What If You Don’t Have Any Ideas?
It’s pretty amazing the number of people who say they’re not good with ideas for new products or businesses. Over the last week or so I had several conversations about this many times during lunches, dinners and other meetings.
I just came back from lunch with 4 other folks and on the span of probably one hour we mentioned about two dozens cool apps and services we’d like to see to make our lives easier. And we weren’t even trying hard.
Ideas that come from personal pain are easy. You think of something you don’t like, and imagine a solution for it. Done. But there are dozens of other ways to come up with good ideas for products and businesses. I think the key to have a great idea is to have lots of them, even try to execute a few of them to have an understanding of what makes a good idea into a great product or business.
Even if you pick an idea to execute on, and later you find out it’s a terrible idea, a new great idea might come out of that. But the more you isolate yourself, the less you live, the less you try to do things… the less ideas you’ll have.
Another reason people think they don’t have good ideas is because they either have too many ideas and lack the necessary focus to add more depth to the ideas, or because they over-think each individual idea to the point they surface all the flaws and hide all the virtues of that idea.
The bottom-line is simple:
- Have lots of ideas, preferably with other folks
- Filter them by potential & execution (can you do it?)
- Don’t over-think and just do it
- Morph your idea into a better idea, even if it means losing 90% of work done.
