Page 42 - The Business Idea Factory: A World-Class System for Creating Successful Business Ideas

Think in pictures

When my wife, Olena, beg an lear ning Eng lish, I r ealized that she speaks extr emely slo wly. I asked,
“Olena, why is it when yo u want to say so mething yo u fir st make a hug e pause and then slo wly say
one word after another?”

“Well, I first decide what I want to say in Russian, translate a sentence into English and then say it
aloud.”

“Olena, do you know how children learn to speak? A mother shows an orange to a child and says, ‘It
is orange.’ Then she points at the house and says, ‘It’s a house.’ After a while, a child associates in his
or her mind a picture of an orange with the word ‘orange’ and a picture of the house with the word
‘house.’ If you want to speak quickly, you need to associate pictures of the objects and actions directly
with Eng lish wo r ds and avo id making a tr anslatio n in yo ur mind. An analytical br ain is r espo nsible
for translating and it significantly slows down a process of turning a thought into a sentence.”

The same happens in your thinking about business ideas. If you try to talk to yourself or think using
words, the conscious brain is activated, your thinking slows down millions of times and your chances
of creating interesting ideas become very slim.

Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford left enormous amounts of diagrams and pictures in
their notebooks. One of the reasons why they were extremely successful idea creators was their habit
of thinking visually. Albert Einstein said that he rarely thought in words. Thoughts came to him in
images and only then did he express them with words and formulas.

Imagine a “car” and a “soap.” Now, create several combinations of these objects to generate new
ideas. You might say, “A soap that is in the form of a car, a car seat that is in the form of a soap, car
washing using soap, a car that uses soap instead of fuel.” But before you say all these ideas you may
first imagine them in your head.

Remember that your super-fast subconscious mind thinks using pictures, and if you want to be
effective at generating business ideas, you should think using pictures rather than words. Great ideas
are first created as images in your head and only then described using words.