John Jantsch posted this awesome piece on how to generate innovative ideas for your business in lightning-like speed.
In it, he teaches us how to leverage the power of parallelism and analogies to criss-cross ideas from one realm of activity into another.
What I do is come up with one single topic – business growth, referrals, persuasion – whatever I am trying to work on – and I pick up books that are not related to the topic and read through them quickly looking only for ideas that relate to or parallel my subject. So, if I doing a piece on business growth, I might actually find some incredibly innovative ideas in a book about how bees build colonies. (Actually nature works are some of the best) The key to this is the single or monochromatic focus while I read.
Let’s turn this into a step-by-step process:
- Pick a single, focused topic.
- Select books that have nothing to do with the topic.
- Scan them for ideas tied to the topic you picked.
- Choose the ones that mirror the structure of your topic.
Simple, easy, elegant. I love it!
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