Diamond in the trash
from the book “Useful Not True”:
When things aren’t going well, you’re in a bad state of mind. If you ask yourself a healthy question, like “What’s great about this?”, your answer will probably be “Nothing! This is just bad!”
Don’t be so sure. Push past that first thought. Keep asking. You can always find something useful.
Use what you learned about brainstorming. Don’t stop at the second or third answer. Come up with crazy ideas.
Use what you learned from jigsaw puzzles. Start with the edges. Come up with extreme and ridiculous ideas that you’d never actually do, but are good for inspiration and finding the middle.
We resist good ideas that require us to change. You think you’re not that kind of person? Not yet, but you can be. Keep all ideas around.
You seem to be locked in a jail cell. But if you know there’s actually a secret exit, you’ll look harder, pushing and pulling everything until you find it.
You seem to be holding a bag of trash. But if you know there’s actually a diamond inside, you’ll sift through the junk until you find it.
Your mind has a lot of trash, and often tells you there’s no way out of your situation — there’s nothing great about this. But if you decide that there is, you’ll keep looking until you find it.
This is gold! It reminds me of hearing you talk about an exercise that makes everyone groan, but invariably leads to breakthroughs. In an interview way`back when, you talked about extreme brainstorming, writing down TONS of ideas, forcing yourself to get to a high volume. Maybe 25-30+. Just to get the numbers, you have to get outside your usual way of thinking. And usually somewhere past halfway, there's a really interesting idea that shows up.
Once I lead a burned-out full-time nurse through that exercise, because she was totally stuck on how to increase her income. After throwing out about 10 ideas for which she had no enthusiasm, she said something like, "Well, if we can just saying *anything,* no matter whether or not it's crazy: I could make more of my special tamales and sell them." Just saying it, she looked so lit up, so energized. (To reference another Derek principle: A good goal is one that makes you want to take action!)
It's funny, I had no idea she was already making tamales on the side, or that several people were already asking her to make more so they could buy them! It wasn't a crazy idea at all. She just hadn't taken a close-enough look. The jail cell had a secret exit after all.
Derek, you’re here! Yippee🕺🏻