They say we think more than 80,000 thoughts per day. Many of those include light ephemeral thoughts like whether I should confirm my last sentence on Google or go right ahead and trust the podcast I first heard it on two weeks ago. Some of those thoughts also involve weighty ones like whether or not to buy the iPad Pro or the Surface Book. In between all these thoughts are ideas, popping up periodically and wanting to be built upon. But often times, between the time we decide to record the idea and when we actually do, another thought saunters in and, yeah, that’s good bye to the cure for cancer.
Meanwhile, some have been able to capture their thoughts and solve many of the world problems via their stroke of genius.
I came across this video over the weekend and it got me wondering about ideas.
Check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyJcJrbPqlY&feature=youtu.be
It’s a collage of the best ideas that have revolutionized the internet as we know it.
Some takeaways from here is that there is no limit to the source of ideas. Ideas can come from getting stuck (11: 54). Getting stranded by the side of the road after a Friday club night could lead to a lot of things; losing your phones to unforgiving hoodlums, passing the night on the sidewalk or getting abducted by aliens, but for Garret Camp (who started Uber before Travis Kalanick came on board), it led to the most valued startup in the world, Uber ($51 billion valuation). When Garret finally got home. He decided to never get stuck again and began work on Uber.
It could also come from being bored. Dennis Crowley got bored with work on a certain afternoon in 2001, and began to wonder about how people found places of interest in New York. He looked at the present offer – a clunky city directory called CitySearch – and thought of how cool it would appear online. And there; Foursquare!
Check out the full video for stories of 50 other founders on where ideas for their startup came from. Paul Graham also shares this thought-piece on how to get ideas for a startup.
