Ideas

Consider The Wildest Ideas

Consider The Wildest Ideas

Garth Beyer

Wild Idea

Are you open to it? Thinking about it? Considering the wildest idea others may have?

I tested a new interface of EatStreet‘s website earlier today with Rob, VP of marketing there. His last question for me was what my wildest idea is that could make the experience better, more remarkable? No boundaries, no wrong answers, no restrictions. It could be anything.

Really, though, he didn’t need to ask. He could have ended the trial without ever asking. The feedback up to that point was safe, it was logical, it was feedback that would benefit the mass number of users. But he didn’t stop there. He asked.

It’s great to think of where the wild ideas are. They represent forward thinking, they represent risk and potential failure, but also potentially wild success too.

 

Stay Positive & So, What’s Your Wildest Idea? Can It Work?

Photo credit

The Problem Isn’t That You Can’t Handle Criticism

Garth Beyer

Two hours of solid group brainstorming. A lot of bad ideas will be thrown in the air, but it’s your right and your privilege to throw as many ideas out there. Good ideas and “meh” ideas.

A friend of mine used to work at a PR agency that, during brainstorming sessions, would not let anyone leave the room until there were 70 ideas on the board. On top of that, even if their first idea was the perfect one and they knew it was, they still went to 70.

You’re a magnet. We all are when we pitch ideas. We attract the criticism and hold it with us while we shout out more ideas. The more ideas, the more criticism we hear, the heavier we feel. Finally, every magnet has its threshold and we can’t hold any more criticism. At that point, we shut up. At that point, we fail. Exhausted from holding so much criticism.

The problem isn’t that you can’t hold any more criticism. The problem is you’ve let it stop you from sharing more ideas. All the sudden you make the brainstorming session about you and not about brainstorming.

It’s two-fold. First, criticism gains weight when you take it personally. Then, second, as you take more criticism personally, you become subjective and blame yourself for poor ideas, for not moving the group forward in the right direction; you believe you’re holding the group back.

Actually, what holds the group back is your lack of more “meh” ideas.

The reason brainstorming groups work is when you share a bad idea, it saves everyone else from thinking of that same bad idea. It’s a game of trial-and-error. More specifically, it’s a game of removing all bad ideas until what you have left are the good ones. When you stop participating with your bad ideas, you’re not doing the group justice, you’re holding them back.

 

Stay Positive & If You’re Not Coming Up With Good Ideas Read This

 

Evergreen Content, Now What To Do With It?

Garth Beyer

Evergreen content is like a wrinkled shirt you found in your closet you want to wear. It’s still stylish, still fits, still brings out your eyes, but you’re not going to wear it wrinkled. Only thing to do: iron out the wrinkles.

I’ve banged my head on the wall a few times trying to come up with an idea for a blog post. I’ve been there. I’ve also watched brands bang walls against their social media teams’ heads trying to get them to come up with a fresh tweet, a viral FB post, a new blog post. I’ve seen people crack at the pressure of coming up with an idea when they’ve felt all the great ideas have been surfaced before. It’s a sad day when that happens. It’s a sad day when they ignore their wrinkled shirts.

Instead of banging your head against the wall, search for the evergreen content, that timeless tweet, that blog post that feels somewhat unfinished and iron it out. I’m not necessarily suggesting you re-purpose something you’ve written. After all, the idea of evergreen content is that it’s already a solid idea.

Narrow the content, take a different perspective to it, add to the narrative because you likely have new ideas to go with it because it was hung in the closet while you’ve experienced more of the world, more of the brand, more of your voice.

Don’t be afraid to dig up an evergreen when you’re lost for ideas, lost for content, lost for words.

 

Stay Positive & Reuse, Recycle

 

Using All Your Potential: Bullying And Psychological Cardio

Garth Beyer

There’s extreme power in balance, in meditation, in flow. I just don’t believe you can use all your potential that way. If you think of an idea and proceed to ruminate, perhaps you’ll reach a symbolic conclusion. Then what? What if you think of an idea and then run with it, try it out, make it happen? Psychological cardio.

Forget all adjectives used to describe ideas. An idea is an idea. The real meaning of it is defined by what you do with the idea, how far you run with it, what you shape it into. Don’t tell me what kind of idea it is. It doesn’t matter. Show me.

How do you run with an idea? That’s where bullying comes in. I’m not fond of the connotation bullying has taken on; it’s completely negative. There’s so much more we can learn from it. We are our own best bullies.

Track coaches are great bullies too. They push you to run further, they yell at you to run faster, they blow their whistle to get you to try the jump again, only this time, jump higher.

B2B bosses are great bullies too. They’ll tell you to go back and do something again until it’s right, they hold meetings with you just to tell you where you are failing and how to improve, they adapt negative reinforcement strategies into their training.

And as I said, we are our own best bullies. We have the chance everyday to steal our own lunch money, to trip ourselves up on a project, to hate on ourselves when we half-ass something. However, we can also yell at ourselves to get up off the ground, to blow a mental whistle signaling to try something again (practice, practice, practice), and to threaten ourselves with unemployment.

Every person I’ve spoken to who states they are self-employed, also tells me “my boss can be a real ass sometimes.”

Rightfully so! As a friend Tweeted at me yesterday, it’s not about seeing just the forest or just the trees, it’s not all in or nothing. She means that it’s a dance. We can institute positive reinforcement, but if we want to reach our fullest potential, there must also be negative reinforcement. To get the most out of our rumination, we also need to act on our thoughts. Think about it in terms of bullying.

What you hear about bullying is only the negative extremes of it. You never hear of bullying gone right even though it happens in our lives everyday and turns out some of the most talented artists.

You have a chance to redefine bullying, you have a chance to build up your psychological cardio, you have a chance to use all of your potential. You can read all the inspirational quotes you want, but follow them up with the crack of a bull whip.

 

Stay Positive & Yes, Bullying CAN Be A Good Thing

Don’t forget to help stop the bad bullying

Your Ideas Do Not Suck Despite What People Say, Tweet Or Comment

Garth Beyer

Naysayer!

Zero reviews on Amazon. No comments flowing. You’re lacking “likes” and “retweets.”

Or worse yet, all the reviews are hating on your product. All the comments say your idea sucks. The only shares you’re getting on social media platforms are tweets and posts to remind people to ignore you. Actually, what you need to do is ignore them.

I’ve been regularly writing for a few years now: sharing ideas, expressing opinions, telling things how I see them. I’ve received a lot of hate, a lot of criticism… a lot of silence.

It doesn’t phase me. How?

Something I’ve learned as a writer is the best applause you will receive is the applause you never hear. It’s a weird world; Usually only the naysayers speak up. But trust me, there are people out there that love your work. They’re just quiet about it. If your goal is to get them to speak up, but their not. Only then do you have the right to say your art is shit. Otherwise keep creating, keep shipping, keep ignoring the naysayers.

I’m a firm believer that there’s not an article on the Internet that hasn’t been read without someone nodding their head in agreement. You’ll never know for certain, of course. But that feedback isn’t the reward, is it?

 

Stay Positive & The Only Idea That Sucks Is The Idea You Don’t Share

Photo courtesy of a naysayer

Go Ahead, Steal My Ideas

Garth Beyer 
The following content was written for the Badger Herald. I felt a need 
to share it here since many readers of this blog are academically 
involved. Worth a read if you're not. After all, we are all students.

If you asked any of my friends, family or blog readers what I do, they would say that I’m a writer. Not an exceptional one. Not a poor one. But a writer, nonetheless. With that, I can confidently say that the source of much of my writing comes from many other’s ideas. I stole them, and I’m not ashamed.

I’m not ashamed of the A’s I get on my writing assignments because I take someone’s idea. I’m not ashamed of my blog readership because I steal other bloggers’ ideas. I’m not ashamed of all the ideas I’ve taken by observation throughout the day and written down in my journal at night. I’m not ashamed because I’ve built off every idea.

All ideas you read in your textbooks, catch online or hear from your friends and colleagues can be traced back to a single stolen idea. That is, until those who took the idea thought to themselves, “This could be better if … ” Great ideas aren’t just made up out of thin air. Great ideas are nothing like epiphanies. Great ideas are made when people steal an idea and make it better.

Recently the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation sued Apple Inc. for allegedly infringing on a U.S. patent on computer technology. I’m far from empathetic about the situation, but there’s a logical explanation for WARF’s pursuit.

If you create something and then someone steals your idea — replicating it for profit and refusing to attribute the ideas origin — then, yes. Sue them. (My only concern is that by the time the lawsuit is concluded, the idea for the computer technology will have been improved upon tenfold by others who stole the idea).

Passionately stated by Seth Godin, “The essential thing to remember, though, is that every project is the work of a thousand generations, of decisions leading to decisions, of the unpredictable outcomes that come from human interactions.”

I’m shocked at how adamant the University of Wisconsin is regarding patents and plagiarism. As a research-based institution, you would think to hear professors propagate to students something along the lines of “Don’t take any other author’s words unless you plan on expanding on them in a way that was not originally done.”

Instead, students are excessively reminded (and for those GPA-dependent students who over-think professors’ instructions, scared shitless) to not take anyone’s ideas. That is stealing.

How hard is it to tell students to take any author’s work, attribute what is word-for-word and develop the work into something better than what it was. That is how progress is made. Are we not teaching students to strive for progress on campus?

The answer is that we say we are striving for progress, but we find ourselves boxed into guidelines and filled with fear of crossing any one of them. It’s a grave mistake how we are thinking about ideas in an industrialist way (mine, mine, mine).

If you stole my wallet or my ego or my books, you would cause real harm and stress to me. But my ideas? Please, take them. The more you take the stronger we all become.

Oh, and by the way, I stole this idea from a blog post on www.blog.ted.com. All I can hope for is that I made it better. And if I didn’t, at least I tried. Something we might all want to take more risks to do, whether academically or not.

 

Stay Positive & Ideas, The Best Thing You Can Steal

The Lottery Project Effect

Garth Beyer

LotteryProjectEffect

When I call forth a team of bright-minded, intuitive individuals to come up with and execute a project idea, we usually don’t find the end.

It doesn’t say much about the specific team members. Like I said, they are all intelligent, all creative and all ambitious. The problem is what I call the Lottery Project Effect.

To them (to anyone I call on) it’s as if they’ve been given the chance to buy a lottery ticket. They show up to the first meeting, they arrive, bringing a determined and creative aura with them. They’re ready to win the lottery.

As Seth Godin says, “The thrill of possibility, the chance for recognition, the chemical high of anticipation. That’s what people pay [show up] for.”

Buying a lottery ticket incites the anticipation and thrill. On the project end, though, being called on is the lottery ticket purchase. The thing is, they don’t cash in the ticket when the project is complete. They’re cashing in the ticket when they show up. The opportunity to create is the reward. They’ve won. But then starts the hard work.

If you didn’t know already, most people who win the lottery end up unhappy in the long run and continue to buy lottery tickets. So it goes on the project side, the thrill of possibility dies down, the chance for recognition that they hoped for starts being fulfilled the moment they meet other team members, the chemical high of anticipation gets trumped by the idea of “I’ve just won the lottery, now what the hell do I do?”

As the project leader, do you keep giving them lottery tickets? Or wait for a team that isn’t interested in the lottery.

 

Stay Positive & Tough Call, Huh? (That’s the Lottery Project Effect for you.)

Photo credit