Ideas are nothing without action, so the saying goes.

It’s a little glib, but I’m not going to argue with it.

It’s also true, however, that action is nothing without an idea, and more often than not, even action and idea together amount to less than we hoped for or maybe even nothing at all.

It’s a disheartening reality, but as anyone who’s started a business and kept it going for any amount of time will tell you, the first (or second, third, fourth…) thing you try rarely works out as you’d hoped.

And even if you do hit it big once, that’s probably not enough.

Most of us can only squeeze so much life out of our individual hits before being relegated to the category of One-Hit Wonders along with Psy, Gotye, and Baha Men…

The key then to both getting off the ground and then remaining aloft once we’ve done so is to ensure we have a steady stream of ideas ready to get to work on when the time is right.

Coming Up With Ideas Is Hard

When I made my first foray into the world of podcasts, one of my favourite shows was Question Of The Day, with Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics fame) and James Altucher (of James Altucher fame…).

It was a short, daily show in which the two friends would have a lighthearted discussion around a topic, often presented by a listener. I’d often binge-listen through 4 or 5 episodes a day while working full-time as a landscaper.

James mentioned on multiple occasions the practice he had developed of coming up with 10 ideas a day as being central to his success in his life as an entrepreneur.

Being young, impressionable and in the beginning stages of figuring out how to start my own business, I took this advice as truth and started keeping a daily journal of ideas.

The first day I wrote down maybe 6 ideas. They weren’t very good. They may not have even been real ideas, and they definitely weren’t original.

I knew they weren’t good, but I figured that as I built up the idea-generating muscle, I would only get more and better ideas each day until by day 100 I would understand how to cure cancer, have built out mental blueprints of a light-speed capable rocket engine, and be primed for fame, fortune, and accolades from the highest echelons of society.

Fast forward 100 days and I had given up on the idea journaling exercise about 87 days earlier…

Where I had assumed that conjuring ideas would become easier with time, I instead found that after a couple of weeks, I had exhausted the ideas that had already been kicking around the back of my head (none of them very good), picked the low hanging fruit, and was left with nothing new.

What Does An Idea Even Look Like?

It had been my understanding that big ideas would appear in the form of a lightning bolt, lightbulb, or some other obvious (and light-based) signal that would alert me to their presence.

And so, when none appeared despite my keen 13-day surveillance, I accepted the fact that I wasn’t the idea-generating type and moved on.

What I realized much later, was that the issue was not, in fact, that I wasn’t the idea-generating type, but that my conception of what an idea even looks like was flawed.

Part of it was that I was impatient.

I was ready to have my million-dollar idea and get to work on bringing it to life.

And so, in my impatience and naivete, I was on the lookout — and only on the lookout — for fully-formed business ideas, ready to download from the ether and convert into paying customers.

It turns out that big ideas, the ones that do seem to strike you like a bolt of lightning are exceedingly infrequent and subject to the same rules as all other ideas.

That is, there’s a better than not chance that they won’t work out as well as you’d hoped.

Generating ideas like this is neither reliable, nor scalable for most of us.

Real Ideas Are Subtle

What I’ve come to learn and embody is that the most reliable way to find and develop ideas into something useful (and maybe even impactful or profitable), is not to go looking for the lightning bolts.

Instead, keep your eyes peeled and your ears pricked for the slight tickling of curiosity. For the end of a ball of string that you can unravel and see where it leads.

For me, these usually show up as a random thought, or observance that strikes me as interesting and worth more exploration.

In all likelihood, most of those ideas won’t lead anywhere “productive” or profitable. But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth exploring. If nothing else, you’ll have exercised your mind, satisfied your initial curiosity about the idea, and can move on to the next one.

Often, however, in unspooling one ball of string, you’ll find the beginnings of another 7 balls along the way.

This is how you become an idea-generating machine. Not by waiting for lightning to strike, but by actively following and exploring the tiniest sparks of ideas you come across.

Commit To Idea Exploration

In my experience, the ideas that amount to the most are the ones that stick their tiny hooks in you, and then force you to grapple with them, unroll them, turn them over, flex them, view them from every angle, break them open before putting them back together.

These ideas are not fully formed. They take time, sometimes months or even years, to wrestle with or to grow into before they become useful.

They can be frustrating, the timing never being quite right, the pre-requisite pieces never quite being in place, never quite fitting into the space we have for them at the moment.

But if we ignore these idea threads in favour of the lightning bolts, we risk passing up the thousands of unexplored ideas, that would have revealed their potential if only we’d taken the effort to give the thread a slight tug to see where it leads.

So pull your conception of ideas down off its pedestal. Write down every thought or observance that seems interesting you, and then commit to exploring it further.

Do this, and you’ll have no shortage of ideas.

They won’t all be good. They won’t all be useful.

But some will both, and they’ll be worth putting the work in to unravel.