Mike Carruthers

We've all come up with an idea and go, hey, yeah, great idea.

That's great.

But where'd it come from?

And my sense is, or my experience is, that sitting down and trying to come up with a great idea, to just sit down and hammer it out, that almost never works.

It seems to come from...

I don't know where it comes from.

You're going to tell me where it comes from.

But the idea of trying to come up with an idea seldom works.

Well, it's I guess because the stories tend to not sound like that.

The stories of great ideas of great success are often the stories of magic and they're not false starts and mistakes and errors and restarts.

It's all much more glamorous than that.

And so when you have those difficult times, you think, well, how come I can't be like those other guys?

But when you look at great ideas, how much of it is the idea and how much of it is the person doing it?

When you look at great ideas, I'm wondering, how often do great ideas come because people are looking for solutions to a problem versus great ideas just kind of generating out of nowhere?

Like the story of Velcro, I think, is kind of the great example of that.

What's the beginning seed of it all?

And that, again, is usually not part of the story.

It somehow gets woven into this tale of this aha moment and how exciting.

And it doesn't include all those bumps along the way.

Yeah.