Idea inspiration

I attended a fabulous event last Thursday night. It was Ignite Columbus. Ever heard of Ignite? Neither had I. It's very cool. Basically, it's a series of presentations. The only rules are you only get 20 slides, your slides advance after 15 seconds, and you only get 5 minutes total to talk.

The presentations on Thursday covered so many topics. Here's a sample:

• multimodal interfaces (I'm ten times smarter after listening to that one)
• saving cash (yes, we all need to)
• temperate broadleaf deciduous forests (save our planet!)
• turning Columbus, Ohio into a Hollywood farm team (I think we can do it)
• green urban planning (and keep saving the planet!)
  
• backcasting with Japanese animation (my personal favorite - so funny and creative)

So much fun and so much idea inspiration. When you're in a creative slump, it helps to get out and hear the ideas of others, and what a fabulous venue for it.

Go out and find an Ignite event in your town!

Help a fella out

Hey - everyone's belly aching about the economy now a days. And with good reason. I've got at least five friends whose jobs have been affected. Chances are, you know someone in the same situation.

So what can you do? It's simple. As you're out talking with people and networking, add one standard question to your small talk line up:

"Is your company hiring anyone right now?"

If they are, then this is your opportunity to help out your friends. Offer to send contact info (get a resume - even better) to the hiring company and pass along the company info to your out of work friends. The connection you create might just be the one to get them a new job.

It only takes minutes and could mean all the difference to someone you care about.

So hey - is your company hiring anyone right now? If so, I know some great candidates. Here are their skill sets:

• Exercise and personal training
• Billing and administration
• Marketing communications

For more info, just mail me.

Simple is best

What's the easiest way to get someone to buy in to your idea? Make sure it's simple.

Not that this is necessarily easy. Sometimes it can be difficult to pare things down to their simplest terms. But the easier it is for someone to understand your idea, the more likely they are to believe in it.

The Common Craft Show does this really well. They use short videos to tell you three things:
1. what the idea is or what problem it addresses
2. how the idea works
3. why you should care

They have many very useful videos on serious topics such as social networks, elections, and blogs. This not so serious one is my favorite:



Happy Halloween!

Let's get together

Have you visited www.meetup.com? It's one of the best ideas I've come across recently. I know I am late to the game (meetup.com was started in 2002 - a lifetime ago in web terms), but it's still really cool.

Basically, you can look for a group that has interests similar to yours that meets in your area. Or, you can start a group if none exists.

Try it! Go out and meet some new people and give your ideas a kick start.

Cut out your limits

I was driving my son to school last week. We were talking geography (his second grade class is doing a unit on landforms, like mountains, deserts, coasts, etc). We were discussing the size of different places.

Mid sentence, he paused and said, "You know, your mind is the biggest open space of all."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

When you're searching for ideas, remember not to set limits. Don't think of why things won't work or what you can't do. Let your mind go and worry about the constraints later.

Building more ideas, part VII - The roof

It might be a while before you get to adding the roof, but I'm including it here for the sake of completeness.

When you've been practicing the system for building ideas outlined below, I guarantee you'll have more ideas. It will be great. You'll be on an idea high. But then you'll have a new problem.

You'll have so many ideas, you'll lose focus. All these amazing things to implement and no time to do all of them. This is when you have to add the roof to your idea building.

What's the roof? Pick and prioritize.

Take all your ideas, write them down, pick the top 5 or 10 or whatever is doable, and let the rest go for now. Save them in your idea file and come back to them later. When you get new ideas, add them to the file, but continue to focus on the top 5 until one is complete. Then pick a new one.

Having a lot of ideas, but never acting on any of them is like a rich person who never spends any money. What is the use of dying with $5 million in your bank account? Why did you work hard and save for all those years and never enjoy at least some of the fruits of your labor?

The goal is not to be the person who has the most ideas, but the person who does the most with them.

Building more ideas, part VI - Fourth Support

By now, if you've been following along and building your idea machine, you should be seeing some noticeable results. You're getting more ideas.

The last support in our system is Generosity. Now that you have a bunch of ideas, don't hoard them.

There will be a time when you come up with something really grand, but you don't feel the time is right. Or you don't want to share it with someone else because you're afraid they'll get all the credit.

Don't listen to thoughts like these. The timing is never right, everyone will always try to steal your ideas, and all the other excuses you might have for not sharing ideas will be valid too. Let it go. Tell people about your ideas. Act on them. Don't wait.

Ideas that are hoarded will wither and die. Ideas that are shared will snowball.

Do you have any ideas you can let go of?
'