Killer Thinking E-Book

Tim Duggan

• Herausgeber: Pantera Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 310

Beschreibung

Killer Thinking is the ultimate guide to creating, developing and recognising incredible ideas that will revolutionise the way you work, from the bestselling author of Cult Status.We need better ideas right now. Everywhere you look, there are growing problems that require fresh, creative thinking to help us solve. The good news is that anyone can learn to master the art of creativity to turn good ideas into brilliant ones.That's what this book is about: those killer ideas that have a positive impact on many people, with near-infinite winners. The type you hear about and think, 'Damn, I wish I'd thought of that!'Tim Duggan, the co-founder of Junkee Media, will show you how to identify and generate your own ideas with big potential, and then how to refine and bring them to life. Learn from the creative minds behind some of the most innovative ideas out there, like Canva, KeepCup, Movember, Linktree, B Corps, Zero Co and more.In this book you'll discover:– 8 steps to integrate killer thinking in your life and work– Why boredom is the mother of creativity– How to refine ideas and bring them to life– The best filter to run your ideas through to ensure everyone wins– 13 practical exercises you can apply to real-world problems today– Why killer execution is just as important as killer ideas– And a whole lot moreWant to be more creative and efficient in life and work? It's all about killer thinking.

Leseprobe

Killer Thinking is the ultimate guide to creating, developing and recognising incredible ideas that will revolutionise the way you work, from the bestselling author of Cult Status.

We need better ideas right now. Everywhere you look, there are growing problems that require fresh, creative thinking to help us solve. The good news is that anyone can learn to master the art of creativity to turn good ideas into brilliant ones.

That’s what this book is about: those killer ideas that have a positive impact on many people, with near-infinite winners. The type you hear about and think, ‘Damn, I wish I’d thought of that!’

Tim Duggan, the co-founder of Junkee Media, will show you how to identify and generate your own ideas with big potential, and then how to refine and bring them to life. Learn from the creative minds behind some of the most innovative ideas out there, like Canva, KeepCup, Movember, Linktree, B Corps, Zero Co and more.

In this book you’ll discover:

- 8 steps to integrate killer thinking in your life and work

- Why boredom is the mother of creativity

- How to refine ideas and bring them to life

- The best filter to run your ideas through to ensure everyone wins

- 13 practical exercises you can apply to real-world problems today

- Why killer execution is just as important as killer ideas

- And a whole lot more

Want to be more creative and efficient in life and work? It’s all about killer thinking.

Also by Tim Duggan

Cult Status: How to Build a Business People Adore

For Ben, who sat beside me as I wrote most of this travelling around Australia in our campervan.

Contents

Introduction

The Key to Killer Thinking

Killer Ideas

• Kind

• Impactful

• Loved

• Lasting

• Easy

• Repeatable

STEP 1: BE YOUR PROBLEM’S THERAPIST

• The Rule of Thirds

• Nail the Brief

• Introducing IRL

• IRL

• Fast Takeaways

STEP 2: FIT YOUR OWN MASK FIRST

• Making Time

• Be the Change

• Make Connections

• IRL

• Fast Takeaways

STEP 3: ‘PLUS’ EACH OTHER’S IDEAS

• Plussing It

• Introducing Cerebrations

• IRL

• Fast Takeaways

STEP 4: SIT WITH IT

• Space, Inputs and Time

• The Beauty in Boredom

• IRL

• Fast Takeaways

STEP 5: APPLY THE RIGHT FILTER

• Select the Best Ones

• A Killer Filter

• Filter, Refine and Repeat

• IRL

• Fast Takeaways

STEP 6: STRETCH IT OUT

• Winners and Losers

• IRL

• Fast Takeaways

STEP 7: LAUNCH INTO A RISING TIDE

• Pick Your Moment

• Sell Your Idea In

• Ride the Movement

• IRL

• Fast Takeaways

STEP 8: LISTEN WITH OPEN EARS

• Navigate by Your North Star

• Listen to Your Audience

• IRL

• Fast Takeaways

Summary

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Introduction

This is a book about ideas.

Those slippery, squishy, malleable thoughts that float into your head at the most unexpected times and then waft away just as quickly. If caught at the right time, and bent into the correct shape, ideas have the potential to transform industries, movements and lives.

Our world needs better ideas right now. Everywhere you look is an escalating problem – from the climate crisis to new ways of working to how to build better businesses to having more meaningful relationships – and creativity can help us tackle all these. Both the small problems that affect just a few people and the massive existential ones that threaten our very future need creative solutions.

Most people think of ideas as a renewable resource that will always be there whenever we need them. If we miss one, we tell ourselves, we’ll just wait for the next idea to come along, as though they’re peak-hour buses on a busy street. ‘You can’t use up creativity,’ wrote American poet Maya Angelou. ‘The more you use, the more you have.’

But I’ll let you in on a little secret: ideas are plentiful, but they aren’t all equal. In the same way that everyone can sing, there’s a gaping difference between my off-key shower belting and Adele’s expert control of her vocal ranges.

The good news is that, unlike my singing, creativity is a mindset everyone can master. You can learn how to separate some of the thought bubbles from the thousands that pop into your head, then refine and massage them until they have multiple positive outcomes for yourself and others.

Good ideas are everywhere you look. Most businesses are built on the back of a good idea. Richard Branson says, ‘A business is simply an idea to make other people’s lives better.’ It might be selling a product or a service that solves a problem for someone, or an idea that improves your work or personal life. You can come up with a simple idea on your own without having to sit down and read an entire book about it.

Then there are great ideas, the ones that benefit more people beyond just making money for a few. Great ideas are less common, and are often refined versions of good ones that have had longer to evolve into something better that can have a bigger impact on more people. It takes some skill to turn a good idea into a great one, and they should be celebrated in every way. Most people with great ideas stop when they reach that level, happy to have elevated it above the others, but miss out on its full potential.

And then at the very top of the creativity ladder are killer ideas.

The simplest definition of a killer idea is that an almost infinite number of people benefit from it. They are the kind of rare ideas that have an impact on many people in lots of ways, including the person who came up with the idea, the business and/or community it exists in, the environment, its customers, suppliers and more. Killer ideas have a lot of winners when they are successful, and very few drawbacks.

In this book you’re going to learn how to come up with your own killer ideas, and the steps needed to move an idea along the conveyor belt from a good idea into a killer idea, and finally how to bring it to life. It might be an idea for how to be more efficient at work, a business idea, how to help people with a for-impact company, ways to make society fairer or more interesting, or just how to have some fun and make the world around you a little bit better.

I’ve always been drawn to killer ideas, the type you hear about and think, ‘Damn! I wish I’d thought of that!’ I’ve spent the better part of two decades playing with ideas and creativity as I built and sold the company I co-founded, Junkee Media, published my first book, Cult Status, and worked on lots of fulfilling long-term projects with companies like Netflix, American Express and Qantas. Alongside a graveyard of creative concepts that never went anywhere, I’ve brought to life a lot of good ideas, some great ones and, fortunately, a few that have stood the harsh test of time.

The first killer idea I accidentally created was an event series I started in my early twenties. Like most random thoughts that pop into our heads, it started out as just a decent, simple idea. I was bored with the usual venues for my fellow LGBT+ community to go out in my hometown of Sydney, so I sent an email to some friends asking them if they wanted to come with me to ‘tag’ a traditionally straight venue by all turning up at the same time on the same night (I jokingly called the event ‘FagTag’ without thinking too much about it). This easily understood idea spread quickly and a hundred or so attendees received a password that would get them a discount on the entry fee. It wasn’t a revolutionary idea, but it worked.

If I had left the idea alone and not changed it at all, it probably would have died out naturally after a few events, but instead I kept refining the concept based on feedback, intuition and, let’s face it, a little bit of my own boredom.

The initial idea was good, but people coming along to the events still had to pay to enter, and there were some unexpected tensions when large LGBT+ groups would turn up at a traditionally ‘straight’ venue without any notice. So I set about refining the idea. The first change was to completely take over an empty venue, rather than trying to mix with unaware crowds. The second change was to make it completely free, so it was accessible to more people. Those two small changes turned it from a good idea into a great one, and its popularity grew and grew until a few thousand people would turn up after I sent out a few emails to my database.

The final part of the equation was making it work for me so it was repeatable and could be long lasting. As the organiser of the event, I needed to be rewarded in some way or it wouldn’t be sustainable to keep throwing it every month. I mapped out all the possible revenue models and settled on a simple one. As the events attracted lots of people who came to a venue and then spent money on food and drinks for themselves and their friends, I negotiated with each venue that I would get paid 10 per cent of the bar takings while the event was on. After experimenting with locations dotted all over the city, I also decided to return to some of the most iconic venues in the country, like the stunning Opera Bar. This is situated at the base of the Opera House and allows you to take a beer right down to the edge of Sydney Harbour and watch the world sail past. It really is one of the best bar locations in the world, and every summer for over 15 years, until Covid-19 got in the way, we returned to this venue.

It was there one late afternoon, as the orange rays of the setting sun reached through the arches of the Harbour Bridge, that I realised this was my first properly killer idea. It didn’t start out that way, but I’d refined and evolved it over the years, keeping the same idea at its heart but constantly tweaking it until there were multiple winners. Lots of parties walked away with positive benefits including the thousands of patrons who turned up for free events, the live singers and DJs who got extra bookings, the venues and their staff who got extra shifts and tips, the LGBT+ community who felt stronger, community groups like ACON (a queer community-health organisation) who took advantage of large crowds to hand out educational flyers, and me – I received a healthy commission just for sending out a few emails to a database I’d built up over the years. I know of many friendships, marriages and even children born as a direct result of people meeting at these events. It was my first taste of what it takes to come up with a good idea, bring it to life and then keep tweaking it until it benefits lots of parties. Since then I’ve used the same principles to start multiple award-winning media titles like Same Same, Junkee, Punkee and AWOL, and keep pushing ideas along the spectrum from a good idea to a better one.

A good idea is a win for usually one or two parties, a great idea has several winners, but killer ideas are win times infinity as they have the potential to make the world around them better. Of course, nothing in this world is completely black and white, and every great idea has unintended consequences that occasionally creep in. But, for the whole part, the best ideas in the world have benefits that far outweigh their drawbacks.

To help you identify or come up with ideas that have big potential, I’m going to introduce you to a new framework through which you can run your creative output to ensure it is ticking all the boxes. In the past, a lot of killer ideas were the ones that made the most money, for their founders, shareholders and those lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. We need to redefine what a killer idea is for our new century, and it’s a fresh type of thinking that takes into account everyone around us. The very name of a killer idea is the best way of remembering what makes them stand out.

The best ideas in the world are KILLER:

KindImpactfulLovedLastingEasyRepeatable

We’ll run through each of these in detail later in the book.

In writing and researching Killer Thinking I spoke with the creators of some of the best ideas in the world. You’re about to meet the brains behind dozens of killer ideas and execution, like these ones:

• Turn discarded waste into useful household products

• Close down the streets of a city to cars one day a week

• Save shipping costs by dehydrating common products

• Prepare and cook fish in the exact same way as meat

• Democratise graphic design so anyone can do it

• Empower people experiencing homelessness to become micro-entrepreneurs

• Reuse the same takeaway coffee cup over and over

You might recognise a few of the businesses and movements above just from their summarised descriptions, but they all began as a momentary thought that flitted inside the head of someone who luckily had enough insight to recognise it as a good idea and the drive to work with it until the idea became a brilliant one.

In the past the positive impact of a killer idea might have been confined to one town or community, but today killer ideas are able to break out of where they begin and positively impact lots of people all at once.

The problems ahead of us are huge, and we require a new way of thinking to solve them. From coming up with ideas to avoiding pitfalls, creativity is a skill that’s just as useful whether you have entrepreneurial dreams of running your own business or are an employee of a company. If you want to create the next impactful company or a social movement that’ll change the world, the thinking behind these goals is the same.

In my first book, Cult Status, I wrote that there are two types of people in this world, and all of us fall neatly into one camp or the other:

The first are the creative types. They’re the ones who approach old ideas in new ways. They apply their creative thinking to their work, a hobby, a talent or their family. They have deep imaginations they’re able to tap into to pull ideas seemingly out of nowhere. They might work for themselves, for someone else or start their own companies, and if they choose to focus their creativity on business they’re able to concentrate their energy on building something with passionate customers who go wild for what they do. They are the first type of people in the world. The second type of people are dead. I genuinely believe that everyone has the ability to be creative in life and business: it’s just that some people haven’t had the chance to show us their skills yet. We’re all creative in our own ways, with ideas percolating in the background – and we sometimes need help and external motivation to make those ideas concrete.

Little did I realise that short paragraph was going to worm its way into my head, only to shuffle out the other side a few years later as this book you’re now reading.

Killer Thinking is for anyone who wants better ideas in their lives to help them solve problems. Some of these might be at work if you need to come up with a fresh, creative approach to help you grow your revenue or number of customers, or it may be a new way of thinking about something at home.

However, a book that’s just about ideas is only half written; the next challenge is actually bringing it to life. An idea that’s not realised is a waste of thought, and you’ve got to put just as much energy into the execution itself. That’s why this book will cover killer ideas and killer execution. Combine the two of them and you’ve got killer thinking, and that’s exactly what our world needs a lot more of right now.

The Key to Killer Thinking

Creativity is a wild, wonderful and messy process. If you study it closely enough, you can see some patterns emerging from all of the noise. While there is no foolproof formula to creativity, there is a series of steps you can perform that will bring you closer to coming up with and refining your own ideas until they are as good as they can be.

To help guide you through this, we’re going to think of the steps to creating, refining and launching killer ideas in a visual way. This will help bring something concrete to some of the more theoretical ideas, and help keep track of where we are in the process. Every single person has potential killer thinking inside them – you just need confidence and knowledge to unlock them.

Throughout this book we’re going to use the image of a keyhole, built one step at a time, to keep us on track and following our method in the right order. Each step will construct the keyhole from the bottom to the top, guiding you with examples and practical exercises, until you’ve created your own path to unlocking brilliant ideas you can use to turbocharge your work and personal life.

At the top of the next page is the key to Killer Thinking:

Six of the steps you’re about to learn are devoted to the art of coming up with better ideas, and the last two to executing them expertly.

Step 1: Be Your Problem’s Therapist

Before you dive into the fun part of coming up with creative solutions, you need to understand every single aspect of your problem better than anyone else. Take the time at the beginning of a project to absorb as much information as you can, and try looking at it from every angle.

Step 2: Fit Your Own Mask First

The biggest mistake most people make when trying to come up with ideas is to prematurely connect with others and try to do it together. Group creative sessions are useful, but they are a thousand times more effective when you do individual ideation first. You need to put on your own mask before you can properly help others fit theirs.

Step 3: ‘Plus’ Each Other’s Ideas

This is the fun part, where you bring people together to come up with ideas collectively, using a simple method to build on top of others’ ideas. I’ll explain why most people are doing group creative sessions the wrong way, and how to compensate for that to generate dozens of fresh ideas with any group of people.

Step 4: Sit with It

You have to let ideas percolate into something special, and give them space, inputs and time to breathe. Without letting creativity work its magic, you’re not going to get the most creative solutions to your problems.

Step 5: Apply the Right Filter

Once you’ve got some good ideas, you need a clear, fit-for-purpose filter that allows you to narrow down your idea to just the elements with the biggest potential. In this step you’ll learn the best way to use predetermined criteria to sort through the ideas.

Step 6: Stretch It Out

Good ideas can be consciously stretched into great ones, and maybe even killer ones, if you concentrate on maximising the number of parties who will benefit. Use the simple technique of Winners and Losers to help massage ideas and move them along the scale.

Step 7: Launch into a Rising Tide

The timing of when you launch an idea is almost as important as the idea itself. In this step you’ll meet lots of people who credit their fortuitous timings with some of their success, and understand global trends that will help guide the timing of your launch.

Step 8: Listen with Open Ears

Your idea is finally out in the world and people are using it and giving feedback. Knowing the difference between listening and hearing is the key to making your idea a killer one that has potential for a deep impact.

To ensure that every step is really understood and drilled into your brain, at the end of every chapter are practical exercises you can complete straight away to help you bring each of the steps to life so you can solve business and real-world problems. Committing some of these ideas onto paper will help you immensely as you go, and you can always return to them after you’ve read through the whole book if you’d rather not stop to work on exercises.

Nolan Bushnell is an American inventor who started coming up with ideas for video games in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first game he created with Ted Dabney was Computer Space, a complicated program where spaceships zoomed around a dark night sky trying to shoot aliens and avoid their fire. It was the first commercially available arcade game, and was also extremely difficult to play, meaning the 1500 machines they produced made little money. The pair went back to the drawing board and instead came up with an easier-to-understand game in 1971. It featured a white ‘ball’ in the screen that bounced back and forth between two ‘paddles’ that were moved up and down by the two players. They called it Pong and it was an instant success, fuelled by its novelty for people who had never played a video game before. The pair went on to found their own company, Atari, which dominated home gaming and computers for the next decade and a half. ‘Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea,’ Nolan has said. ‘It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.’

He’s right too. One of the great secrets of creativity is that coming up with ideas is easy. The hard part is shaping them into something with potential, and the most difficult part is bringing the best ones to life. All of us face challenges at work and at home every single day, and when we do, we’ve got a choice to make. We can either let that problem take control of us, or we can meet it head on and think of creative ways to solve it. That’s the power that killer thinking can have to make you more creative, successful, efficient and fulfilled in every part of your life, and that’s why I’m so genuinely excited you’re about to come on this journey and learn how to unlock your own creativity.

Everything begins with an idea: it’s time to start exploring the best ones.

Killer Ideas

How many ideas do we have each day?

Given how fleeting they can be, and how quickly our brains can shift gears from one thing to the next, it’s hard for the average person to figure out the answer to that question. For decades scientists have tried to track how many thoughts and ideas we have each day, and they’ve failed miserably. They often relied on volunteers to describe their own thoughts, which is a self-defeating exercise.

Researchers at Queen’s University in Canada made a breakthrough recently when they decided to stop trying to follow what someone was thinking about, and instead measure when the brain activity showed they had moved on to a new thought. Dr Jordan Poppenk and a master’s student, Julie Tseng, named each of these a ‘thought worm’ and published their results in Nature Communications in July 2020.1 ‘When a person moves on to a new thought, they create a new thought worm that we can detect with our methods,’ said Dr Poppenk, who is the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience.

The most fascinating finding of the research is that based on the number of thought worms they’ve tracked, they estimate that the average person has around 6,200 thoughts per day.

Just stop and think about that: you have 6,200 thoughts every single day of your life. That’s an overwhelming number of things floating in and out of your head trying to get your attention, ranging from minutiae like, Where did I leave my glasses? all the way through to, Why aren’t I happier? and How do I solve that big problem at work?

Most of this happens in the background of our minds like the random dripping of thoughts, processing of senses and the internal dialogue no one will ever hear. Among that barrage of information, occasionally lurking between those thousands of fleeting thoughts, is an idea. A golden, precious thought about how something can be done better.

Every idea that’s changed the world began when someone grabbed hold of one of those thought worms when it first reared its head, and then didn’t let go of it like they did most of the other 6,199.

A lot of the thoughts that bounce around our heads are just noise: recurring reminders, recycled opinions we’ve absorbed, or a funny video we’ve just seen on the internet. Then there are the ideas that rise above the rest because they might be a solution to a problem that’s been bugging you, or an elegant way of combining two things that could change the way something works.

To help you identify which ideas are worth looking out for and developing into something more, we’re going to build a framework that will allow you to test and strengthen any ideas and push them along the scale to greatness. Remember, killer ideas are:

KindImpactfulLovedLastingEasyRepeatable

Let’s go through each of these in more detail.

Kind

Kindness isn’t a word that’s often used in a workplace setting. Kindness can sometimes sound weak, or soft, or too touchy-feely for the thrust and pace of business, right?

I reckon that’s bullshit. We’ve been told for decades that business is a cut-throat, competitive, win-at-all-costs fight against others to claw your way to the top. There are entire TV genres dedicated to people outdoing each other in business by backstabbing in order to become number one.

Kindness is missing from traditional business, and it needs to be more than just a buzzword. The best ideas are sympathetic to the world in which they exist. They are kind to the environment, the supply chain, their customers and staff. And the best part? Kindness is contagious. Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki and his colleagues set out to test if seeing other people’s good behaviour would inspire people to act in the same positive way.2 They did this in various ways. The first was to recruit participants to complete a paid study, and at the end give each recruit a one-dollar ‘bonus’. They showed them brief overviews of a hundred charities and asked if they wanted to donate any of their bonuses to each of the worthy groups. The participants saw how much other participants had donated, which was, unbeknownst to them, manipulated up and down by the researchers. The result was that people who believed we lived in a generous world where others were donating a high percentage of their bonus donated similarly high amounts. In other words, the kindness of others was contagious.

To test it even further and ensure it wasn’t just guilty imitation, they conducted a follow-up study where participants observed other people donating either generously or stingily. They were then told they were moving on to a completely unrelated task where they pretended they had a pen pal. The participants were given a note to read where the pen pal had described their life over the last month, including all of the ups and downs, and then had to write back to them. The researchers found that the participants’ letters to their pen pals differed in tone depending on what they had observed earlier. Participants who had watched people donate generously wrote notes that were friendlier, and more empathetic and supportive, compared to the ones from those who had watched people behave greedily. ‘Witnessing kindness inspires kindness, causing it to spread like a virus,’ wrote Jamil Zaki in Scientific American. ‘We find that people imitate not only the particulars of positive actions, but also the spirit underlying them. This implies that kindness itself is contagious, and that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.’

Killer ideas begin with kindness at their core, and spread far and wide outside their original bubble. Ideas that are inherently kind travel around a community, a country and even the world.

Think about the entire ecosystem that surrounds your business, and how kind each aspect is.

Customers: Do you treat them with kindness? Do you listen to them, respond in a timely manner, and take into account their needs ahead of your own?

Environment: How kind is your idea, business or company on the environment? Are you leaving the world in a better state than you found it? Or are you just taking and not replenishing anything else at the other end?

Staff: Are you fair and reasonable with your colleagues? If you keep empathy at the forefront of your decisions, it’ll help you make better ones.

Supply chain: How kind are you to people you purchase from? Are you reasonable in your demands from them? Do you consider the entire process?

It must be pointed out that kindness doesn’t mean bending over backwards and saying yes to anyone’s demands. Kindness can play out in unexpected ways, especially when it comes to other people. Research professor and author Brené Brown writes in Dare to Lead that ‘Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind’,3 and shows that data reveals most people think they’re being kind by avoiding clarity, when the opposite is actually true. Some things might not seem kind at first glance, but you have to take into account the bigger picture and how it affects everyone.

Google has a position called a Chief Innovation Evangelist. It’s a strange title with a very worthy job description. It’s their job to encourage people, both inside and outside of Google, to pursue radically new ideas, think with an innovation mindset and figure out what needs to change in current workplaces to get there.4 The current Chief Innovation Evangelist, Frederik Pferdt, says the skill that will be needed most in the future is empathy.5 ‘Practising empathy every day as a business leader, for example, helps you understand what your employees need and what your immediate team actually needs right now. So, putting yourself into their situation, to really understand how they really think and feel, helps you come up with better solutions for your employees.’

If you begin with empathy, clarity and kindness as the core motivators for an idea, you’ll be well on your way to creating a contagious idea that can build its own momentum and really catch on.

Impactful

Killer ideas have serious impact. They exist to fulfil a clear purpose that is obvious to everyone involved. Every killer idea has a clear Impact Statement, a concept I explored in detail in Cult Status. As a quick refresher, an Impact Statement lays out exactly the effect you want to have on the people who use your service or product. An Impact Statement is different from a goal. A business goal is generally a number to reach, like ‘sell one thousand computers’ or ‘call one thousand people’. An Impact Statement is also different from a Mission Statement. A Mission Statement describes your purpose or mission. It’s the reason that you exist, the what? of your company. An Impact Statement is the so what? of your company. If you fulfil your mission, then what effect is that going to have? If you want to learn more about Impact Statements, head to timduggan.com.au.

Killer ideas are super impactful, with effects that are often felt in multiple communities. Anyone can think of an idea that is good, but a truly impactful idea does good. Killer ideas exist for a very specific reason: to solve a problem that’s easily understood by everyone who hears the idea.

The best ideas in the world have a clear purpose beyond just making money. Of course, some of the best ideas have truly impressive revenue streams, but that is not their sole reason for being. The reason they resonate so much is because their purpose is clearly understood by consumers who identify strongly with it.

A killer idea is a living, breathing organism that moves on a journey from good to great to killer. When an idea connects with an audience, it gets taken on by them and becomes part of their stories as well. That allows the idea to grow and change and have a strong impact over a long period of time.

It can be overwhelming to think you need to come up with ideas that will be so earth-shatteringly good they will change everything. If you’ve got huge ambitions, then by all means go for gold and I won’t get in your way. But not everyone has the same approach, and some ideas can be measured by how deeply the results are felt by a targeted number of people instead. Remember that every successful creative idea starts small, and with the right refinement, tenacity and adaptation you can build the quality and quantity of your impact.

Loved

Killer ideas aren’t just liked, they are absolutely loved. There’s a big difference between liking something and absolutely loving it, and that’s the difference between a good idea and a great one. When an idea is really adored, it’s welcomed into people’s lives.

There are three main reasons people fall in love with an idea:

• they identify strongly with the purpose of what it’s aiming to do;

• the idea helps people express who they are; and/or

• it makes them feel better about themselves.

Some of the best ideas tick all of those boxes simultaneously, and if you can tap into just one of those deep connectors to create a business or movement that makes someone feel seen, it’s a very powerful foundation for long-term success.

Jay Coen Gilbert is the co-founder of the B Corp movement, a coalition of businesses that meets the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance and accountability in balancing profit and purpose together. ‘An idea will take on a life of its own if people love doing it,’ he says. ‘I would argue that love is the most important form of value. If someone makes me feel good, I want to spend more time with them because it feels good to feel good.’

When something is loved, it can help an idea transcend all the noise and be deeply felt by the people who need it. Think right now about someone you really love (shout-out to my husband Ben, who I’m thinking of right at this moment). When you are deeply in love with someone, you don’t sweat the small stuff but you do concentrate on the bigger picture. They might annoy you occasionally, or you have an argument, or they do something that pisses you off (and vice versa) – but in the end it doesn’t mean much; they are just temporary emotions that get overridden by a deeper gratitude when you really love someone. It’s the same with a killer idea. Any small defects in a product, the execution or communication, can all be forgiven if a customer is in love with the idea behind it and all it stands for.

Loved ideas spread far because customers become enthusiastic advocates for them, organically telling others and helping amplify word-of-mouth marketing. The goal of any business or movement is to be loved and appreciated.

Lasting

Killer ideas have staying power. They are living beasts that evolve along with the moment, shifting and morphing to react to feedback and what the current situation demands of them. The best ideas are ones that are fluid and responsive and that will evolve and last for a long time.

Don’t be afraid if an idea changes as more people get involved, or as the world around you changes. Nothing is set in stone, and the environment and world around us are constantly moving. The best ideas are vigorously tested by lots of different people, and grow stronger with each iteration. They’re flexible and they adapt to the needs of whoever is using them at the time.

The reason the best ideas last so long is because they often hook into a movement that’s bigger than just them. Launching your idea on the back of a rising tide will give it the best chance of riding the wave for a long time. Movements have momentum, and they allow an idea to gather a greater speed than if it were going against a trend.