Eye-Deas 1: Have You Started Seeing Things?

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Worth 1000 Words

I look at it this way. They say a picture is worth a 1000 words. A good post can be as short as 400. One picture could help A LOT.
–ME Strauss

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I like to have illustration with what I write. Pictures add reader support and interest. I’ve said that before, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I often use visuals as a way of reverse engineering. Photos, clip art, line art, fine art, and objects in the real world are all great sources for ideas. Of them all, rights-free photos and clipart work double time. You can use them to get ideas; then use them to illustrate the idea after it’s written. For this conversation I’m going to use the words photo and image to suggest any form of visual or illustration you might use.

The reason images make great idea starters is that they access the right brain–the place where words don’t usually hang out. Images get you thinking in a new way about things–connecting thoughts that don’t usually get connected, triggering memories. Images involve your eyes in the process of bringing in information. You don’t have the problems of words tripping over each other or of your left brain trying to edit your thoughts when all you want to do is get to an idea.

Folders, Envelopes, & Boxes of Ideas

Ever sit at someone’s house when the scrapbooks come out when you hardly know a person in the pictures? Isn’t it strange how if you’re friends with the person who owns the album, the pictures can get you involved in telling stories anyway?

I collect images. I use them for fodder–stuff to look at when I need ideas. They’re in several beat-up old folders, a couple of 9×12 envelopes, and a box or two. Some are at my friend, Peg’s house. I also have about 23 photo and art sites bookmarked on my computer–that doesn’t count the museums and art galleries which might be 20 or so more. I don’t put much effort into the collection, and I get a wealth of ideas from having it. The images come from a variety of places.

  • Photos and greeting cards from daily life. I keep cool old photos and greeting cards with weird cartoons on them. The gating factor for keeping them is Will I want to tell a story about this? Could this prompt a story in anyway? When I add one, I always look for one I no longer need.
  • If, for some strange reason, I find myself at a flea market where they’re selling old photos or calendars, I might look through the really old ones to find something that triggers an idea or two.
  • When I’m driving I notice things that would make a good picture–that guy who was walking a Dalmatian in front of the brownstones on Roscoe St, looked like Fagin from Oliver Twist. I write down a mini-description of what I saw when I stop.
  • Sometimes, I take a shot with my camera phone, but I only do that for really weird things, not usually people.
  • I look at the pictures in magazines and catalogues for ideas to write about. At last, I’ve found a use for my time when sitting in waiting rooms with all of those boring magazines.

I read billboards and check out window displays too. Even the ads on buses have pictures that might trigger an idea about a subject that I write about. Those notes and pictures go into the folders, envelopes, and boxes.

I only do this kind of idea hunting when I’m alone. I don’t want to turn into one of those people who lives their blog the way some folks live their jobs. . . . But then I’m alone a lot.

Setting Up A Photo Idea Directory

I’ll often go to my favorite rights-free photos sites when I have down time to browse for photos that capture my imagination. It’s a great way to get the words out of my head and relax at the same time. I save photos I find into a Photo Idea Directory.

These points will help you to set-up a directory. This will start you out organized and give you a process that handles photos properly and saves you time when you look for ideas and find a photo you want to use.

  • Open a parent folder to be the Photo Idea Directory.
  • Organize that folder with subfolders by source–in case you need to download or access an item again for another reason. Don’t try topics at this level. Topics are like tags, just too nebulous to keep track of. Name the photos by topic/content not the folder.
  • Always check rights restrictions before you download a photo.
  • Download as close to the size you will use–or slightly larger–to save space.
  • If the photographer has been named, write a quick e-mail such as this:

    I’m using your work (name of item here) on my blog for (purpose here). Thank you for your generosity and for your beautiful image. If you’d like to see it, you’ll find it at (permalink here).
    Give the email a subject line of I’m using your (name of image).
    Save the email into a drafts folder until you use the photo. When you want to use the image, the email is ready; hit send.

  • Keep your eye out for photos on subjects you write about to add to the file.
  • Visit the Directory when you need inspiration. You might be surprised how it works. The thumbnail makes it easy to see what you’ve got to choose from.

Often when I’m away from home, waiting for something, I’ll mentally go through my photo file and one or two photos will come to mind for me to play with. Some of my best writing ideas have started that way. I think of the images in that file and connect one to some topic that I’ve been wanting to talk about. It’s as if the photos are waiting for me to tell their stories–I just have to figure out what those stories are.

Get the Picture?

Using your eyes to find ideas can get your right brain working for you. As you do what you do, you can be collecting images that hang out in a box or on your computer waiting for you to decide what their story is.

Try a little reverse engineering the next time you need an idea. Pick up a magazine, visit an online gallery, or browse your favorite photo site. Let your imagination do the rest for you. Suddenly you’ll find that you’re not stuck using the same images over and over again. What’s cool about photos is that they change in small ways to match what you’re looking to find in them.

Images will not only get you started, but also help you dress up and promote your final written work. Build a great image for your brand and your business by putting images to behind your ideas from the start. Get the picture?

How might reverse engineering with images add appeal and depth to your writing?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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The 10 Skills Most Critical to Your Future

Filed Under Branding, Business Life, Outside the Box, Productivity, Strategy, Successful Blog | 25 Comments

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Thinking in the 21st Century

Thinking cannot be separated from who we are. In the 21st century, the age of intellectual property, the way we think is crucial to having a place in society. What we think and how well we express those thoughts will determine where we fit and how well we live. Thoughts, ideas, processes, intangibles–all have value in a world of constant change where knowledge is an adjective, a noun, and an asset–in the form of intellectual property–on balance sheets.

In the largest sense, American society is breaking into two classes:

The first class are people who know how to think. These people realize that most problems are open to examination and creative solution. If a problem appears in the lives of these people, their intellectual training will quickly lead them to a solution or an alternative statement of the problem. These people are the source of the most important product in today’s economy – ideas.

The second class, the vast majority of Americans, are people who cannot think for themselves. I call these people “idea consumers” – metaphorically speaking, they wander around in a gigantic open-air mall of facts and ideas. The content of their experience is provided by television, the Internet and other shallow data pools. These people believe collecting images and facts makes them educated and competent, and all their experiences reinforce this belief. The central, organizing principle of this class is that ideas come from somewhere else, from magical persons, geniuses, “them.”

. . . My purpose in this article is to undermine that belief.

–Paul Lutus, Creative Problem Solving

Most Schools Are Inside the Box

When I was in school, it was weird and unpopular to think outside of the box. But there I was. It’s not something I learned to do. It’s how I came into the world. Much like a left-handed kid learns to use right-handed scissors, I learned to figure out how everyone thinks. I learned to observe so that I could understand them. Knowing how other people think was a survival skill for me. For them, learning how I think was a gesture of friendship.

That was then.

In school it’s weird not to think like everyone else.
In society, outside-of-the-box thinking is a prized commodity. Innovative thinking is essential to any change-based leadership brand.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

My experience of school, both as a student and sadly as a teacher was not, in the most primary sense, geared toward developing new ideas. It was centered around teaching and learning what had already been done, without taking that next step to challenge the past with how it might have been done differently or better.

Thinking Outside of the Box Is Critical

The world economy has changed to one of service and ideas. Conversation is digital and content is king. The ability to work with ideas has become crucial to having a place in society. Thinking outside of the box is no longer a weird personality trait, but something to be admired and valued. It’s a key trait necessary to modern-day strategic planning and process modeling.

Intellectual property–content–is an asset that not only gets produced, but reproduced, reconfigured, and repurposed for variety of media. Those who produce intellectual property are builders of wealth. An original idea that solves a problem or presents an opportunity is worth more now than it ever has been. Those who develop and mold original ideas are the new “killer app.”

10 Skills Critical to Your Future

These are ten skills critical to your repertoire. They have indelible impact as part of a resume, a personal brand, and as a skill set. They compound in value each minute in the marketplace. Though it can be done, these 10 skills are difficult to cultivate inside the proverbial box. Yet they are critical to your future, if you want to be an idea creator and not an idea consumer. These are

The 10 Most Critical Skills for the 21st Century

Future Skills
  1. Deep independent thinking and problem-solving – The ability to understand a problem or opportunity from the inside out, vertically, laterally, at the detail level, and the aerial view.

  2. Mental flexibility – The ability to tinker with ideas and viewpoints to stretch them, bend them, reconstruct them into solutions that fit and work perfectly in specific situations.

  3. Fluency with ideas — The ability to describe many versions of one answer and many solutions to one problem set and to explain the impact or outcome of each both orally and in writing in ways that others can understand.

  4. Proficency with processes and process models — The ability to discuss a problem in obsessive detail and to define a process, linear or nonlinear, that will solve the problem effectively within a given group culture.

  5. Originality of contributions – The ability to offer a value-added difference that would not be there were another person in the same role.

  6. A habit of finding hidden assumptions and niches — The ability to see the parts of what is being considered, including the stated and unstated needs, desires, and wishes of all parties involved.

  7. A bias toward opportunity and action — The ability to estimate and verbalize the loss to be taken by standing still and missed opportunities that occur by choosing one avenue over another.

  8. Uses all available tools, including the five senses and intuitive perceptions, in data collection — The ability to weigh and value empirical data, sensory data, and one’s own and others’ perceptions appropriately.

  9. Energy, enthusiasm, and positivity about decision making — The ability to bring the appropriate mindset to the decision-making process in order to lead oneself or a team to a positive decision-making experience.

  10. Self-sustaining productivity — The ability to use the confidence gained from the first 9 skills to establish relationships with people at all levels–from the warehouse to the boardroom–knowing that ideas are not the pride and privy of only a gifted few.

Innovative, imaginative, inventive, mind-expanding, playful-wondering, what-if, how-come, dramatic-difference, find-the-wow, visionary, killer-app, I-want-one, no-more-stupid-stuff, nothing-in-moderation, bet-the-farm, incredibly-sexy, please-please-can-I, that’s-so-cool, couldn’t-knock-it-off-if-they-tried-to, able-to-see-better-than-the-best, no-more-move-here-today-move-it-back-tomorrow, stupid kind of thinking happens outside of the box.

The skills that you develop from outside of the box thinking stay with you for a lifetime and are transferrable from one job to another. You don’t need them to write every shopping list, but they are there whenever there is a problem to solve or an opportunity to take advantage of.

It doesn’t take a genius to become a fluent, flexible, original, and creative source of ideas. It takes a person who can develop habits of thinking in new ways. What actually happens is that you find out how you really think, rather than how you were taught to.

You become uniquely you–BRAND YOU–the only one–priceless.

Who wouldn’t want to work with a person like that?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

PS We’re going to go down the list of all 10 in the Finding Ideas Outside of the Box series. Let me know if there’s one you’d like to do first.

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Start in the Middle 3: Alligators and Anarchists

Filed Under Branding, Outside the Box, Productivity, Strategy, Successful Blog | 1 Comment

Problems and Opportunities

Starve the problems. Feed the opportunities.

–Peter F. Drucker, regarded as the founding father of the study of management

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Problems and opportunities are two sides of the same coin.
Your brand is the solution to the problem of how the world sees you and your business.

Alligators and Anarchists

Problems and opportunities can make anyone feel surrounded by alligators and anarchists. Too many obstacles isn’t that different from too many positive choices–both have to be tamed and sorted and decided upon based on their value and viability.

Problems and opportunities are places where the beginning is not the most prudent place to start if you want to make a difference and a decision happen quickly.

Start in the Middle

One way to make problems and opportunities more manageable is to divide and conquer–by starting in the middle. Whether it’s the deal of a lifetime you’re deciding on or you’re trying to unravel a poorly handled relationship, find a way to place the situation in front of you and take a long look at it.

  • Look for the core of the matter. Often there is one idea, event, or assumption upon which all parts hinge. If you can identify that, you know what you’re working with. In a problem solving situation, that’s what you want to fix. For a brand or an opportunity, the core idea is the goal you’re seeking. If you find you’re not seeing it, try tearing away everything you feel is unimportant or unnecessary.
  • If you can’t find the core, find a hot spot–a compelling detail, an assumption, or an idea to focus on. Make that your focus. Obsess on it. Describe that hot spot in painful detail–especially its impact on the problem, brand, or opportunity. How does changing that hot spot affect the possible outcomes? Repeat the process several times to get a feeling for your problem, your brand, or your opportunity from the inside out.
  • Then do the opposite–put the problem, your brand, or the opportunity in the middle and look at it from several viewpoints. Imagine you are a musician, a mathematician, a construction worker, a writer, an architect, a dancer, a psychiatrist, your customers, your parents, and your kids. How would each role see the matter differently? How does each new view that change the options of where you might take the possible outcomes?

At this point, STOP.

Give your mind time to rest. Any brain would need a chance to take in and sort all of the information you have just gathered. While it’s doing that, do something totally unrelated.

If you’re worried that you need to keep fixing the problem. molding your brand, or moving on the opportunity, take heart that you’re not losing time. You’re actually stopping yourself from wasting it. To ease that feeling, make an appointment with yourself to come back to the discussion–at least two hours later. Your brain will show up prepared for the meeting, You’ll get more done after this break. I promise.

When your thoughts have gelled, use the Content Development Tool to organize your ideas and the support for each one in a fashion that you can look at and share with confidence. Now all that is left to do is decide which option is the best for you–or to repeat the process if you want to take the idea a level deeper

Divide and conquer from the middle. That’s the reason my older brother–the middle child–always saw so many options and won so many arguments. Hmmm. Maybe he’s the one who taught me this problem-solving skill.

Please don’t tell him. He takes credit for more than half of what I am already.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Start in the Middle 1: Write a Three-Course Meal
Start in the Middle 2: Middle Idea Bank
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Start in the Middle 2: Middle Idea Bank

Filed Under Content, Idea Bank, Outside the Box, Successful Blog, Writing | Leave a Comment

Some word associations to jog new ideas . . .

Try connecting one of these terms to something it wouldn’t usually be connected with.

Phrases that Use the Word Middle

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Middle Man . . . Middle Atlantic . . . Magic Middle . . . Middle Ground . . . Middle School . . . Middle English . . . Malcolm in the Middle . . . Middle-Earth . . . Middle East . . . Middle Pillar . . . Middle Temple . . . Middle West . . . The Mighty Middle . . . In the Middle . . . Stuck in the Middle . . . Middle of Nowhere . . . Middle of the Road . . . Middle Years . . . The Middle Passage . . . The Middle Colonies . . . Middle Start . . . Middle Appalachians . . . Middle Age . . . Voices from the Middle . . . Middle America . . . Middle-age Spread . . . Middle Rhine Valley . . . Middle Class . . . Middle Manager . . . Middle Name . . . The Middle Ear . . . Middle C . . . Middle Jurassic

Synonyms for Middle

average . . . central . . . center . . . centre . . . equidistant . . . eye . . . halfway . . . heart . . . hub . . . in-between . . . inner . . . intermediate . . . intervening . . . junior high . . . mediate . . . medium . . . mid . . . midriff . . . midsection . . . midstream . . . midway . . . on the fence . . . uncertain

If you think of more, please add them in the comments . . .

Ideas and enthusiasm are contagious!

Thanks!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Start in the Middle 1: Write a Three-Course Meal
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Don’t Hunt IDEAS — Be an Idea Magnet
Got the Idea. Now What Do I Do with It?

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FIOTB–Tool 1: Content Development Tool

Filed Under Business Life, Checklists, Content, Outside the Box, Productivity, Strategy, Successful Blog, Writing | 8 Comments

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Because thinking outside of the box is unstructured, it can can lead to “swiss-cheese solutions”–answers that have holes in them–things that we just didn’t think of in our unstructured thinking. So I find that using structured tools relieves the stress of checking to make certain that all bases have been covered.

Content Development Tool

Ironically using boxes makes it easier to think outside the box. I use this content development tool to make sure that I have considered a topic from every direction before I start getting it ready for any audience. This tool works equally as well for planning an interview, a brand, an article, a small meeting, or a major presentation.

Purpose/Getting Attention: What does my audience want to know?

  • What are my main points and ideas?


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  • What facts and details support them?


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Presentation/Keeping Interest: How is it that I will show and tell them?

  • How will it look?


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  • How will I say it with simple elegance?


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Brand YOU/Reader Satisfaction: Why will they be glad they listened?

  • Analysis, predictions, interpretations


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  • What value-added will leave my audience feeling satisfied?


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Whether you’re inside or outside of the box, you need to know the what, how, and why of the information you’re offering any audience about any topic. That’s why I’m sharing this tool before we begin talking about getting ideas and solving problems.

I use it all of the time. It’s here now, if you need it.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Editing for Quality and a Content Editor’s Checklist
Introducing Power Writing for Everyone
Why Dave Barry and Liz Don’t Get Writer’s Block

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