The final stretch of my morning walk to coffee passes through a wide oak-lined path.
Over the past month, the ground has regularly been littered with acorns, crunching underfoot as I walk by, the branches above filled with dozens more.
There’s something I love about the size, shape, and feel of acorns. The symbolism of small beginnings and slow growth is a nice reminder as well. And so almost every day I’ll either stoop to pick up, or reach to pluck down a handful of the smooth seeds to bring back home to decorate the base of my office plant.
As winter has drawn steadily nearer, however, fresh acorns are becoming harder to come by.
That doesn’t keep me from looking, however.
At this point, most of the acorns on the ground have either been trampled and crushed by the time I walk by or are lying next to the proliferation of dog shit in the tree planters beside the path.
And so I’ve turned my gaze to the increasingly bare trees.
One quiet morning, when there was no one else around, I decided to examine the trees more closely.
As I stopped in front of one of the trees to have a better look, I immediately saw great bunches of acorns still crowding the branches just above the reach of the average person.
Around the back of the tree, off the path and overhanging a low retaining wall, the bounty of acorns continued, these all well within arms reach.
Finally, I realized that there were, in fact, still plenty of acorns within reach, directly along my walking route. They were disguised behind leaves, however, and difficult to spot while walking by at full speed.
It made me think about how similar spotting and collecting acorns is to spotting and collecting good ideas.
Ideas Are More Abundant than We Realize
The most obvious and easily accessible ideas in any space are always the first to be picked over.
Some of those get claimed and put to use by other people. Others get tossed aside, trampled, and covered in whatever the idea equivalent of dog shit is.
It’s often at precisely this point when most of us make our entrance into a new space, survey the landscape, and draw the mistaken conclusion that the bubble has burst and there are no good ideas left to be had.
Of course, there are almost always still plenty of good ideas worth picking, but in order to find them, we need to get creative
Fortunately, the distribution of acorns on the oak tree provides a framework for finding the seeds of ideas anywhere.
4 Methods For Idea Discovery
When we understand where ideas tend to get picked over fastest—within easy reach along the most well-traveled path—it’s not hard to come up with solutions to find and harvest the less accessible ideas.
These solutions are divided into four categories.
1. Exertion
The first opportunity is to work harder than other people are willing to.
When it comes to picking acorns this might mean jumping in order to grasp the acorns that would otherwise be out of reach.
For ideas, this might be getting in more reps in our niche or with our subject matter or medium than other, more opportunistic people are willing to put in.
Get to know the ins and outs of any space by working in it and plenty of non-obvious opportunities have a way of presenting themselves.
2. Ingenuity
While exertion is certainly one way to access hard-to-reach ideas, ingenuity and creativity allow us to reach higher.
On an oak tree, this might mean getting a ladder, using a stick to knock down acorns suspended higher up in the tree, or shaking the trunk until they fall.
In our creative work, ingenuity might mean pattern-matching ideas that have worked in other industries or niches with ours, or focusing on growing a network in the space that continually presents feeds us new perspectives and ideas organically, rather than needing to go out and find them ourselves.
3. Inconvenience
As I discovered with the oak, there are often plenty of good ideas within easy reach if we’re willing to step off the most well-traveled path.
Every niche and industry has a dominant audience segment that the majority of people & brands cater to. But that doesn’t mean they’re the only segment. In fact, they’re often the hardest to gain traction with because of the amount of noise and competition.
Explore the fringes of your space and you’ll find all kinds of ideas and opportunities ripe for the picking.
4. Patience
Finally, there’s the method of simply slowing down enough to actually see our surroundings for what they are as we pass through them before writing them off as barren & devoid of opportunity.
We’d be surprised by what turns up when we settle into a space and participate in the existing community for a while.
On the oak, simply stopping to stand beneath it for 30 seconds was enough to spot acorns that had previously been invisible to me.
Perhaps the epitome of this approach is the patience of continuing to return to the tree, day after day, season after season, year after year, with the knowledge that even if the tree is barren today, it’s only a matter of time before new acorns begin to emerge.
The spaces in which we live and work are constantly shifting, morphing, and evolving.
Which means new opportunities are always developing, budding beneath the surface, and waiting to break through.
When they do, the people who will be in position to take advantage of them will be those who have been patiently tending to the space long before the new batch of ideas showed up.
Our challenge then, as creator entrepreneurs might not be finding ideas.
But finding the tree we’re willing to weather the seasons under, and then reaping the bounty it provides.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.
Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
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