Wisdom Shouts: How Good Ideas Are Effortlessly Created With Remarkable Predictability

Have you ever wondered how public speakers regularly come up with good ideas that are so deep, profound and thought-provoking?

Growing up, I remember coming across good ideas encapsulated in sayings such as:

“Your attitude determines your altitude.” , 

“If you do not know where you are going, people will lead you to where they are going”, and,

“Your location determines your allocation.”

While many of these thoughts forced me into reflection, they also created a desire to know how to come up with good and shareable ideas of my own.

Then one day, I received light in one of my blindspots concerning the origin of good ideas.

Someone had shared the story of how God spoke to the heart of a pastor stuck in traffic in one of Nigeria’s busier cities. Traffic lights were non-functional, and there were no traffic police around. As a result, chaos broke out. Horns blared and drivers hurled obscenities at each other. On that road, survival was the name of the game and only the toughest drivers escaped unscathed. Ultimately, in a manner of minutes, there was a total standstill as there were bottlenecks everywhere – caused by impatient drivers driven by selfishness and disregard for anyone but themselves. It was within this chaos that this pastor found the clarity in his heart to hear the following words:

Where there is no order, stagnation is bound to be the order of the day!

If you consider that statement, you’d realize that so much truth and practical value were packed into those few words. For instance, if you fail to put your finances in order – clearly separating out your income, expenses, liabilities and assets – it would only be a matter of time before you find yourself in a state of financial stagnation.

There is no doubt that God planted the seeds of this wonderful idea into this pastor’s heart. However, the same way seeds do not grow in the absence of other factors such as good soil, nutrients and water, good ideas would not thrive in the wrong environment. There were certain things that worked in the pastor’s favor, such that he was able to pick out the good idea in the midst of the stress and chaos that reigned supreme around him. While there are so many ways to skin a cat, I would be sharing three practical tips that you can use to consistently source good ideas.

Good Ideas Come From Seeing Everything Connected

If someone gave you a gift of $100 and somewhere along the line you lost it, research has shown that you would not feel as hurt as you would if you lost $100 from your hard-earned money. In spite of the fact that we mentally acknowledge that a $100 bill has the same value, regardless of if it was given to us as a gift or as a part of our salary, we subconsciously appropriate different values to the different $100 bills depending on the circumstances that surround how we got the money in the first place. The process of compartmentalizing money into different categories based on how we feel about the money is referred to as mental accounting.

Unfortunately, our tendency to compartmentalize is not limited to money. We do the same thing in our relationship with God. We create “God time” in the morning and evenings where we pray and read the Bible in 30 minutes, while we live the remaining 23 hours and 30 minutes on our own terms without giving so much as a thought about God. We compartmentalize our lives and it is no surprise that we lead spiritually empty lives because we have learned to live so long away from the influence of the Source.

Interestingly, our tendency to compartmentalize is also one of the reasons why we find it difficult to get good ideas. Many of us fail to see the overlap between different bodies of knowledge and as a result, the probabilities of finding good ideas become slimmer than ever.

Here’s an example of a good idea I bent into a quote:

Everything reverts into a state of chaos. Order is enforced by power

– Promise Tewogbola

To get the first part of my quote, I borrowed from my limited understanding of the second law of thermodynamics as explained in physics and chemistry. In addition, I observed that any time I vacuumed my room and put it in order, it was only a matter of time before I found the need to clean the room again. This is because of the tendency for everything to fall into disrepair if left to be by itself. The second part of the quote was gotten from my realization that it took effort on my part to put my room back into order.

The more I thought about my quote, the more I realized that it was a pretty good idea that had practical value in the real world. For instance, if you are in a romantic relationship and you refuse to talk about issues in the relationship with your better half, it would only be a matter of time before chaos becomes the order of the day in that relationship. However, the moment you take the effort to engage in uncomfortable conversations with your partner, you would dramatically improve the quality of your relationship. The same thing happens when you are trying to keep fit. The fact that you worked had in the gym 5 months ago does not mean that you would be in shape 5 months from now. If you expend the time and effort to get in shape, only to rest your oars, you would find your shape reverting back into that initial state of ‘shapelessness’ and chaos. So, to keep in shape, you have to embrace personal power with yourself and expend the effort in beating yourself back into the image you desire.

Everything is connected in one form or the other. If you want to consistently find good ideas, stop compartmentalizing your life. Rather, approach life with the paradigm of connectedness. Make it your responsibility to find associations and applications that link seemingly diametrically opposed bodies of knowledge. You will be positively surprised by the sheer quantity and quality of the good ideas you churn in the long run.

Good Ideas Come to the Expectant Mind

After being equipped with the paradigm of seeing everything connected, the next ingredient for sourcing good ideas is to have an expectation for them. The role that our expectations play in our lives cannot be overemphasized. While there are people who are conscious of the inter-relatedness of things, they are so many people who subconsciously believe that they are not smart enough to come up with good ideas. This pattern of thinking is not only toxic to good ideas, it is also capable of forcing people into mediocre existences because their expectations have been trained to work against them.

The truth is that your expectations determine your experiences.

If you know that everything is connected and you expect that one way or the other, you would find those associations, it is only a matter of time before you start seeing those associations.

There are different ways people activate their expectations towards good ideas. Some people have a thinking cap they wear whenever they want to come up with good ideas. Some other people have a thinking spot in their houses or somewhere in their towns where they regularly go to for good ideas. Personally, I take a two-legged approach. First, I try to stir curiosity in my mind. The person who felt that curiosity killed the cat made the wrong diagnosis. I am genuinely interested in learning new things because I know that a good idea can be birthed by virtue of my exposure to new information. Secondly, I try to move around with a small notebook that fits my pocket. That way, I have a physical way to show my expectation to come in contact with good ideas. And when the ideas do come, I am already equipped with the tools to capture them.

For all the flak that the law of attraction has received over the years, this is actually one area of your life where there are undeniable proofs that it works. If you consistently expect a good idea to come whenever you wear a stupid cap, it’s only a matter of time before that becomes your experience. If you continue to expect good ideas to come at you when you sit on a silly chair in your house, or you are in a particular corner in your city’s park, your expectations will not be cut short and in time, you will start experiencing the awe that accompanies good ideas. If you embrace a curious heart for novel ideas, you will experience them, and if you walk around with a notebook to capture good ideas, it’s only a matter of time before you start attracting them like ants to sugar.

Good Ideas Come When You Consistently Celebrate the Mundane

Many people associate good ideas with lightning and fireworks. Nothing can be further from the truth.

The good idea behind the quote – ‘Where there is no order, stagnation is bound to be the order of the day!‘ – came in the middle of terrible traffic. A part of the idea behind my quote – ‘Everything reverts into a state of chaos. Order is enforced by power’ – came from me observing how my room gradually became disorganized over time. If you live in a big city, you are likely going to find yourself in terrible traffic at some point and if you have a place where you live, it is likely that you have had to rearrange your room times without number. Yet, not many people would have been able to take advantage of the mundane routine in their lives to come up with good ideas.

The reason is simple. Many people are not present to the moment. And the number one reason why a lot of people are not present to the moment is because of fear. People are afraid of the past, the present, as well as the future. They have a constant fear of the unknown constantly humming in the back of their minds. They are worried sick about things that are either out of their control, or won’t matter once the facts are changed.

The moment you deliberately choose to be present to the moment and actively engage with the mundane events of day-to-day living, you separate yourself from the myriads of individuals walking with their minds miles and years away from their physical bodies. By so doing, you place yourself in an advantageous position where you are likely going to find a good idea that escaped the consciousness of every other person.