Photo by poportis

Recently, I wrote about how to generate innovative ideas. Here’s the rub:

All the innovative ideas in the world won’t mean squat if you don’t act on them.

A Thousand Ideas

How many times have you been standing in the shower when inspiration struck?  A novel, an advertising campaign, a new product line?

What did you do about it?

We all get a thousand ideas a day. Few are acknowledged, fewer are acted upon, and fewer still are brought into being.

Many ideas will fall apart when you shine a light on them, but some will be diamonds. And as for the rest, those fragments will often come together in surprising ways, given the time, space, and even more ideas.

Act, and Be Acted Upon

I believe that the more we act, the more we’re acted upon. If we act on the ideas we receive, we will receive more and better ideas.

Isn’t it true that competent people who get things done get more work assigned to them?

The universe behaves the same way.

15 minutes

I’m guilty. I have reams of ideas – video blogs, short films, novels, stories, memoirs, non-fiction books, software. I have ideas for how to market myself and how to improve my website.

Where to begin? I say spend 15 minutes a day listing and vetting your ideas. Try to figure out why they won’t work. Recombine them in new ways until you strike gold.  Then spend your 15 minutes working on that one idea.

15 minutes a day = 91 hours a year

But once you get going, you wouldn’t be able to keep yourself to 15 minutes a day.

This entry was posted on May 9, 2011 at 7:44 am and is filed under Innovation, Motivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.