The Key to Ideas

In today’s society, everything revolves around convenience, sold to us in a prepackaged form, be it meals or holidays, clothes or entertainment. This creates an issue, however, as this convenient consumer culture creates an expectation that new ideas will come gift-wrapped.

There is a belief that good ideas come already fully formed, and this can stop further development, which ends the possibility of those ideas becoming great. Let’s say you are pitching a new idea to work colleagues, one thing that an innovator will often hear is ‘that has already been tried’ or ‘this company doesn’t work like that’.

This can be frustrating and unfortunate as this sort of criticism can nip potential growth in the bud, and ignores the fact that new ideas don’t come conveniently ready-made.

It is import to nurture new ideas over time and develop them in an encouraging environment.

The reason this criticism often occurs is that people are expecting perfection right from the off. If we take Henry Ford for example, initially his Ford models were inefficient, smelly and awkward to drive. But over time, Ford recognised the future rarely arrives as a finished product and continued to develop and refine his automobiles.

Innovation is a sloppy process, there is no exact formula or guidelines to follow. The main key to a good idea is to have many ideas.

Beethoven obsessively recorded every idea that popped into his head, sometimes even interrupting conversations, and leaving the dinner table midway through a meal to do so.

Great ideas don’t come easily, nor do they come quickly, all of them require a lot of hard work. It is important to constantly generate new ideas and tend to them, allowing them to have time to bloom.