How to come up with ideas that are truly different from the rest of the pack.
TL;DR:
- To come up with ideas that are unique, you have to consume content that is unique.
- By reading things that are not in your lane, your mind will start to make connections and you’ll see patterns that apply to your lane as well.
I was listening to David Perell’s interview of Mark Manson, where Manson pulls the curtain on his writing process. One of the things that comes up is how to come up with unique ideas, and both Perell and Manson have thoughts on this matter.
Perez’s starts off by saying that if you are consuming the same continent as everyone else (a.k.a. the zeitgeist), then you’ll have the same ideas as everyone else. The way to come up with truly unique ideas, Perez argues, is to read books that no one else is reading. Manson actually take it up a notch and recommends not only reading different things, but read things that are not in your niche/lane. The reason for that, he says, is because your mind will naturally make connections to the things in your niche/lane as you read. So there’s two benefits of reading things that others aren’t reading.
- You’ll be introduced to ideas that are others aren’t introduced to and that means the ideas you come up with will be different from the rest of the pack.
- You’ll be able to make connections and analogies with concepts in different fields.
Cat Training and Branding
I’ll give an example of this in my own experience. We recently adopted a cat and I’ve been consuming a lot of content about training your cat and understanding cat psychology. One of the things that the experts recommend when training your cat to respond to their name is basically using classical conditioning. You say their name every time you give them a treat and slowly you start throwing the treats after the cat comes so they know when their name is called that they have to come to get a treat. Now this got me thinking about branding and how the greatest brands have essentially classically conditioned people to associate their brand with certain emotions. The example that comes to mind is of Coca-Cola and happiness.
If you go to Coke world in Atlanta, before they let you into the full experience, you have to watch a short video. In this video, you see a bunch of different moments of happiness: a couple telling their parents that they’re going to be grandparents, someone afraid of skydiving taking the leap, someone making a basketball trick shot, a kid who is nervous asking a girl out, you get the idea… At the end of all these moments where the audience feels happiness for what’s happening on the screen, they make sure that Coca-Cola bottles are in the frame and the Coca-Cola branding comes on at the end.
And this isn’t just a one time thing. If you’ve seen Coca-Cola commercials over the years, we’ve been classically conditioned to associate Coca-Cola with refreshing and happiness for a long time.