Mike Carruthers

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.

So you said that the idea of sitting down and trying to come up with ideas is somewhat counterproductive for many people.

So what does work?

If that doesn't work, do you just wait until...

I don't know, something happens.

I always find, though, that when you generate a lot of ideas, you've got so many things that now you're too close to it and you can't really see the forest for the trees and now you can't really evaluate them.

Yeah, that rings true because doesn't it seem like you're able to look at somebody else's ideas or what somebody else wrote or somebody else made or whatever and evaluate it in a much more objective way, as you say, because it's not yours.

So you have a distance on it that gives you that ability that you cannot do with your own stuff.

One of the things I've always heard about creating ideas, good ideas, is to take two things that are seemingly incongruent and putting them together somehow into something new.