How to plant the seed of a great idea
Ideas have power.
They shape our lives and create our reality.
They’re so powerful that we need to learn how to harness them to lead us to a place where we want to go.
“Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the spirit is coloured by such impressions” — Marcus Aurelius
Inception, Christopher Nolan’s epic film, shows us how we might plant the right ones and watch them grow.
If you haven’t seen the film, let me give you a quick overview.
Cobb, the main character, is a thief.
He’s no ordinary thief. He doesn’t go around stealing physical possessions. Instead, he has learned how to enter people’s minds and extract valuable information from them. He sells his services to rich people looking to get an edge by knowing things.
Cobb does this by entering people’s dreams and constructing elaborate worlds that open up a dreamers mind whilst disarming their defences. This allows him to get the information he needs with little resistance.
However, some people who know they’re being targeted have gotten wise to the potential for attack, and they start learning mind techniques to defend themselves from these thieves.
Working out how to guard our minds and their ideas is a life skill with value in the modern world. It is not necessarily to stop someone slipping by our defences while we sleep, but more to consider what ideas shape our lives and take control of them.
In the film, Cobb is asked by a powerful businessman to plant an idea in a competitor’s mind rather than steal information. Saito is capitalising on a transition of power from father to son because of the father’s death. He wants to weaken his main rival.
Planting an idea is known as Inception. Cobb had studied the possibility of inception and believed it was possible.
“Your mind is the arena in which you rehearse your future, your thoughts determine what goes into the arena, and this very moment is the result.” — Steven Aitchison
However, it isn’t easy. And most of his team thought he was crazy to try. Cobb figured he could do it and needed to follow two principles.
First, the idea had to feel obvious and right to the mind having inception done to them. It cannot be too alien to the dreamer. If it wasn’t subtle, the mind would defend against and reject it. It’s similar to real-life when a person tries to make you do something or believe something in a way that causes you to react. Sometimes we resist ideas just because we don’t like the way people force an idea onto us. The more normal it feels, the more likely we are to work with the idea.
Secondly, the idea needs to be positive. He suggests that positive ideas are more powerful than negative ones. In the film, the positive idea he wanted to plant into the sons head is that he should be his own man doing things his way, rather than following what his father would have done. His Dad felt the company was more robust as a single entity rather than in smaller pieces.
To plant the idea, the dream world needed to be strong. Cobb achieved this by layering dreams together. A dream within a dream within a dream. The resulted in the dreamer having no idea what was real and what wasn’t. It meant Cobb could slip the new concept in without any defence. In some ways, it’s like the parable of the mustard seed. When they land in the right type of soil, small ideas can grow into massive trees.
One idea can be powerful. Many ideas, when combined, can lead to real innovation. The challenge is to get a few ideas into our heads and then spend time thinking about them until they come together in novel ways. When people become a little obsessed with an idea over a long period of time, humanity can benefit as we find breakthroughs.
In his book, seeing what others don’t, Gary Klein explores where aha! moments come from. Interestingly, it’s often outsiders who come up with breakthroughs. This is because they have different ideas about how the world works, and they start working on problems where they can bring a unique perspective.
Neil Gaiman suggests to budding authors to capture ideas from everyday life and put them on the ‘compost heap’ in their mind. Similarly, compost heaps break down over time to create a fertiliser that makes beautiful earth to plant; he argues that ideas can break down over time once we’ve had some time to think about them. Placing ideas in front of our mind to actively think about them and pop them in the back of our minds helps our brains process the ideas in different ways.
Oprah Winfrey once said that “I know for sure what we dwell on is who we become.” I find this such a hopeful thought.
Today we have access to so much information. There are millions of books. There are millions of YouTube videos. Podcasts are springing up everywhere. There is a blog on almost any topic you can think of. Ideas are everywhere. You just have to look at things that you find interesting and think about them. The best writers tend to be avid readers. The best entrepreneurs tend to be people who study their own industry and are also keen on learning from others.
Many people can have similar ideas on the face of it, but no two are really the same. When we add one idea on top of another, then sprinkle some of our own histories, identity and magic dust into the mix, what comes out of the other end will undoubtedly be a unique insight. In this way, we get to imagine a new world — and it doesn’t have to be a dream. If it’s something that you keep coming back to time and again, there is a possibility your idea might become a reality.
