Five Steps to Have The Best Ideas You’ve Ever Had

Everyone is hunting for their next “big idea.” Or maybe clinging to one, worried someone else will “steal their idea.”

But ideas are abundant. Ideas are free. As Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design says,

“Ideas are not like fine china, ideas are like paper cups — they are cheap to manufacture, and when one has holes in it, go get another one.”

Seven years ago I had a crisis. I hated the startup that I had spent the last five grueling years building. I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to dig deeper within myself to find a project, cause, or idea I could fall in love with — a thing that would make the meaningful change and contribution to the world that I had invested my life in pursuing happen. From within the trenches of digging for my next big thing, I practiced this one process I’m about to share — and then the magic started to shine out from within my tangled mind.

Once I saw how these puzzle pieces fit together, my imagination was suddenly illuminated like never before. It was like my brain went from limping along like a grey potato in pursuit of “clicks” to lightning bolt city, reimagining and reinventing the future of civilization. I started having the best ideas I’ve ever had.

Seven years later, the more I practice this process, the better it gets. It’s been so fruitful that I ended up writing a book about it called How to Save the World. These days, I have so many ideas that I mock them up and put them on my website in the actual hope that someone will “steal my ideas.” I simply have too many good ideas to know what to do with them all.

Here are the five steps to have a never-ending stream of great ideas:

Make some space for 2 to 5 hours to do this exercise properly. Creative thought comes from calming the “busy” mind in order for different parts of the brain to be activated — the parts that make new connections and fuel your imagination to come up with ideas.

Step 1: Research deeply the numbers describing what you want to change in the world.

Your first step is to find the key number that best defines what you want to change in the world. It must be a real-world number that is measured in quantitative units of physical matter, such as tons of carbon dioxide, parts per million of a chemical, lives saved, green cover in cities, child mortality, or number of trees.

There will be a direct relationship between how deeply you understand your data and how good you are at coming up with ideas to change that data. Research the organizations that collect and store the data. What types of sensors, satellite images, or cameras are used to gather the data? Can you get the data per person, per household, per street, or per company? Is there a real-time data collection system? Pick up the phone and get to know the people who collect the data.

Great ideas that change the world aren’t plucked out of the air, nor are they copycats of other startups. Great ideas are harvested from looking deeply into your data.

Step 2: Define your goal number.

It’s simple. To change the world you need two numbers — where you are now and the destination you want to get to. For example, some goal numbers I’ve been using for my projects — I call these numbers “God Metrics” in my book — are zero carbon emissions from the electricity grid, 50 percent green cover in cities, and 80 percent calories on a menu from plant-based foods. Real world-changing doesn’t take the form of clicks, downloads, subscribers, views, or signatures. It comes in the form of real-world physical matter you can measure.

What’s your goal number for the future world when the cause or problem you are interested in is “solved?” How would you measure a utopian happy ending?

Step 3: Get a large piece of paper and write this number in the middle inside a circle.

Get a large piece of paper. Draw a circle in the middle of the paper and write your goal number in it. All your ideas and strategy will come from influencing this one big number.

Step 4: Imagine a future world when this number has come true.

Look at your data goal again, and ask the question, “How do we get there?” There’s something about putting data at the center of your creative process that does something incredible to your imagination. It will help you generate lots of great ideas that are fresh and different — probably too many! Think of it as harvesting ideas from looking deeply into your data.

Now that you’ve fleshed out your visualization of the beautiful utopian future, it should be thick with rich and beautiful ideas.

Step 5: Mind-map 100 ideas that it will take to get the world from here to there.

Your task now is to write down 100 ideas that will help take your cause from the current world today to your visualized tomorrow. Draw bubbles branching off the main number in the middle of the page, with a different idea in each bubble. Your ideas can be anything from simple behaviors like using compostable straws to crazy sci-fi high-tech ideas like floating solar-powered sky gardens that we get to by strapping on a hydrogen-powered rocket booster pack. The intention of this exercise is to keep your mental energy flowing around the problem. Keep asking yourself “How could we make this new world work?”

Coming up with 100 ideas is crazy, you say? Here’s the thing — trying to get to 100 ideas will force you to dig deep into your creativity. Don’t worry if your ideas seem silly, or unrealistic science fiction. Ideas are like layers of an onion. As you peel away one layer of an idea, you’ll be able to see the next idea. Once you are 20 ideas in, you will have lifted off the obvious ideas and you’ll need to make new mental connections and think in different ways to get to the next layer. The kind of ideas you’ll come up with when you are 90 ideas in, will be quite different from your fifth idea. Often the best ideas will be buried the deepest.

If you get stuck for ideas, try making categories or branches for different industries, types of people, or market sectors. Start exploring branches such as food, transportation, social life, babies, clothing, e-waste, education, and whatever else you can think of. Keep branching and coming up with more ideas.

Don’t flake out on this exercise at just a few ideas. Don’t stop at 27 ideas. Keep going. Your one diamond of an idea could come to you at idea number 88. Your ideas can even be indirect. You might write down an idea for an app, then you write down next to it something like, “I really need to enroll in a course to learn how to code.” Then you enroll in a course, there you meet a project partner, and together you make a startup that changes the world — for a totally new idea.

Don’t be shy of the crazy

Don’t be shy of embracing your craziest ideas. Go deeper into the crazy. A fantasy idea like “water-powered flying cars” might be the stepping stone to your next idea that is viable. Maybe it’s not flying cars, but it gets you to think about underground cars, and then about underground bike tunnels. You contact Elon Musk’s Boring Company (they bore tunnels for underground transportation) and start working on a plan to bore a bike tunnel from the Golden Gate Bridge through a very steep mountain to Marin City, which currently makes bike commuting on this route almost impossible.

You google “utopian bike tunnels” and see there is a movement in London to turn abandoned train tunnels into bright bikable urban spaces — you make contact and find your new creative partner. One day Elon Musk might bore a bike tunnel through that mountain in Marin, but in the meantime, you’ve joined a team that turned a real tunnel into a joyful, eco-friendly underground art-tube and sparked a movement of bike-tunnel designs in cities around the world.

Your crazy fantasy idea could lead to a reasonably viable idea, and if that idea doesn’t happen, the process of exploring the “crazy idea” will probably illuminate a dozen even better viable ideas.

I’ve often been shy of pursuing my craziest ideas, but when I have (often years after I thought them up) I have often discovered that after a couple of months of working on my idea, it didn’t seem that crazy anymore. I find that other people in the world are working on something related, and it all starts to seem perfectly logical, and pretty cool.

If you ever have a choice to hold back and choose the safe, vanilla option or else dive into your wildest ideas, go for the wild ones. It’s a no-brainer. Don’t pull away from your craziest ideas. Go deeper into them. The world craves inspiration. It craves novelty. It craves innovation. You will most likely find some corner of your wildest ideas that has real viability and can light up the world.

Moving into the Idea-bundance

Be wary of getting hooked into thinking there is one special idea out there for you, that will blossom into the startup of your dreams and change the world. Getting attached to a singular idea is a liability for the imagination. One idea can be greedy for your life’s hard-drive space, and it can block new ideas from being downloaded from the ether.

There is a Japanese philosophy called kaizen which can be roughly translated as continual improvement. It means finding ways to always improve a system, or optimize a workflow, instead of remaining rigid and unchanging. Employing kaizen means allowing your ideas to be always improving, flowing, and changing. It means continually assessing your ideas and systems to see how effectively they are shifting the dial of your data, and with this attitude, you make small changes every day to do it better.

Think of the problem you are trying to solve as the trunk of a tree, with thousands of ideas exploding out like acorns. Ideas, like acorns, will fall to the ground and some will grow and some won’t, but the tree will always make new ones. The holy grail of innovation is in pushing yourself to invent many, many ideas and exercising this part of your brain like a muscle. You need to be the tree.

Ideas are not end-points in themselves. Ideas are like stars in the sky that light the way — they facilitate your journey to reach your goal data point. If your data goal is 1 million trees, it doesn’t really matter which idea is the vehicle to get there.

There is no tangible limit to how fruitful your capacity to invent new ideas can be. I’d like to see you have so many ideas that you are giving them away like a grandmother next door with a tree that fruits so heavily she has to give boxes of oranges to everyone on the street.

Your ideas matter because life is not defined by how successful we become, it’s defined what we contribute to the world. The world needs your imagination. It’s your calling, and maybe even your duty, to share it with us.

‍