February 01, 2019

How to Find and Validate Your Next Big Idea

Has the instantaneous thought “This is genius, why has no one ever thought of it before?!” ever crossed your mind? You pause everything you’re doing to note it down. And when it’s out of your head and on a sheet of paper, it’s only then that you realise you’ve invented the paperclip…

Or, maybe inspiration comes to you in your sleep. You wake from a dream that culminated in you winning the Nobel Peace Prize. You jot down your thoughts and in the morning wake to find a scrawled note that simply says…’Cronut’.

There’s a reason why these ‘apple falling on Newton’s head’ visualisations of ideas can be hard to achieve. When you think of a good idea as a network that requires growing and nurturing over time, and not an instant epiphany, you might stop looking for that flash of inspiration and start gathering smaller (but important) thoughts to craft into your own, considered idea.