Recycling silly ideas?

Recycling silly ideas?

Ideas come and ideas go. When you are struck with an idea, you will probably ask yourself whether it is worthwhile pursuing. If it is not too silly, you might confide with someone else just to seek their opinion. But what if you think that it is a really silly idea? Would you just brush it off and forget about it?

Ideas are actually a priceless commodity! Whether you considered it silly or not, you should get into the habit of jotting down that idea somewhere, so that you can refer to it later on. A lot of people don't know that ideas have an element of time! An idea might not have any value at the time of its sparking, but might be very useful at another period of time. Unfortunately, most people just tossed away those ideas that they considered useless, without knowing that they are actually throwing away 'gold'. Would you like to save those ideas so that you will be able to make something out of it later on? I call it 'idea regurgitation', and I use it to add to my repertoire of ideas. You can use those saved up ideas for many things, irregardless of whether you are at home or at work. If you have saved all your old emails, you will know what I mean. You can’t really tell when that insignificant email that some else sent you will one day be useful. So are ideas, which are many more times more useful! Let me show you how to make full use of all the ideas that happened to cross your mind.

Ideas should be jotted down on a nice looking book, and each one should be indexed with a number. Diaries are best, especially those with leather cover. Treat this book as you treat your treasure chest. Next, cut out small portions of paper, and write down a number on it to represent each of the ideas that you have written down on the book. You will also not opine as to whether any of the idea is silly or not. Just jot it down, anyway. Now, roll up the small piece of paper with the written number into a small paper ball and put it in a large glass jar. Decorate the jar if you can and put it in a place where you can see it day in and out. Then very so often, tell yourself that you have to feed it with more ideas. If you don't like the paper ball idea, you can always buy those colored paper especially designed for folding small little origami stars. The idea of putting the numbered paper balls into the glass jar is to encourage you to fill it up with your many ideas. You can visually see how much ideas you have generated by just looking at the jar.

The next thing that I normally do is to shake up the glass jar containing the little paper balls and pick up two of them. I will do this during those quiet moments where I have everything to myself to ponder on things. Remember, these paper balls represent those ideas that I have jotted down in the book and now, I will just pick any two with random. I will then check the two numbers from the two paper balls and find what the two ideas that I have previously jotted in the book were. What follows is the most interesting moment for idea juggling. I will now ponder on the two ideas. And in most cases, the two ideas will have little in common. The idea here is to juggle the two dissimilar ideas and combine them into one bigger idea. On many occasions I could combine two apparently useless ideas into a new useful entity! Of course, some times, you just can't fit a square peg into a round hole, but no matter, it would have served as an exercise in creativity. So you get the idea. This 'idea regurgitation' exercise will expand your ideas bank many folds. If you were to practice it often enough, you will have a great repertoire of ideas in no time at all.

Creators, inventors and marketers should use ‘idea regurgitation’ techniques to bring about innovations in their field of expertise. So are moms and pops, especially when they have to show juniors how to solve difficult problems. Even better, use ‘idea regurgitation’ in your brain storming sessions and have all ideas recorded for later uses. You will be surprised that the ‘silly’ idea that you had before becomes a wonderfully useful idea later on in your life!

You can get more creative ideas from the author's invention book here