Jump Start Your Brain. Doug Hall

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      It’s the same story with ideas—the more ideas you generate, the more good ones you’ll have. And your good ideas will be of a higher caliber. Quantity is the shortest possible distance to quality. And more quantity is a straight line to higher quality.

      This was the finding of a series of experiments conducted in the fairly sanitary confines of the Eureka! Ranch laboratories. We assembled groups of ordinary people and asked them to invent ideas for new products. Each group’s ideas were typed and tabulated.

      An independent panel then reviewed the ideas, rating each for how “wicked good” it was. Stat man Mike Kosinski advised me that he could say with 96 percent statistical confidence that the quantity of ideas is directly related to quality. Mike modeled the data and found the following relationship between quantity and quality.

No. of Raw Ideas	No. of Wicked Good Ideas
25	5
50	10
100	19

      MORE CHOICES MEAN SMARTER DECISIONS

      Research with owners of small and mid-sized companies found that those companies with more choices for growth in their development pipeline grew 1.5 to 5.8 times faster than those with fewer choices. Net: in the real world it appears that the more choices you have the smarter the decisions you make. This is why I challenge clients to come up with at least 50 written choices for growth before making decisions on what action to take.

      Summary

      So there you have our self-evident Eureka! Truths, in no particular order. One more time, in short form, the list looks like this:

      •You Have to Swing to Hit Home Runs (go for quantity)

      • Reality Is Not Relevant (think of perceptions, feelings, tastes, sights, sounds, smells)

      • Breakthroughs Contradict History (forget conventional wisdom)

      • Respect the Newborns (write down every idea, no matter how loony it might seem)

      What’s Missing?

      In the first edition of this book there was a fifth truth: FUN IS FUNDAMENTAL. It pains me to remove it from this edition. However, no matter how hard I’ve tried, I’ve found no correlation between increasing levels of fun and the creation of more genuinely “big ideas” for growing a career or business.

      There’s plenty of evidence that fun matters in “theoretical academic research.” However, when faced with real-life challenges, laughing is not a lubricant for productive creativity.

      While fun doesn’t help with the creative process. Fun does help with the development journey. To contradict history—and change the world—requires energy to overcome the inevitable challenges that you’ll face during your adventure. Speaking from nearly 40 years of entrepreneurship experience I’ll tell you nothing builds energy like a sense of humor. And nothing kills energy like taking yourself too seriously.

      So chill out, kick back, and enjoy the journey.

      MUSIC BONUS: Life is meant to be lived and enjoyed. To punctuate the point I’ve included a link to another Scott Johnson tune “Lighten Up There Boy”—it’s a tune that will help you chill out and set your mind straight. Before moving on click on it and give it a listen.

      Visit http://www.doughall.com/JSYB2

      4

      IDEAS—THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

      You’ve got your good ideas, your bad ideas and your mud ugly ideas. The question is, how do you tell them apart? How do you pick the nuggets from the gravel?

      Let’s be honest. Most newborn ideas are ugly, wrinkly little wretches. If the newborn is your own, you’re liable to think it’s a thing of wonder and beauty. But it’s going to need a whole lotta nurturing before anyone else will think so. Because it’s not theirs.

      As you go through life, you will decide the fates of thousands of newborn ideas. You’ll need to know which ideas are worth nurturing and which, frankly, aren’t. Most challenging is tapping those ideas that are really great, or “wicked good” as we say in Maine.

      “Life is a bowl of cherries. It’s full of pits. Whether you control your life or it controls you depends in large measure on your ability to spit out the pits.’’

      – Richard Saunders

      FACT: Picking winners and losers becomes increasingly difficult the more unusual an idea is. The further removed an idea is from the confines of precedent, the more likely it is either to light up the sky or explode in a blaze of failure.

      Greg, a successful inventor, wrote to me regarding his experiences with trying to separate the good from the bad and ugly of ideas.

      “To date, I have had 10 of my inventions go worldwide, several national and many just fail completely because of timing, because of markets or because they were just bad ideas and I was blinded by my convictions. Over the years, I have made millions of dollars … and lost as much.”

      To those who wonder why Greg didn’t just keep the millions and never risk again, he goes on to explain.

      “To me, money is just a tool to allow me to work on another invention. That’s my motivator, not money.”

      Here’s the data on good vs. bad. Each point on the chart represents customers’ perceptions of how interested they would be in purchasing a new product or service concept and how new and different they perceive the idea to be.

      You can see that, with ideas that are seen as being really and truly new and different, they generate significantly greater and significantly lower purchase interest.

      On the flip side, as an idea is less new and different, it moves more toward the essence of average. It becomes safe. Safe is fine for the brain dead; safe means they can’t screw up. It also means they can’t be great.

      No Guts, No Glory!

      Check out that chart again. It shows that when your idea is the same old same old, you have no chance. That’s NO CHANCE of being great!

      This is true for new product concepts. It’s true for your career. And it’s true for your life.

      Minor differences have minor impact. Dramatic differences have the potential to be GREAT, WORLD CLASS, SPECTACULAR!!!

      The geniuses of creativity know this relationship.

      Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas created two of the biggest box office hits of all time—Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Both rated high on the scale of new and different. Both took risks.

      Spielberg and Lucas also created 1941 and Howard the Duck, two of the most legendary stinkeroos of all time. Again, both movies were new and different. Twenty years hence, Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark will be remembered. The other two will have been long forgotten.

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