The best way to have a great idea is...
True or false? William Shakespeare wrote 19 plays and 75 sonnets.
False - He actually wrote double that number.
Shakey, or Billy to his friends, banged out 38 plays and 150 sonnets.
Not being a Shakespeare nut, I couldn’t honestly say that I’ve heard of some of his works before, such as, King John, Henry VI part 3 or Troilus and Cressida.
But Romeo and Juliet is known the world over.
And everyone knows how to finish this saying off: To be, or ….
You’ve also most likely heard of the titles Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear and a few others from the creative pen of Shakespeare.
In fact, with his ideas, Shakespeare had a very good hit rate, comparing successes to failures, or shall we say, ‘not so famous’ pieces.
Mozart and Beethoven
Another genius, Mozart, composed over 600 musical pieces, while the next genius who came along, Beethoven created over 722.
Even if you’re not a classical music fan, you could probably recognise a tune or two from either if you heard it.
The “Da Da Da Daaaaa…. Da Da Da Daaaaaa“ opening of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, for instance.
Or you could probably hum along to the start of Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik”…
And you probably didn’t think of challenging the above when both Mozart and Beethoven were called geniuses.
You know some of their tunes, but what about the other hundreds of musical ideas they had which didn’t become famous?
Those ideas have been lost (except to only a few fanatics who know every note they ever wrote).
So what makes William, Wolfgang and Ludwig geniuses…. or have genius ideas?
To try and answer this, let’s come a bit more up to date.
Thomas Edison
If you’re doing a pub quiz, you better know that Thomas Edison is famously known as the guy who invented the light bulb.
(This is actually a contentious point, but it is widely acknowledged that Edison created the first commercially practical incandescent light.)
There is no better symbol of ‘having a great idea’ than the visual of a lightbulb being switched on, is there?
But in his lifetime, for things he had invented, Thomas Edison registered 1039 patents.
It’s a huuuuuge amount.
He was clearly a prolific thinker and had many many many more ideas than most normal people.
If he had 1039 real patents, we can only guess at how many tens of thousands of ideas he generated that never reached the patent stage.
So, is the answer to having a great idea, to just have lots and lots and lots of ideas?
From 600 or 722 musical ideas, the vast majority of people can only hum one or two bars of Mozart and Beethoven.
And from 1,039 ideas, most people only know Thomas Edison for the light bulb.
Does that mean that all the other ideas stink? :)
Clearly you have to consistently come up with a massive amount of ideas, to get one, or a few, that turn out to be great.
Or maybe you are thinking that all the above characters are way too far off in the distant past to be relevant now.
After all, they had more time on their hands.
They didn’t have to contend with getting more followers on social media, driving to the gym, or trying to find an obscure ingredient at the supermarket for a tasty recipe they saw on a TV show.
But let’s remember something for a moment…
““Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.””
So let’s bring this into the modern day.
Steve Jobs
We all know Steve Jobs for his world changing products… or let’s call them ideas.
The Mac
The iPod
The iPhone
The iPad
Four monumental ideas, fashioned out of creative thinking, that have shaped our lives immeasurably.
But the same pattern appears yet again.
Steve Jobs registered 241 patents.
What happened to his other 237 ideas?
And what about the enormous amount of ideas that Steve Jobs must have had, that he didn’t think were even worth patenting?
How to have a great idea
The stats don’t lie.
If you want to have a great idea, it’s simple. You have to:
Produce lots of ideas.
A massive amount of ideas.
A gargantuan amount of ideas.
Then you will stand a chance of having lots of OK-ish ideas, mediocre ideas, terrible ideas, but also… that one big idea that becomes world famous and creates your legacy.
Investing all that hard work and time might even turn you into (what future generations call) a genius.
And if that all sounds a little bit too much like hard work, then here’s Edison again to help us out…
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Please enjoy Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant discussing this topic of generating great ideas by clicking the image below.
