more effective than waiting for the greatest opportunity or content to arise, which lead to me believing Instagram would be a high engagement channel where I would likely be seen more often, and more content is appreciated than less
- Law 7 — “the credit for an invention or creation is as important, if not more important, than the invention itself” leveraging the brand equity and skills of other illustrators will allow me to use that as a platform to be seen, and take credit for, than having to do it all myself.
- Law 11 — “possess a talent and creative skill that simply cannot be replaced” public speaking, marketing, and storytelling are my strengths that I can perform better than most. Combining the use of video with writing should be my prime marketing tool.
- Law 46 — “it is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable” the requirement of beautiful graphics, high quality production, and only showing the polished side of my work isn’t required. Opening up to simple illustrations, basic formatting of words, and little requirement for high quality video production may actually lead to greater connection.
During a House of Cards binge (which I can actually say was a productive activity) — a scene where the lead actor Kevin Spacey, and president at the time, Michel Gill sit in their respective chairs and observe Childe Hassam’s “Avenue in the Rain” painting and wonder what previous presidents must have experienced sitting in those chairs. This was the moment that solidified that art is the vessel that has the ability to spark emotion and insights based on the specific experiences and viewpoints of the person observing it. So art in essence is the structure, and the person observing it walking through it. Having an impact different to that of another person inside. What I should create should have that same effect. The insights my stories share, should hence, be everlasting underlying human truths.
Secondly, the scene of impermanence in the episode featuring the Tibetan monks, where they created an exquisite structure only to destroy it once it was done, was one impactful lesson that lead to my most popular story art to date.
Cycle #2
Performed with an Australian illustrator with 18+ years of experience.
The idea transformed from comic strips of the story as a storyboard, to a singular illustration, painting, or artwork.
People are accustomed to purchasing collectible artwork in the form of framed paintings or canvases. It thus makes sense to present it in a new form, but not create such friction that it defeats the purpose.
Cycle #3
A week later, this cycle proved to be the small tweak that unlocked the greatest value.
The primary driver was Jack Trout’s book Positioning which lead to me realising that the creation of a new category of art — referred to as Story Art would position this work in its own uncontested waters. Furthermore, positioning it as the antithesis of the hubris filled, complex, and vague, world of contemporary art which already has great opposition, will drag those against that world to join the world of Story Art.
Seeing as I created the category, being the first person in it and should the category take off, would mean I would reap the rewards.
Without this final cycle, this leap wouldn’t have been made.
You’re amazing for reading this far, and I hope I lived up to my promise. Please post in the comments sections below or email me me@jaskysingh.com on what this has helped you achieve thus far.
Would love to be a part of everyone’s journey :)
P.S. For part 2 and many more insights follow me on Instagram @sikkant.
