eureka!
How’s this for a confession: I’ve never had a good idea in my life. In fact, thinking about it, I don’t reckon I’ve ever actually had an idea. Pure and simple, I don’t think I have a creative bone in my body and any level of creative juice I may have been born with must have been transfused out at a very early age. Following on from the earlier assertion of my burgeoning over-functioning OCD nature, I can honestly say ‘I do but don’t think’, ‘I operate but don’t feel’ and, with such a one-dimensional nature, any idea-based eureka, damascene epiphany, bolt out of the blue or aha! moment is about as likely as Jose Mourinho still being at Stratford Bridge come season end.
Which all makes me feel a little unloved and undervalued as don’t we all go overboard in our celebration of the brilliance and the simplicity of the great inventors & creators? OK, yes I admit I do as well, but secretly, deep-down, I despise the lot of ‘em! There’s not a great deal about the basic concept behind the car (engine, wheels, people and the shopping to pick-up) that I couldn’t have dreamt up; the telephone is a pretty basic combination of electricity, wire & gossip that surely wouldn’t have been beyond my operational & objective mind; space travel only needed a suicidal adrenalin junkie and a big f*ck-off explosion underneath him. Facebook? Pah, let’s not even go there. However, it’s not lost on me that it’s Mark Zuckerberg who’s currently in the news philanthropically donating 99% of his $25bn net worth, and not me!
So, perhaps if you’re like me, you’ll be relieved to know that we can, rationally & diligently, stack the odds of having ‘the big one’ a little more in our favour. Yeah, apparently it’s not all about waiting for the light-bulb switch to be flicked, but as much about training your mind to encourage it to have an idea, and then to have the sense to delete the bad ones and enhance the good ones. Nothing more than muscle memory for the brain-train. The other element is not to think of an idea as original. Accept that it’s probably been had before and you’re either putting a fresh spin on it, or your idea is a slightly different way of putting together existing components. Also, the more ideas you have, the greater the prospect of having good ideas, so do all you can to encourage this by keeping the ol’ grey matter in tip-top shape: read, read lots, talk, listen, have conversations, have lots of conversations, debate, argue, eat, drink & be merry with your pals, get-off Zucker’s face and stop popping pictures of your dinner on Instagram. The world is full of great ideas just waiting to be uncovered so keep turning over those pebbles on the beach.
