Dr. Sudip Chakraborty
A man possessed with an idea, is a blessing as well as curse.
Having it or not, really don’t know which one is worse.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com recently said; we are ideas starved, not capital starved.
In many ways it reflects the working of today’s world. Audacious and outrageous ideas, changing the way business is done and making things outdated not long before its birth. So its all about the person who has got an disruptive idea & can change the rules of the game at a blink.
So, from where does these ideas come from? As a man of science, I might say, some part of brain & that’s where we are so wrong. Actually ideas are right there floating in thin air and the person who has that illusive receptiveness, happens to pick it just at the right time. It just comes as a click, eureka moment, hunch or random thought which just doesn’t leaves you. So basically there is no inventions, only discovery of things which were just waiting to be unfolded.
So when we are surrounded by ideas all the time, why we pick it up so latel or rather completely overlook it ? What makes us primed to receive any idea? Here are some examples:
- When your back is to the wall; JK Rowling was travelling alone in a train, trying to shut her brain off from the difficulty in raising her children alone without any job. Suddenly she got stuck with this idea of a magical wizard and named it Harry Potter. She continued scribbling whatever came in her mind and by the time train stopped, she had the first script of harry potter series. Notwithstanding the numerous rejection, she kept the original script and released it somehow. Today she is one of the richest writer.
- Get closer to the nature; Wright brothers got the idea of aeroplane and its dynamics after hours of staring at seagulls.
- Day to day happenings around you; the whole idea of Nano car came to Ratan Tata after seeing an Indian family of four person cramped in a scooter, exposed to rain and heat. His team went on to redesign and make Nano which drew unprecedented attention worldwide. Indian auto industry was never the same after that.
- Trust and back up your idea; Some say ideas are dime a dozen but if it’s yours see it till the end. Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, was offered to sell it by Mark Zukerberg of Facebook at a time when twitter was not doing good in US. Even after being offered more than its market valuation of that time, Biz refused. Today twitter is now valued over $5 billion.
- What if it is not your original idea, spin offs are just fine; Bansal friends, founder of Flipkart.com, learned the ropes about e commerce initially at Amazon.com, only to leave the company and start their Indianised version of company.
- Don’t take yourself too seriously; Passionate people are difficult to work with and are usually asocial. Steve jobs was removed from his own company because he was ill-tempered. Still he perused his passion to make things simple, he was recalled back to his company at his terms & came up with I pod and later I phone.
- Remain unsatisfied and question status quo; Sony was doing great with its larger music player but its owner was not satisfied. In their quest for continuous improvement, they made walkman, which changed the way we listen music.
So basically we need to tune ourself to a frequency where we become more receptive so that our creative juices starts flowing freely. And that highly subjective state could be different for different people. It could be a good run, nice music, walk in the woods or just meditation. Take your pick but give yourself a chance to get what we need very badly even though abundantly surrounded by it .
good reading.