Are you looking for a good idea for your next startup, or next story…
And can’t seem to come up with an innovative idea?
Then you haven’t gone through enough bad ideas because good ideas mostly hide among a pile of bad ideas. You have to sift through many such bad ideas before you get to the good one.
Seth Godin has said it the best, “… the goal isn’t to get good ideas; the goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up.”
I love my friend James Altucher’s advice of becoming an idea machine for putting Seth’s advice to practice. He recommends coming up with 10 ideas every day, however bad they are, if you want to become an idea machine.
I practiced what James recommends even before we had interacted. In my teens, I was excited about launching a business. The only problem was that I could not come up with any new idea, beyond a bad idea which was about packing and selling wheat flour.
So, I started reading a lot and started making lists of ideas that I could work on. After doing it for a couple of years, I had so many ideas and I could not stop coming up with new ideas every single day. I had become what James calls an idea machine. I felt so empowered and it felt good.
You can do the same and never be short of good ideas, by following the process. It may not even take 2 years if you are disciplined about coming up with 10 ideas every day like James recommends. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes.