Sample material: Ideas

Here is about 10-12 minutes of written material that I am going to record. It is not very good in terms of grammar; I wrote it out as I would say it so it needs a lot of editing as a written piece. There are sentences that are repeated. This is not an error. Again this is how I would say the material out loud. A repeated sentence is said with more emphasis and more slowly. But I would like some feedback for anyone who has time to go over it.

An idea: the most resilient parasite

We live in a world of complexity and information overload. There is just not enough time for us to process the vast amounts of information the world expects us to process. All this information coming in from the outside leaves us very little time to think about and process information and ideas that come from the inside, from ourselves.

This power to generate ideas, make inferences, and be creative is the key difference that separates us and keeps us above computers in the evolutionary chain. It is what makes human special. Computers can store and process massive amounts of information with incredible power and speed. Human brains do not consciously do so well. Yet in the information age, to keep up to speed, we are required to learn and process so much information. Let’s not forget what makes a human brain so powerful and so unique. It is not our ability to process A LOT of information, it is about ability to process information in really creative ways.

Henry Ford was criticized for not being very educated, for not having enough of that outside knowledge. He replied saying that he didn’t need to be educated. He said that he hired other people to learn that stuff for him so he would have more time to do more important tasks such as thinking. Thinking and creating is what we do well.

That’s what I would like to talk about today: Take more time to think to generate and develop your own ideas. There is incredible power in this discipline and I will show you how and why.

You don’t need to be a genius to come up with good ideas. I have a theory that I would like to share with you: Human beings were designed to have good ideas. Human beings were designed to have good ideas. I know at times it seems that exactly the opposite is true, and I will admit that most of any one person’s ideas are probably bad ideas. I have had loads of bad ideas I could tell you about, but I still believe that it is in our fundamental nature and design to produce good ideas even if they aren’t as frequent as the bad ones. YOU were designed to create brilliant and powerful ideas!

“So how come I haven’t recognized any of these ideas?” you ask. Well if you are like most people, who don’t give much awareness and attention to their own thoughts and ideas, you just let ideas come and go as they naturally do. You probably don’t take the time to think about, test, and act upon these ideas to see if they are good. You probably don’t have the patience or trust to give yourself a chance. It is a terrible mistake. You were designed for so much more.

So… when you have an idea, when it hits you and you feel inspired, when it makes you smile, when it stirs you and gets you excited, hold onto it. HOLD ONTO IT with all your might. Let it swell within you until it brings forth fruit and you can say, “It was a good seed; It was a good idea.”

“What is the most resilient parasite? (Remember the movie Inception?) Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.”

Ideas are powerful. Hold onto them.

Do not let them go because they will disappear if you do. Most people never find out which of their ideas grow into really good plants, which ideas are the most valuable, which ideas make millions, because they let them go. We have lots of bad ideas but we should at least take the time to find out which ones are bad and which ones are good.

All the time I hear fantastic ideas from people. They go something like this:

“I think I should quit my job and do this.”

“I think I’d be really good at that.”

“I’d like to start doing this or that.”

“If only someone did this or that..”

I say, “HEY! I think that is an excellent idea. You should do it.”

How many people listen to me? Not very many. I’m telling you I hear such good ideas from people all the time it hurts me when they let them go. Hold onto your ideas.

One of the best ways to hold onto an idea is to write down these ideas on paper. Make a habit of this. Any spark that goes on between those cute ears of yours, write it down. If you are in a place or situation you can’t write down an idea, hold onto it! Hold onto it until you can write it down because that idea might just be the one that changes your life. And it only takes one idea written down and acted upon that can make enormous changes for you.

An idea came to me one night as I was getting off the bus on my way home from college. It was cold and snowy, and dark so I wasn’t about to write it down right then; I was just going to go home. But I had to pee really bad. There was a Taco Time right there at the bus stop, so instead of walking ten minutes uncomfortably to use my bathroom at home I just walked into the Taco Time to use their facilities. After doing my business in the men’s restroom, this idea came to me again and I thought I should write it down. So I did. Right there in the men’s restroom at Taco Time I pulled out a pen and notebook and wrote down the idea.

I am so glad that I did. It was one of the most important ideas I have ever had.

Honestly I probably could have made it home without using the restroom, but the idea might not have made it home.

The idea might not have made it home. It’s funny because I ended up writing that incredible idea because I needed to use the restroom. I would have just walked home otherwise. So here is my advice: If you can’t wait to get home to use the restroom, don’t wait to get home to write down an idea. (Profound yeah? J )

Write down your ideas. We don’t do it enough. If you have an idea for a business, write it down. If you have an idea to improve your life or someone else’s, write it down. If you have an idea for a book, write it down! That one should seem obvious, if you are going to write a book about some incredible ideas, I would think at some point you would have to start actually writing those ideas.

We’ve all heard of writer’s block. You know, when a writer can’t write because he’s run out of ideas? Well a worse type of writer’s block occurs when a writer won’t write and he is FULL of ideas. We need to get over our writer’s block and write down our ideas.

You should also make a habit of writing down ideas you get from other people. You will learn a lot doing this; there are a lot of good ideas out there. But it is much more important that you write down the ideas that come out of your own head. Why? Well you are probably more likely to do those ideas if they are your own. More likely to turn one of them into a plant that produces fruit. You could hear the same idea a hundred times from other people and you’ll never do it. But once it comes from you, it is inspiration.

Cobb: What do you want?
Saito: Inception. Is it possible?
Arthur: Of course not.
Saito: If you can steal an idea, why can't you plant one there instead?
Arthur: Okay, this is me, planting an idea in your mind. I say: don't think about elephants. What are you thinking about?
Saito: Elephants?
Arthur: Right, but it's not your idea. The dreamer can always remember the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake.

Once you come up with the idea, once it is yours it can grow and work magic. If you want to influence people don’t try to give them ideas, try and help them discover ideas. Inception plot. That’s a Dale Carnegie classic how to win friends and influence people.

While you are listening to me, if an idea comes to your head. Forget! what I am saying and take a moment to dwell onyour idea. Your ideas, for you are much more important than my ideas for you. In fact the most important ideas you’ll ever have are the ones that come out of your own head. This is the idea that changed my life and just so happens to be the idea that I wrote down in that Taco Time restroom. The most important ideas you’ll ever have are the ones that come out of your own head. I will share with you some ideas, but you need to get your own! Do you understand the power and potential of what I am saying? Or even more important, do you understand the power and potential of what you are thinking? Even right now? This room is swarming and bursting with really really good ideas. And they’re not coming from me.

Let’s take a moment to talk about the great thinkers in history men in history that came up with really good ideas: Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Dante, Aquinas, da Vinci, Galileo, and Einstein. These men have gone down in history as the great thinkers. Might I suggest that they are considered the great thinkers because they I don’t know, took a little more time to think? It’s possible. The point is that they took the time to think their own ideas, write them down, develop them, improve them, and write them again until they became the great thinkers. They were brilliant because of their OWN ideas, not because they necessarily new OTHER peoples’ ideas. In fact Mortimer Adler, Editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica said that the great thinkers probably read less books in their lives that what is required for us to read in college. They just took more time to read better than we do. Took more time to think and create their own ideas. Interesting. Why then do we try to get as much outside information in our heads as possible? We should, if we want to be great thinkers, develop our own ideas.

Take more time to think and generate your own ideas.

I’m not saying that you should NOT study other peoples’ ideas and other books. You should make study and reading a very important part of your life. I am only suggesting that you take more time to think about your OWN ideas. Because unless we can catch and hold onto a few good ideas from our own head then we will have sure wasted our time, wasted a good brain that was designed for creation, designed for more. Until we capture our own good ideas then we will never discover our true potential.

The idea was the product of other ideas.

If it is a good idea, it will swell within you.

And you got to test the idea. People are afraid that their idea that they think is good will not turn out to be so good. That will probably happen… a lot. But you have to be emotionally stable to accept it and not take it personal. You have got to have the courage to keep trying your ideas even though many and possibly most of them will fail.

I had a professor once to agree to go over a paper of mine as a favor only if I promised him that I wouldn’t be offended if he torpedoed it. He said that people sometimes have “fundamental misunderstandings” and he was a very logic based professor so fundamental misunderstandings did not slide with him. I told him okay. However before I gave him the paper I was worried that he would find fundamental misunderstandings in my paper and reasoning and I was afraid to give him my paper. Now this seems odd to me. Wouldn’t I like to know if I had a fundamental misunderstanding somewhere in my head? Shouldn’t I try to make sure I have the fundamentals understood correctly? Why is it people are afraid to face their imperfections and learn from them? Why can’t people face their fundamental misunderstandings of the world?

Have courage to face and fundamental misunderstanding that you have, and then have courage to keep developing those incredible ideas.