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How to Exercise Your Idea Muscle

When I was in grade school, my family moved from suburban Philadelphia to a small farm in northeastern Pennsylvania. At nine years old, I was blissfully unaware that our huge garden, barnful of animals, and missing TV were part of the Back to the Land Movement.

Kids in that area joined 4H, so we did, too. I even became secretary of our chapter. My one duty was to write up the meeting minutes on a manual typewriter and mail it into the local newspaper where it would show up in print two weeks later. My meeting minutes all ended the same way: “The meeting was adjourned and refreshments were enjoyed by all.”

There’s another memory that has stuck with me about that time: the 4H Pledge.

Picture courtesy of Belmont 4-H

Head, Heart, Hands, Health. The Four H’s.

The 4-H Pledge has a lot in common with James Altucher’s book Choose Yourself. In this call to entrepreneurship, Altucher advocates a Daily Pledge as the best way to strengthen your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being.

His recommendations are things you’d expect: Eat less, exercise more, watch less TV, forgive someone. Easy to put into a list, not always easy to do.

So do one. Just one, right now, and your life will be incrementally better. Then do it again tomorrow. And the next day.

Choose Yourself

When I made the switch from corporate fixer to writing fulltime, I didn’t think of my career change as entrepreneurship. I thought of my move in personal terms, more along the lines of a lifestyle change or a fulfillment of dreams than as part of a trend. I didn’t see myself as part of a larger movement, just like I didn’t see my family’s move from the city to a small farm as part of the Back to the Land Movement of the 1970’s.

I need to learn to think bigger.

Altucher argues that we have entered an era where full-time work is fading, and “cubicles are getting commoditized.” In his view, these “middleman jobs” are going away and they’re not coming back.

But not ALL jobs are disappearing. Newton’s Third Law has social as well as physical applications (I’ll save you the trouble of googling it: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”) The new, middleman-free playing field means new opportunities for creators and consumers to connect directly.

And you want to be one of those creators.

Building up Your Idea Muscle

So you've stoked a desire to be one of these “creators” and you have taken the time to nourish your 4 Hs. How do you connect the dots? How do you find a path that will free you from the dreaded cubicle existence of a middleman?

Time to engage the idea muscle.

Altucher's prescription: Feed your brain with liberal bouts of reading (minimum two hours a day from four different books) and maybe some internet surfing. Let your mind wander, be open to the world around you and tune into the pain points of everyday life. Then produce ten ideas. Every day.

Try it right now. Turn off your internal filter and let ‘er rip. It’s surprisingly hard to come up with ten fresh ideas once, much less every 24 hours. If you need inspiration, check out this post on Seth Godin’s blog.

Here’s a selection from my daily list:

• Relate Altucher’s book to 4-H for blog post
• Match.com for writers and mentors
• Writer to writer coaching clearinghouse
• Home schooling network book sales channel
• Develop a rating system for writing craft books
• Reverse polarity dog collar that makes loose hair stick to your pet (instead of the rug)

Review your ten ideas. Can you identify a next step that is actionable right now? If not, move on. If so, write down the next step.

Most of your ideas will suck. Some will be too vast to be actionable. Some will be too derivative. Some will just be “what the heck was I thinking?” But every once in a while you’ll hit on something that makes you think: “why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?”

It gets easier. Altucher talks about how, with daily exercise, your idea muscle can turn you into an Idea Machine, the kind of creator that is able to see and connect with entrepreneurial opportunities on a consistent basis.

Happy exercising. Just remember: I have dibs on the ionic dog collar.

David Bruns is the creator of the sci-fi series  The Dream Guild Chronicles, and one half of the Two Navy Guys and a Novel blog series about co-writing the military thriller, Weapons of Mass Deception. Check out his website for a free sample of his work.