The One Thing You Must Do To Have New Ideas

THE ONE THING YOU MUST
DO TO HAVE NEW IDEAS

AllGoodCopy.com

Sometimes they’re right there
in your face, shouting at you
like an arrogant teenage kid
who thinks he knows best…

Other times
they’re
nowhere to
be seen, like
your broke
mate Steve:
always in the
toilet when
it’s his round
at the bar.

From now on,
let’s make

ideas
illegal

Well. Er. That’s the problem…

I DO need them.
And so do YOU.

If you want to be successful, the one
skill you’ll need in abundance – more
than any other skill, in fact – is the
ability to come up with good IDEAS.

If you can’t
think up new
ideas: you’ve
got a major
problem and
you need to
fix it ASAP.

Quite simply it’s a
matter of balance:
if you want something
new to come OUT,
you’ve got to put
something new IN.

You see,
your brain
is like
Audrey II
from The
Little Shop
of Horrors:
it demands
to be fed.

Or for a less freaky – but still
weird – image, imagine it’s like
Short Circuit demanding ‘input’.

And despite what some people will
have you believe, I ideas DON’T just
come out of nowhere.

Ideas are like restaurants you suddenly
notice have opened. You can’t remember
seeing the premises being renovated or new
signs being put up – just one day it wasn’t
there and today it is. But just because you
didn’t notice the work being done doesn’t
mean it wasn’t.

Only problem is: they’re built in your
subconscious (which is why you don’t
see them being built), so it’s
IMPOSSIBLE to know exactly which
raw materials you need to build them.

Therefore you need as many
different raw materials as
you can get your hands on.

The good news is: everything’s
useful, from high-brow art…

...to children’s television.

The only rule:

Consume equally as much that has nothing to do
with your niche as with what does.

To give you an idea of how much
random stuff you need to consume to
come up with new ideas, here’s what
raw material I consumed in a month.

Three graphic novels: a
biography of Fidel Castro,
an account of Freud’s
most famous patient (The
Wolfman) and one about
the famous flapper girl
Kiki of Montparnasse.

Three fiction books: The Brief and
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot
Diaz, Death in the Andes by Mario
Vargas Llosa and Motherless Brooklyn
by Jonathan Lethem.

Two non-fiction books: How Music
Works by David Byrne and
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.

FIVE SALES
PROMOTIONS
One oldie by Bill Bonner and another
by Mark Ford (Michael Masterson)
One of my own and two newer ones by
friends, one that flew and one that bombed.

Oh...
And the packs I worked on with my
own junior copywriters.

Four films: Wreck-It Ralph and Despicable
Me; Scenes from a Mall (which was a favour
Woody Allen must have owed someone) and
The Squid and the Whale, about a literary
couple going through a divorce.

I intermittently re-watched The
Sopranos, a reality television in
the UK called Got To Dance and I
went to see a couple of games of
football, in varying divisions.

And I listened to records by My
Bloody Valentine, A$AP Rocky
and the Deftones.

And I don’t list all this stuff to try
to impress you, instead I want to
illustrate my point: it’s a LOT of
random raw material.

But just think what all that is
doing in my mind…

Take a detail I read about how Fidel Castro
could have been killed before any of his
revolutionary business

if it wasn’t for one sympathetic soldier
sending him to a public prison

And think how that might
interact with watching a
surprisingly emotional
performance by a Canadian
dancer in Got to Dance.

How – or even if – this information
will appear directly in my ideas,
we simply do not know.

What we do know is that my
brain now has a vast resource
of raw material to delve into
and potentially build from.

But once you’ve fed your brain, you
must trust it to do its work.

Yes there are
exercises you can do
to tease out ideas
and by consciously
separating the left
and right sides of
your brain you can
encourage new
thoughts – perhaps
I’ll cover them
another time.

But
ultimately,
there is one
thing I’ve
learned over
the years:
the ability to
come up with
new ideas is
fundamental
to your
success

And in turn, the ONE thing that any
entrepreneur must do to develop and
maintain that ability, is to always keep
feeding your brain with a vast variety
of raw materials.

So I hope you take this
idea on board…

I hope these thoughts may
even contribute to your own
raw material…

And I hope you have many
new and breakthrough ideas
throughout your career.

Thank you for reading
If you enjoyed it,
please do share it
And if you’d like some more
ideas, head over to:
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The One Thing You Must Do To Have New Ideas

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