Ideas

Every day of your life you will come into contact with ideas, both good ones and not so good. Through reading, talking with others, seminars, workshops, webinars, and just plain old thinking, your mind processes thousands of thoughts—even while you’re asleep. There are enough ideas floating around to make everybody in the free world successful, if they would just use them. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for most people because they are not well supplied with good ideas that can be used effectively.

I bet you’re thinking “wait a minute.”

So, what’s the contradiction?

Well, the biggest problem is that people let ideas come and go without digestion, decision, practice, retention or even a conscious thought. They never let themselves become acquainted with great ideas in the first place. They haven’t established a system for preserving, classifying, digesting, or using the ideas they encounter. They have no idea vault in which to save the ideas that come to them in the first place. And as a result, their minds exist in a constant state of famine, the creative part of their brains is starving because there are no new ideas feeding them.

Avoid the Idea Famine

One of the most important possessions a successful person has is an effective idea bank. That’s the easiest way to avoid the idea famine. A workable idea bank may be in the form of note cards or stored in binders, in journals or kept on a PDA, Blackberry or computer database. For example, a fiction writer may clip newspaper articles and save them in alphabetical order according to their subject matter. That way, they can be referenced later to fill in gaps in story lines.

The form doesn’t matter. What does matter is that a systematic and uniform method of retaining ideas is in place. Every successful person learns early on to warehouse their ideas somewhere, and to keep them in a form that is easy to access when they need to.

It is an old axiom in the newspaper business that a good file and a poor memory is a lot more efficient than a poor file and a good memory. It is also said that even the dullest pencil is a better instrument for preserving ideas than the sharpest memory. You’ll find that somewhere, every successful person has a large and extensive paper memory, whether they will admit to it or not.

Adapt Ideas to Your Situation

Often when you get an idea it is not immediately adaptable to your situation. It needs to be remodeled to fit your circumstances and personality at the time. Most ideas, in fact, are stillborn to begin with, and because of lack of  care pass into oblivion before they’ve had a chance to develop at all That’s why you MUST get in the habit of writing ideas down, and then, when that idea’s time has come, molding it to fit specifically your needs of the moment.

Far too often people cast aside ideas that are not ready-made for them. “That doesn’t fit my circumstances, so why should I bother with it?” is a common thought process. That, of course, is a mistake. Some of the greatest and most successful ideas in history have come about because someone was trying to develop or adapt another idea. Thomas Edison proclaimed to his investors that he could develop and market a working light bulb in six weeks. It took him many months and tens of thousands of ideas before he was successful, and in the end, the solution had been right there in front of him since the very beginning. He simply would not allow that idea to fit his situation at the time, and that was almost a very, very costly mistake.

Give Your Idea a Face Lift

Quite often, an idea requires a complete face lift to be useful. Such an operation can be profitable if you aren’t afraid to try and can do it well. What you start with is just the basic idea. You do some research on it to “flesh” it out, then the accumulation of ideas and problems are submitted to your subconscious mind. There, they can then incubate in the depths of your mind where a workable and usable idea can be better molded and refined. The end result may look something like the original idea, but have completely different results than you had anticipated. That’s okay. Face lifted ideas frequently become the strongest concepts because they are forged from many concepts, somewhat resembling metals molded from different materials in order to gain strength.

Gear Up For Ideas

So how do you get ideas into your bank? Well, it’s not enough to simply write down what seems to be usable ideas. You have to learn to be systematic and uniform in your banking process. The method I’ve found to be the most effective has five simple steps. First take notes; second, mix the ideas; third, put them into your subconscious mind; fourth, put the results into a reservoir to save for later; fifth, use the ideas that are immediately applicable to your situation.

Think Between the Lines

The birth of ideas occurs at no particular time or place. You are constantly getting little flashes of inspiration. They come and go, usually staying with you for only an instant. Always be prepared to capture them when they happen. If you don’t have a pencil and paper handy at all times, you’re going to lose some of the very best ones.

Once you are “in the groove” of capturing ideas, you will get them from people, from events, from circumstances, from most anything occurring all around you. When you read a book you often get more ideas from what you think between the lines than from what is actually printed in the book. That’s why most publishers of learning aids put wide margins in their books-so you can write down ideas before they disappear forever!

The ideas that come to you between the lines are often more valuable than the ones you read in a book because they are ALWAYS your own. They have characteristics only you are familiar with and are more likely to be ready for immediate use than any others.

The same thing is true when you listen to a speech or attend a seminar. Take notes on the things you hear that impress you the most. But also, and more important, take notes on what you are stimulated to think as a result of what is said. Those are YOUR ideas coming out of your collected wisdom. Those kinds of ideas always relate better to your own particular situation.

Stir the Pot

Most of you know enough about computers to realize that a disk drive without a processor is as useless as a screen door in a submarine. But put the two together; add a monitor and a program and you really have something. The same thing applies to ideas. Alone, they may have little power or value. Mix them with other ideas and you may have a concept that can change the world. A spark is just a spark that dissipates immediately unless you let it fall on something flammable. Then you not only have light, but you have heat and a chemical reaction. Let your ideas unite that way. Always have some paper or a little note pad for those little sparks to fall on. Then your idea will really become something valuable if you get into that habit.

This process has been likened to establishing a kind of research department in your head. You can learn to do idea combinations, once you get in the habit. It’s like adding dynamite to that little spark of an idea. Just be careful, you might blow the roof off with the right combination.

Put Your Subconscious to Work

Once you’ve mixed those ideas, let them tumble around in your subconscious mind. The subconscious works something like a cement mixer, constantly turning over the thoughts you’ve put in there, allowing ideas to mix further. This works even while you’re asleep. It can also be working on ideas when you’re thinking about something totally unrelated. Believe it or not, it even works when you’re watching television.

Remember, too, that you have a powerful set of instincts and intuitions that are constantly interacting with your subconscious. Very little is known about how these processes actually work, but be aware of them. They also help ideas to mix and match.

What if nothing comes of your latest idea batch? Don’t throw the ideas away. They may just need a little more time to develop. Successful people have a lot of ideas in process at the same time. Thomas Edison always had people working on ideas that he came up with, no matter how unrelated the concept was to his latest project. That’s how the phonograph came into being. You can do the same with the same results, if you’ll just follow the laws of success I’ve been outlining for you in this blog posts.

Build an Idea Reservoir

Once you’ve let your subconscious mind do its work and have a result you like, build a mental reservoir to put it in. This is different from an idea bank, which holds only raw and undeveloped material. While the idea is in the reservoir, related ideas will come to you. Or you may think of other applications of the concept. Edison was particularly adept at developing several applications of the same idea. He already had the power plants, distribution systems and electric poles designed for his light bulbs before he ever had a working bulb. That’s because he knew his basic concept was sound. It was just a matter of application. I mean think about that for a moment and the implications. Imagine thinking that far ahead before you’ve even tackled the initial invention at hand that is totally necessary for the other to exist.

That’s a lot how my mind works, and for years I seriously thought I was broke, but it works for me and my companies.

Apply Your Ideas

When an idea is mixed thoroughly, like good concrete, it’s time to put it to use. That’s the final and ultimate test of an idea. Victor Hugo once said that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has finally arrived. An idea’s time comes when you get to pour it out so that you can use it productively.

Unfortunately, many people are willing to work with and develop an idea in their head, but they stop there, being afraid to put their idea to the final test That’s like leaving concrete in the mixer. Sooner or later it will just get hard, crack and be of no use to anyone.

Turn Those Ideas into Cash

Using this five step approach to developing ideas can put cash into your pocket. An idea in action has tremendous power for building wealth. As a good example, I had an associate who had a great idea for building wealth through a whole new concept in the travel industry.

This man had no clue as to how he was going to develop his new concept. He didn’t have an idea bank, and he had never really worked toward something totally new before. He was starting from scratch. Then another idea came to him and he wrote it down. He thought about it for weeks. He let it tumble around in his head. Then he did some research on travel. He let his subconscious mind work on it some more. He looked at all the applications.

Finally he was ready to put the idea to the test.

His idea was a brilliant marketing concept, a whole new approach to selling travel nationwide. Marketing is this man’s field. He’s an expert in it, but he had no experience in the travel business, and had never thought of this particular concept before, even though he traveled every week.

To make the idea workable he had to invest most of his savings. But he believed in his idea and was willing to take a risk. Today, that idea has not only turned into cash for him and others, but sparked an entirely new field in the travel business Without his diligence—and confidence in developing it, that idea might have been thought of by someone else. If he had read this blog a year earlier, and put the five steps into practice, his idea might well have made him a deca-millionaire by now, instead of just very wealthy.

Can It Work For You?

Contrary to what many “average” folks might believe, nobody has a corner on ideas. Henry Ford had no corner on the manufacturing and marketing of automobiles. He simply had a concept on how to put them together cheaper, faster and more efficiently than anybody else-and he acted on that concept.

It didn’t hurt any that he had access to financial resources, but he did have to… ACT.

Every great success in the history of man has come from the development and application of new ideas. That doesn’t mean you have to create all your ideas yourself. But you do have to make them your own. You have to develop them yourself, so that you can apply them in ways that nobody else has thought of, and that can work for you.

Can you become successful?

Of course you can.

Can you turn ideas into cash?

Absolutely!

Can you think?

Can you write?

Can you follow instructions?

When you can answer all these questions in the affirmative, you won’t have any doubt about the answer to that first big question.