Ideas Can Happen Anywhere. Are You Ready?

Creativity rarely happens while sitting at a desk or in the thick of a two-hour brainstorm. Ideas happen “out there” when you least expect it while interacting with the world and generally living life. And that's because any new idea requires two old ones to collide.

You have something in your head--what you had for breakfast, an opinion on politics, a book you recently read--and that something collides with something else you run into as you navigate your day--an end cap on aisle 6 of the grocery store, a poster on a train, a TV spot during the hockey game. Two things connect and boom, a new idea is formed.

You could say ideas are what happen to you while you're busy making other plans. So the question is, are you ready for ideas that happen in the oddest of places?

When I designed Ideasicle X, our virtual idea generation SaaS platform, I intentionally played right into this truth, this reality about the nature of creativity. We equip the team of four people working on an idea job with a versatile platform—web and mobile—so they can post their ideas when they happen no matter where they are at the time. They can just pull out their phone, pull up the job on the app, and click that magical green button, "Start New Idea."

Notice it doesn't say "Post New Idea," it says "Start New Idea," because that's how we roll at Ideasicle X. Any idea a freelancer starts is intended to be improved by the others on the team. And vice versa.

So if you start seeing people who seem to have stopped dead in their tracks, in the middle of doing something else "out there," with their phones up to their faces, slight grins, as they feverishly thumb out a message like their lives depend on it, they're probably Ideasicle X freelancers who just experienced the perfect collision of what is and what could be.

Once you realize that creativity can't be forced, you can start playing into that truth and not resisting it. Then you'll be ready for ideas no matter where they occur.

Reference: Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World, by Pagan Kennedy