THERE ARE TWO distinct and very different processes involved in finding an idea for your Play Project. The first is to generate options and the second is to choose between them. Most people make the mistake of merging these together and as a result get stuck. If you think you’ve got no ideas, that’s because you’re doing this too – evaluating and discarding ideas at the same time as trying to generate them. This just ties your brain in knots and leaves you confused and frustrated. To ensure that doesn’t happen this time, we’re going to separate the different processes into two steps with a break in between. First we’ll generate ideas and later, in the second step, we’ll evaluate them. In the third step of this Crash Course we will then turn the best idea into a manageable project you can start right away.
No! Here’s why. Most people don’t have a single, clear passion. I don’t. And yet I have constructed a successful working life made of things I love doing. If I won the lottery tomorrow and never had to make any money ever again, I would still be doing much of what I do now – reading, writing, giving talks, running events, learning, teaching fascinating ideas to people, running courses, playing with technology and doing online projects. And those are the things I get paid for. That’s what I call ‘getting paid to play’. The way I got there is how most people get there – by choosing one project that I was excited about at a time and following it through. After each project I would reflect on how well it worked and how much I enjoyed it and use that to choose my next project.
Even if you are one of the minority with a singular passion, the only way you can find it is by trying stuff out. The only way to know if you really enjoy something is to experience it.
So if you want to find your passion or just find work you love, here is the single most important message in this book for you:
Don’t think it out.
Play it out.
Don’t sit around hoping to find your calling; go out into the world and explore. Be willing to experiment with some ideas. And that starts with generating some.
That might sound like a lot but in fact it’s easier to generate lots of ideas than try to come up with one right idea.
It’s easier to generate lots of ideas than try to come up with one right idea
Today is all about possibilities. Your aim is simply to generate as many ideas as you possibly can for businesses, events, services, products, courses, workshops, websites, books, freelance/consulting careers and so on that you think you might enjoy pursuing.
IMPORTANT: Your focus today is quantity not quality. That means generating as many ideas as you can without worrying whether they are possible or can make money, whether you can do them in 30 days or whether you have the skills or talent or connections or funds to make them happen. We will look at all that later.
And put aside any workerbot thoughts about finding a career for the rest of your life. In fact, don’t even think about a business at this point. Today is just about projects and ideas you’d like to make happen.
We’re going to approach idea generation from five different angles. Some might work better than others for you. That’s fine.
Don’t evaluate your ideas at all. Just write anything down that you think might be interesting, exciting or fun to do. Today is about brainstorming and the first rule of brainstorming is no judgement. Remember, premature evaluation results in disappointment for everyone.
Let’s start with a braindump of all those projects you’ve wanted to do for a while – creative projects you’ve thought of doing but haven’t got round to, the book you haven’t had time to write, the business idea you couldn’t see how to start. Write them all down.
| # | Idea (in 10 words or fewer) |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 |
If you can’t come up with seven, that’s OK. See if you can write down at least one or two, then move on to the next category.
Ideas that use your talents, skills, knowledge or even just your personality traits are usually quicker to get off the ground than the ones that are in a completely new field. So let’s think of a few ideas that make use of what you already have.
| # | Ideas using my talents, skills, knowledge, personality |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 |
‘Behind almost every frustration, inconvenience and lack lies a new business waiting to be born.’
—Alain de Botton, author, TV presenter
and co-founder of The School of Life
Paul Graham of Y Combinator (one of the most well-respected startup investment companies in the world and named the top startup incubator and accelerator by Forbes) says that the most successful startup ideas are organic ones – meaning ones that grow organically out of your life experience. These succeed more often than ideas people choose in an area they have no experience of just because it looks like it has potential. The iPhone for instance is an organic idea – it’s the phone that Steve Jobs wanted to exist so he created it.
Sara Blakely, inventor of the innovative body-shaping pantyhose Spanx, told CNBC in 2013 that, ‘My own butt was the inspiration.’ One night, she couldn’t find the right hosiery to wear under white trousers, so she decided to invent her own. She named it Spanx and turned it into a business that made her, at the age of 41, the youngest self-made female billionaire.
‘Why doesn’t this exist?’
THIS QUESTION HAS driven the creation of businesses throughout history. Here’s an example from Sweden.
A little fewer than ten years ago, sound designer Alex Ljung and artist Eric Wahlforss got frustrated trying to exchange music files. They told Wired magazine in 2009 that
It was just really, really annoying for us to collaborate with people on music – I mean simple collaboration, just sending tracks to other people in a private setting, getting some feedback from them, and having a conversation about that piece of music. In the same way that we’d be using Flickr for our photos, and Vimeo for our videos, we didn’t have that kind of platform for our music.
So Alex and Eric built one. They called it SoundCloud and it now has 175 million registered users worldwide.
Necessity could be the mother of invention for you too. What do you wish existed? It might be an app you can’t find, a guidebook you’d like to read, a support group you would join or a club night that doesn’t yet exist.
You’ll often find that some version of what you’re considering already exists but it has been poorly implemented or just doesn’t work the way you’d like it to. If it’s a book or blog you’d like to write, you could approach the same topic with your own distinctive style and still create something successful.
Think of all the things you wish existed or an area where the existing solutions frustrate you and write down any ideas for projects.
| # | Organic ideas (in 10 words or fewer) |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 |
OK, let’s add in a few wild cards. Let your imagination rip for a while and see if we can top the list up with some dream ideas. What do you dream of doing? What did you dream of doing as a child? What would you do if you won the lottery? After you’d had a couple of months off work, sitting on the beach drinking cocktails, what projects might you take on?
Let’s write down some dream ideas: things you would do if you had all the money, time, confidence and contacts you could ever want. What would you do? Write that novel? Build your own house from scratch? Design your own car? Put on a one-person show at the Edinburgh Festival? Write a killer app that dominates your field? Get your own TV show?
Write down seven dream ideas below, the more outrageous the better.
| # | Dream ideas (in 10 words or fewer) |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 |
Now, in order that we can do something useful with these wonderfully outlandish dreams of yours, all we need is a simple little rule from the wonderful US author, Barbara Sher. As Barbara says, ‘You can always have the part you love most about any dream.’
So for each of your seven dreams above, fill in the following table by writing down the part of the dream that you most love or find most exciting. For example, if you wrote down a dream of having your own prime-time chat show, what is the most exciting part of that dream for you? It might be being the centre of attention in front of an audience or spreading a message with your choice of topics and guests or a chance to meet your heroes on your own show or having a vehicle for indulging your passion for comic performance.
If you dream of creating the killer app that trounces Adobe or Facebook, the exciting part for you might be to finally immerse yourself in a project you have complete control over or a chance to indulge your passion for technology or good design or a chance to finally prove how awful the current solutions are and show them how it should be done. Of course the idea of getting rich and quitting your job could be a big part of the appeal, but what we’re looking for is a dream that’s exciting to be doing, not just one with an exciting paycheque. That’s because if you don’t enjoy doing it, you’re unlikely to have much success at it.
What we’re looking for is a dream that’s exciting to be doing, not just one with an exciting paycheque
For each of your dream ideas above, write down the part you find most exciting.
| Dream # | The part that excites me most about this dream is … |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 |
Your next step for each dream is to think of some idea that seems more doable but that retains the part of the dream you wrote down as being the most exciting. If the exciting bit of the chat show example was meeting your heroes, you could simply try and meet several of your heroes and interview them for a blog. If the most exciting bit was the chance to be funny, you could launch your own chat show as a podcast for free right now and develop your comedy skills.
If you want to create a new social network that you think would be better than Facebook but you don’t have millions of dollars of funding, then your more doable idea might be to write posts on LinkedIn Pulse critiquing the good and bad of current leading social networks and laying out your vision of a better way. Or it might be to develop an add-on to an existing social network that addresses your concerns.
Write down the more doable versions of your dream ideas below.
| Dream # | Doable version of my dream idea |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 |
You should have a good few ideas written down now but let’s chuck in one last idea. This is your ‘Ah what the hell!’ idea that you throw into the hat at the last moment.
| # | My ‘ah what the hell!’ Idea (in 10 words or less) |
|---|---|
| 1 |
(It’s funny, but sometimes it’s the thing you throw in at the last minute that turns out to be the one closest to your heart.)
I’ve detailed five ready-to-go ideas for you in the Idea Cheatsheets which you can download for free from www.screwworkbreakfree.com – these give details of five possible projects that are particularly good if you’re still in the exploration stage and want to choose a project that leaves your options open and helps you come up with other ideas you can follow on with: write a book (or blog), start an online business, run an event or workshop, sell arts, crafts or physical products, and sell your services as a freelancer, consultant or advisor. If you struggled to come up with your own ideas, download the Idea Cheatsheets now and pick one or two to add to your list here before we move on. I guarantee that there will be something that will work for you.
In the next step we’ll look at how to evaluate your ideas and then make a choice. Then in the final step, we’ll take your chosen idea and turn it into something you can do in just 30 days. But for now, take a break: have lunch, go for a walk or sleep on it.