ideas

1 Thing Great Inventions Have in Common

I was just reading this list of the world’s most famous inventions, and I found a common thread between them. Here it is: Great inventions bring the world together.

When you’re thinking about creating your next invention, ask, “How can I make it easier to bring people / resources together?” The more people / resources you connect, the bigger your potential market.

One way to remember this is to package the concept in a “trigger.” I recommend the word: CONNECT. When you’re brainstorming think about what to CONNECT, who to CONNECT, where to CONNECT, etc. This framework will help inventors save time and maximize their creative impact.

Creativity tip: write your ideas down

In order to have great success with creativity, I’ve learned to write everything down and imagine it being done in vivid detail.

The process of writing ideas down in a notebook help to you solidify what the ideas actually are. For example in software design, you may say let’s connect this screen with that screen. While the general idea is there to connect to screens, there are so many other factors that need to be decided like how do we render the contents of this view with that view if we merge them together? What technology changes are needed? What is the best order to do things in?

Writing this all down in a notebook and visualizing the answers to these questions will help you clarify your thinking. That way when you present your idea to other people, you are presenting a coherent well-thought plan as opposed to a vague idea.

A notebook also helps you understand the priorities because you can look at the other ideas in your notebook and decide which one merits being worked on at this time.

It’s very easy to get excited when you get a new idea. The bottom line is that writing it down will help you clarify the idea to a point where it is ready to come to life.