Ep 365 | Sometimes All You Need is Just One More Good Idea

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today we're going to talk about ideas. Specifically, we're going to talk about how just one more idea can change everything for you. Can unlock all of life's mysteries for you. Just one more idea. I wanna start by sharing a long quote from Jim Rohn. Many of you probably know Jim Rohn. If you don't know Jim, you've probably read something that he's said or written about before. Jim was an amazing entrepreneur. He was an author, he was a motivational speaker, and he talked about wealth, he talked about happiness, just an amazing, amazing guy. That really contributed to, God, I would even call him maybe one of the original founders or fathers of the personal development space. And Jim said, and I quote, "Ideas can change your life. And sometimes all you need is just one more good idea in a series of good ideas. It's like dialing the numbers of a combination lock." After, after you've dialed 5 or 6 numbers, the lock may not come open, but you probably don't need 5 or 6 more numbers. Maybe you need just one more number, one more idea. Maybe a seminar or a sermon can provide it. The lyrics from a song could do it. The dialogue from a movie could do it. Conversation with a friend might do it. If you keep your eyes and ears open, You'll find that one last idea you need. Once you find that idea, the lock comes open and there's the door for you to gain your success. It's a really great quote. And it's, you know, it's one about perseverance and persistence. And, you know, we know that these things are the key to business success, life success, relationship success, just staying in the batter's box as our good friend, Mac Newton tells us. But I really like this thought around how we may just be one idea away from something life-changing. We can look at a variety of examples, especially in business. Let's take Instagram. You know, Instagram, as many may know, was a location-based check-in app. It was originally called Burbn. And it wasn't gaining a lot of traction. And, and its founders found that people using the, the Burbn app were more interested in sharing photos than checking in at locations. So they pivoted the app to focus solely on photo sharing with filters. That was the idea, right? The, the original idea, or the ideas that stacked to bring about Burbn They needed one more idea, and that idea was photo sharing with filters might make a lot more sense. This change in focus created, you know, massive success, as we all know, for Instagram, and it attracted millions upon millions of users. And we know that Facebook acquired Instagram for a billion dollars or so about a decade ago. It's still one of the most popular social media platforms. How about Slack? Many of you are using Slack today. Slack is in— I think we've talked about this quite some time ago at the podcast because I'm fascinated by the story of Slack because Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack, his team initially created Slack as an internal communication tool while they were working on a video game. Their focus was on the video game and the video game failed. But they recognized the potential of their communication tool, so they pivoted a focus— almost reluctantly pivoted the focus— to go after the standalone product of the communication tool for team collaboration. Slack became a leading communication tool for businesses, and it was acquired by Salesforce about 3 years ago for almost $28 billion. That one more idea that Stewart and his team had was that, hey, this silly communication tool that we're using to build our video game, what if that was the product? What would that look like? Maybe one more quick example for you. Airbnb. Airbnb began as a way for the founders of the company to rent out air mattresses in their apartment to attendees at a conference who couldn't find hotel accommodations. That was how Airbnb came to be. It was renting out air mattresses at apartments so the attendees of a conference who couldn't find a hotel had a place to stay. And the idea was expanding this concept to allow people to rent out their entire homes or their all of, you know, their entire apartment to travelers worldwide. Airbnb is now a global hospitality giant. It's disrupted the traditional hotel industry. It's changed how people travel. As a matter of fact, I would bet that most everyone listening to the podcast has leveraged Airbnb or a like service in the past year. That's how much it's changed things. These are all one more idea type of concepts. You are, in fact, one idea away. So, the question I'd be asking myself is, if I'm truly one idea away, How do I come up with more ideas? How do I, how do I, you know, get that spark that changes the trajectory of my business? And I think it starts with what Jim Rohn said, which is being open-minded, your eyes and ears open. It starts with number one, being curious, asking questions and exploring new perspectives. Constantly ask why. Or what if, or how. We've got to expose ourselves to other subjects and industries and cultures, maybe even things that have nothing to do with what it is we do. But by asking why and what if and how, we create a more diverse knowledge base and more connections that can make for greater ideas. So be a bit more curious, and maybe it sparks an idea. I think you could also engage in different creative exercises. I'm a big fan of having a whiteboard up in front of me and a marker and just staring at it and setting aside time for some free thinking sessions with the, with the focus being to generate as many ideas out of like a brainstorming session, right? So I think that creative exercises like standing in front of a whiteboard and asking yourself a big question or drawing out some sort of mind map so you can see the relationships between different ideas. I think these things inspire new thinking. The next thing I really think about if I want to be, you know, spark some new ideas, I got to change up my environment. I've got to seek some new experiences, maybe travel somewhere or try something I haven't tried before or work in a different setting. Just changing up the environment can refresh your perspective. It can inspire some new ideas. I also, you know, around environment, might want to surround myself with more creativity. Like, who are the creative people in my world? How do I get around them? Maybe even go— I know this might sound crazy to some of you, but I don't know, you go to a museum or you see some sort of performance that's outside of the norm for you. It can stimulate some creativity, which leads to some ideas. I also think with respect to changing environment, one thing I do constantly is I go out in the middle of nowhere by myself, especially where it's quiet and I can only be in my head. And I don't go out there and say, gosh, what ideas can I come up with? But I just let my mind, my mind calm. And it's fun— funny, like when the, when the noise subsides, the physical noise as well as the noise in my head I think that's when your wisdom really starts to show up. Next couple things in terms of, uh, manufacturing some creativity in order to create some new ideas: I would embrace constraints. What do I mean by that? I would look at the constraints, the obstacles that are standing my way. Maybe it's timing, or maybe it's budget, or whatever it may be. Those things can force you to think more creative creatively because you've got to overcome them. So I look at how can I challenge myself, how can I put myself in a creative, you know, environment by, by having a challenge like a specific goal or time frame. And I've got to be creative with a limited number of resources to solve for it. So I put myself in a position where I'm facing some sort of constraint that I have to embrace. The last thing I'm thinking about in terms of sparking new ideas, being a bit more creative, is practice what I would call divergent thinking. In other words, we got to think in multiple directions. So instead of focusing on one solution, explore as many possibilities you could come up with. Like, don't settle on the first idea. Push yourself to generate more, right? Like, ask yourself to come up with more even though you may not feel like you need it. I also think in terms of multiple directions, we talk about inversion. Like, instead of going from start to finish, what if we work from finish to start and work in a, in a different direction? So taking a different perspective or a different angle allows us to see things a little bit differently. We could take elements from different concepts, we can start to merge them to create something new, and this could potentially lead to innovative solutions and ideas. Now, there are other things I'm sure that you can do in your world to create more ideas, but the, but the, the focus here and why I'm so, you know, hell-bent on talking about this today is because for many of us, the greatest amount of money and success we have actually stems from one or maybe many of our biggest ideas. In other words, we had the greatest success because we had a big idea, yet we spend very little time trying to come up with ideas because we're doing the things that we perceive to be urgent and things that we perceive to be important. And we're constantly on the go. And I'm challenging you here today to recognize that you may be one idea away. How can you go and generate that idea? Use some of the things I talked about, test it out. I'm sure you've got a couple things in mind. And let that, that last idea be the code, as Jim Rohn said. Let it unlock things and see where your life goes. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.