How to Tweak Your Mind into Coming Up With Innovative Ideas
We all marvel at those humans whose brains seem to be a wellspring of fresh, innovative ideas, each of which have the potential of starting a multi-billion dollar business, set a new trend or even ignite movements which shape society. What makes them think differently and which lessons can we learn? A personal take on thinking processes.
Leonardo Da Vinci, Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, Arianna Huffington — there are a handful of people who just seem to constantly come up with world-changing ideas, which set new trends and standards and ultimately shape the way we live. Are they just a different species of humans (I call them: Homo Genius)? Or is there a method which we can adopt to translate our raw brainpower to innovative and elegant ideas? It turns out: “Yes”, and “Yes” — precisely because Homo Genius evolves from Homo Sapiens by applying a rigorous way of thinking. Here is my personal take on shaping my thought process.
You Don’t Have to be Skilled to See the Problem
Every innovative idea solves a pressing problem in an elegant way. Let that sink in first, and then let us look at what this sentence’s implications are.
First, innovation evokes an image of something from outer space: never seen before, completely unknown and potentially dangerous. However, the most accurate description is simply: surprisingly unexpected. This surprise happens when something well-known in a completely unrelated context is tweaked and translated to serve the current use case.
Second, elegance is the child of human intuition marrying ease of use. Through our experience we have gathered enough data to make assumptions about how things around us work. When those things then confirm these assumptions, our intuition is reinforced. However, when our assumptions didn’t expect something extraordinarily easy to use, our intuition will be imprinted with a new standard: the bar has been raised. Every new standard creates a new “first impression”, and every such “first” is a positive memory. Our brains just happen to label this experience as: elegance.
Finally, and most importantly, you don’t have to be skilled to see the problem. This obvious point usually sweeps away all thought barriers in the minds of those who realise this simple truth. A problem is everything that elicits a frustrated sigh from you. “I forgot my password for the umpteenth time” — that’s a problem. “I don’t know which documents I need for my situation and how I can get them” — this is another well-known problem. “I don’t know where to invest my spare money” — even though this problem is pressing, I assume everybody would be grateful to have it in the first place.
However, you don’t need to be a programmer, administrative employee or investment professional to see these problems. If at all, applying your virgin mind to solve these problems proves to be an advantage. The key here is to differentiate between the solution and its implementation by using the art of Abstraction.
Cutting Through the Bulls*** Using Abstraction
There is no better way to explain a concept by means of a folktale, and this is what I am going to do: be the child who cannot see The Emperor’s New Clothes. In this well-known story, two weavers fool a vain emperor. Sensing an opportunity, the weavers sell the emperor a dress which only the intelligent and competent can see. The emperor is hooked, puts the dress on and marches through his capital. Not wanting to be perceived as stupid and incompetent, the crowd plays along, until an ignorant child exclaims: “The emperor is naked!” Suddenly, everybody sees the obvious and wonders why it took them so long to realise.
What the child unknowingly did is a perfect example of the art of Abstraction. The child didn’t have prior knowledge, cut right through the matter and expressed what everybody already knew but didn’t dare to think. And this is where your lack of skills enables you to be the child.
Abstraction Gives You the Vision to Infect People With Your Ideas
Children love to play “Make Believe”. We can learn a lot from this simple game: When you encounter a problem, imagine how the solution would look like in a perfect world, and then start working backwards.
Applied to the password problem: create a service which makes remembering passwords obsolete.
The document problem: create a single platform from where you can get every single document you ever need in your life as a citizen.
The investment problem: create a system which invests your money automatically and responsibly.
(To be sure, these scenarios are well-known and there are already plenty of people out there who are tackling these problems. But still, they do exist and are not elegantly solved — at least not that I have heard of.)
The art of Abstraction sets your goal and forces you to stretch yourself. But more importantly, it provides a vision which serves as a basis for communication with other people who will help you get from the abstract level to a more concrete one. This process is what I have called implementation above. Only now do your skills enter the scene: based on your talents, what can you achieve and where do you need external input?
How Timing Influences Your Skills and Your Vision
The timing of this question is a crucial part of the equation. Asking the question before having a vision and considering your own skills most probably leads to frustration (because you likely won’t be able to implement everything yourself).
However, after developing a vision and realising that you don’t have the skills will motivate you to seek external input. The same vision then will likely infect the person you are talking to — hooking them to work with you on making your vision a reality. Before you realise, you are in the process of starting a new venture which is going to have a shot at solving the problem.
Constantly applying the art of Abstraction leads to another positive effect: evaluating everything from a child’s perspective forces you and your organization to increase the ease of use of your solution. Remember, ease of use influences human intuition; both are ingredients to create elegance. In addition, elegant solutions draw attention and spread like wildfire, creating trends and shaping societies — which is exactly what we want to accomplish with our brain child.
Key Takeaways
- You don’t have to be skilled to see a problem.
- Use the perspective of a child to cut through the BS.
- Constantly exercise Abstraction to streamline your thinking — if it is too difficult to understand, it is not abstract enough.
- Don’t expect yourself to possess all skills to solve every problem you encounter — set your vision by using Abstraction and use this vision to attract the talent which will help make your vision a reality.
