Page 141 - The Business Idea Factory: A World-Class System for Creating Successful Business Ideas

Train creative muscles

In 7th grade, my math teacher Alexander said to my mother, “Victoria, your son’s performance is

ver y po o r. Ho nestly, I think math isn’t his thing . It wo uld be better fo r Andr ii if yo u tr ansfer him to

another school at the end of the year.” My classmate Peter was a naturally gifted student and several

heads above everyone I knew at math. He always solved problems nobody else could and Alexander

called him “math heavy artillery.”

8th g rade, after one incident in class I became ver y inter ested in math. I began devoting all my
In

spar e time to math and by the end o f the year became the seco nd-best math student in the class after

Peter. In 9th grade, Peter became very interested in guitar, founded his own band and neglected math.

By the end of the 9th grade, I outperformed Peter and became the strongest math student in the entire

school. In 10th grade, I continued devoting at least 4 hours a day to solving problems and by the end

of the year became one of the 100 best math students in the Ukraine.

Peter is cer tainly much mo r e g ifted than I am, but I tr ained sig nificantly mo r e. I am sur e that if he

devo ted at least half the time that I did to math he wo uld achieve far better r esults than I. If yo u ar e

interested to know what happened to Peter later, he became a guitar player in one of the most popular

bands in the Ukraine.

When a person finishes a marathon in under 3 hours we don’t say, “Wow, he is a running genius,” we

say, “He or she trained a lot. Anybody can run a marathon in under 3 hours after a couple of years of

daily training.”

Ho wever, when talking abo ut the wo r ld’s best thinker s, peo ple o ften say, “They ar e g eniuses. I will

never be able to create such awesome ideas.” Guess what? The world’s best thinkers are able to

generate successful ideas not because they are geniuses, but because they think about ideas daily and

have trained their creative muscles more than other people. If you practice generating ideas regularly,

after some time you will produce better ideas than the majority of naturally gifted people, because

your creative muscles will be stronger.

Any person who trained for a marathon for several years would outperform a gifted runner who

didn’t. Any person who practices creativity daily will outperform at creating successful business ideas

any genius who doesn’t.

The more you practice pushups, the more pushups you will be able to do. The same happens with

ideas. The more you practice creative thinking, the quicker high-quality ideas will come to your head.

If you take practicing ideas generation seriously, in a few years other people may call you a creative

genius.

The majo r ity o f peo ple r ar ely g ive tasks to their subco nscio us and o nce they see that their cr eative

muscles are weak say, “I am just not a creative type.” It sounds the same as, “I exercise only twice a

year and can’t do more than 5 pushups. I don’t have the talent for pushups.”

Fortune top-15 writers write about 5 novels a year. How can they be that productive? They write daily

and their writing muscles are very strong. If you want to become world-class at generating business

ideas, yo u need to exer cise yo ur cr eative muscles r eg ular ly. If yo u think abo ut ideas daily, yo u will

generate better ideas than naturally gifted people who don’t.

Certainly, every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as muscles grow flabby with