THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO TO HAVE NEW IDEAS

AllGoodCopy.com

Ideas are irritating.

Sometimes they’re right there in your face, shouting at you like an arrogant teenage kid who

thinks he knows best…

Other times they’re

nowhere to be seen, like your

broke mate Steve: always

in the toilet when it’s his round at the

bar.

I’lltell

youwhat…

From now on, let’s makeideas illegal

Who needs themanyway?

Not me...!

Well. Er. That’s the problem…

I DO need them.And so do YOU.

If you want to be successful, the one skill you’ll need in abundance – more than any other skill, in fact – is the ability to come

up with good IDEAS.

If you can’t think up new ideas: you’ve got a major problem and you need to fix it ASAP.

How?

Quite simply it’s a matter of balance:

if you want something new to come OUT, you’ve got to put

something new IN.

You see, your brain is like Audrey II from The Little Shop of Horrors: it demands to be fed.

Or for a less freaky – but still weird – image, imagine it’s like Short Circuit

demanding ‘input’.

And despite what some people will have you believe, I ideas DON’T just

come out of nowhere.

Ideas are like restaurants you suddenly notice have opened. You can’t remember seeing the

premises being renovated or new signs being put up – just one day it wasn’t there and today it is.

But just because you didn’t notice the work being done doesn’t mean it wasn’t.

Ideas are definitely built.

Only problem is: they’re built in your subconscious (which is why you don’t see them being built), so it’s IMPOSSIBLE to know exactly which raw materials you need to build them.

Therefore you need as many different raw materials as you

can get your hands on.

The good news is: everything’s useful, from high-brow art…

...to children’s television.

Consume equally as much that has nothing to do with your niche as with what does.

The only rule:

To give you an idea of how much random stuff you need to consume to come up

with new ideas, here’s what raw material I consumed in a month.

Three graphic novels: a biography of Fidel Castro, an account of Freud’s most famous patient (The Wolfman) and one about the famous flapper girl Kiki of Montparnasse.

Three fiction books: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa

and Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.

Two non-fiction books: How Music Works by David Byrne and Predictably

Irrational by Dan Ariely.

FIVE SALES PROMOTIONS

One oldie by Bill Bonner and another by Mark Ford (Michael Masterson)

One of my own and two newer ones by friends, one that flew and one that bombed.

Oh...

And the packs I worked on with my own junior copywriters.

Four films: Wreck-It Ralph and Despicable Me; Scenes from a Mall (which was a favour Woody Allen must have owed someone) and The Squid

and the Whale, about a literary couple going through a divorce.

I intermittently re-watched The Sopranos, a reality television in the UK called Got To Dance and I went to see a couple of games of football, in varying divisions.

And I listened to records by My Bloody Valentine, A$AP Rocky and

the Deftones.

Sounds tiring, right?

And I don’t list all this stuff to try to impress you, instead I want to

illustrate my point: it’s a LOT of random raw material.

But just think what all that is doing in my mind…

Take a detail I read about how Fidel Castro could have been killed before any of his revolutionary

business

if it wasn’t for one sympathetic soldier sending him to a public prison

And think how that might interact with watching a surprisingly emotional

performance by a Canadian dancer in Got to Dance.

How – or even if – this information will appear directly in my ideas, we

simply do not know.

What we do know is that my brain now has a vast resource of raw material to delve into and

potentially build from.

But once you’ve fed your brain, you must trust it to do its work.

Yes there are exercises you can do to tease

out ideas and by consciously separating the left and right sides of your brain you can

encourage new thoughts – perhaps I’ll cover them another

time.

But ultimately, there is one thing I’ve

learned over the years:

the ability to come up with new ideas is fundamental

to your success

And in turn, the ONE thing that any entrepreneur must do to develop and maintain that ability, is to always keep

feeding your brain with a vast variety of raw materials.

So I hope you take this idea on board…

I hope these thoughts may even contribute to your own raw

material…

And I hope you have many new and breakthrough ideas throughout your career.

Thank you for reading

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And if you’d like some more ideas, head over to:

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