Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

Thinking, writing, business ideas … You’re only a stranger once.

How Do You Capture Your Irresistible Ideas?

Filed Under Idea Bank, Marketing, Successful Blog | 9 Comments

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Be Irresistible Instead

Every great movie star did a movie or two for the cash until he or she could do the movies he or she really wanted to do. That’s one thing. It’s fine to do if we know that’s what we’re doing. It’s a skill-building, bill-paying short-term strategy that works to keep us solvent.

But, if we’re not careful, we can get so busy doing, that we lose sight of the end game — the strategic goal out there on the horizon. While we’re busy making money to pay the rent, we can have outstanding ideas and let them get away while we work at things that don’t inspire us.

Work without inspiration steals energy. It keeps us in the same place or moving in the wrong direction.

What powers and fuels a career or a business is irresistible, value-added, real WOW ideas — what folks need, wish, and dream for — can’t live without ideas. Even if you’re working on something that’s boring, are looking for your own irresistible ideas that will head you to your own horizon? Here’s how to know one …

  1. An irresistible idea addresses the practical and the emotional simultaneously. Think of a great car that makes you feel something when you drive it. Irresistible ideas appeal to the child and the adult in us.

    2. I bought my Toyota MR-2 Spyder for many reasons. It had great performance specs — practical. It has its flaws — 1.9 cubic feet of storage space. The WOW is the faux titanium door handles — emotional. No other car has them, not any Porsche, Ferrari, BMW two-seater. I know. I look inside them all. They all look boring to me. Those door handles make my car look like it cost 3 times what it cost. It will also allow me to resell it much higher. And the dealer was willing to sell and service it at a great price — it fit into my life.

    An irresistible idea fits easily into our lives. We don’t have to work to buy that product, to learn a lot use it, or to explain it when we share it with our friends. Irresitible save us time, saves us money, or gives us a sense of ease and comfort.

  2. Irresistible ideas are in the details, not in giant bells and whistles.

    3. Every car has an engine and four wheels. Trying to improve on those gets you into trying to be original. Original is risky and expensive. Why not piggyback on what has been tested and perfected. Irresistible ideas come in the back and the side doors. They approach things from the inside out. They make things work better, feel softer, stop being a pain. Irresistible takes one part and makes it elegantly simpler.

    Irresistible ideas are joyfully unexpected. I still love the person who invented the wireless mouse.

  3. Irresistible ideas are authentic. Spectacular ideas can’t be knocked off with the same effect, because they came from customer-centered thinking. Gotta be Apple to make the iPod. Gotta be Iain Dodsworth to make TweetDeck. I can’t build your event or product your way, because you are the special sauce that makes it just right.

The most irresistible ideas come from where your passion and your intelligence cross with the places you spend the most time. We have more ideas than we might actually realize and when we’re busy working on something tiring it’s easy to forget them.

How do you capture your irresistible ideas?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Beware the Single Biggest Time Sink on the Web

Filed Under Idea Bank, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 14 Comments

I've been thinking . . .

about time sinks.

When I first got to the web I spent my time wandering, exploring. I was learning and making friends. We’d discuss things, sometimes long delicious thoughts would last for days. Those conversations hardly happen much anymore. Everyone is so plugged in.

My inbox seems to be so many ideas coming at me. Each one is colorful and attractive. Many are doable. Some have potential to be huge. Some will never run.

I used spend time helping folks think through their idea, put together the pieces so that they would have something whole and workable. Eventually I found that I can’t help every idea and get anything of my own done. A great idea deserves a commitment.

How many commitments can one person make?

Getting ideas is so much fun. Making them happen is where the real work starts.

We lose interest, find a flaw, get seduced by a new idea, or land a job that offers more.

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Have you found that biggest time sink on the web are ideas that never get done?

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Is That Noisy Guy On Twitter Creative or Just a Pain in the . . . ?

Filed Under Idea Bank, Inside-Out Thinking, Successful Blog, Writing | 15 Comments

It’s Complex

Paradoxical Creativity

When Csikszentmihalyi wrote Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, he found that it wasn’t easy to pin down what determines a creative life, it seemed to hinge upon the determination to follow a creative instinct.

What Dr. C. did was describe how creativity works. He laid out how culture evolves as curious and determined individuals transform domains. He explained how we might learn from the lives of those men and women to add creativity to our own. He found the commonalities in their struggles and strategies. This is what he said about them.

Are there no traits that distinguish creative people? . . . If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be “complexity.” By this I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes — instead of being an “individual” each of them is a “multitude.” Like the color white that includes all the hues in the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.

The qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow cultivating the aggressive, competitive side of our nature, and disdain or repress the nurturant, cooperative side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think that one or the other pole is “good,” whereas the other extreme is “bad.” . . .

Perhaps a central position, a golden mean, is the place of choice, what software writers call the default condition. But creative persons definitely know both extremes and experience both with equal intensity and without inner conflict. –Csikszentmihalyi, p. 57

He named ten antithetical traits both present integrated in dialectical tension and called them the Ten Dimensions of Complexity. I call them the Ten of Paradoxes of Creativity.

Either way, they make us crazy.

The 10 Dimensions of Creative Complexity

Each trait that Dr. Mihaly uncovered is a contradiction, a complexity, a paradox. Each contributes to making it hard to predict creative responses. If you consider the list as a whole, you’ll see how such a “complex individual” might find “fodder” that fuels curiosity, innovation, and original ideas. It’s also easy to see how less “exhuberant” people might find these contradictions confusing, difficult, and frustrating. What do you see?

  1. Creative individuals have great physical energy, but they become extremely quiet when they are at rest. This restful period can lead others to think that they are not feeling well or that they are unhappy, when the truth is they are fine.

  2. Creative folks tend to be both highly intelligent and naive at the same time.

  3. Creative people are disciplined and playful simultaneously. In some creative people, this can mean that they are responsible and irresponsible at the same time as well.

  4. Creative minds move between a spectrum of fantasy and imagination and a firm grounding in reality. They understand the present and need to keep in touch with the past.

  5. Creative individuals seem to be both introverted and extroverted, expressing both traits at once. An image to explain this might be that they are shy showoffs, if you can picture that.

  6. Creative people are sincerely humble and extremely proud in a childlike way. It requires ego to have a risky, fresh idea. It takes self-doubt to hammer it out to a workable form.

  7. Creative folks don’t feel as tied to gender roles. They feel distinctly individual. They don’t feel the barriers of authority or the rules of what they are “supposed to do.”

  8. Creative individuals are thought to be rebellious. Yet, in order to be creative one has to understand and have internalized the traditional culture. Therefore creativity comes from deep roots in tradition. Creative people are traditional and cutting edge.

  9. Creative people are deeply passionate about their work, yet can be extremely detached and objective when discussing it.

  10. Creative people are highly open and sensitive, which exposes them to pain and suffering, but also allows them to feel higher values of joy and happiness.

I plan to pair Dr. C.’s research with my educational background to offer some actionable ideas for stretching our creativity as we go about our business and our lives.

Creativity in Action

So is that noisy guy on Twitter nuts or creative? So if I’ve made you curious, even just a little bit, that’s start. Curiosity is the cure for boredom. Curiosity fuels ideas. Ideas keep blogging alive.

Move it forward by asking everyone you meet today one question. Make today “one question interview day.” What will your question be?

Mine is this . . . Do you have paradoxes in your personality?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Holiday Bloggers’ Block — What to Get to Let Ideas Come to You!!

Filed Under Idea Bank, Successful Blog, Writing | 15 Comments

Get Out of Your Head!

insideout logo

When people speak of writer’s block, often what they mean is that they don’t know what to write about. Without that goal, they can’t get started. It happens to bloggers too.

Whether we’re writing a single blog post or setting out to start a new blog, we have to know what we’re planning to communicate and the direction we want that communication to go.

In other words, we need something to say.

Get some help . . . by letting the ideas come to you.

Ideas tend to hide when we try to hunt them. Those we find seem shallow and less than appealing. Ideas and people have that one huge thing in common. They’re easier to work with when they come to you.

Get it? Good.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Related
Don’t Hunt IDEAS — Be an Idea Magnet
Got the Idea. Now What Do I Do with It?
Finding Ideas Outside the Box
Eye-Deas 1: Have You Started Seeing Things?

The Game of Life

Filed Under Idea Bank, Outside the Box, Successful Blog | 14 Comments

I've been thinking . . .

how we make things work.

We finish a day’s work exhausted, burnt out, bone tired. If we were asked to keep going, it would be a stretch — nor a healthy thing. Do we go home to rest? Do we take a nap, rejuvenate and refuel? No, most of us don’t. An hour or two later, you’ll find us out dancing, playing ball, or at the gym lifting weights.

Many of the sports and activities that we do for fun require more physical and mental energy than what we need to invest to get through a work day. Yet, they don’t wear us out nearly as much, and in some cases, they pick us back up.

How is that? It’s no surprise that it has to do with how we think about work.

Years ago, Charles A. Coonradt tested his idea by turning work tasks into measurable self-competing contests — games that could be won. Folks were asked to weigh the paper they filed every day. Within 3 weeks, a department that had overdue filing for 3 years was ahead and found itself with 3 hours extra each day. The people in the department asked for more work — new work — that they could measure that way. [He called his book, The Game of Work.]

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Sometimes I use this technique to get myself to conquer tasks I’m not fond of doing. Today I’m wondering what life would be like if I took the same approach to everything I do?

Have you thought about that? What problem would be easier if you thought of it as one more level, challenge, quest, in the game of life?

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