Aspen Ideas Festival: Where do ideas come from?

NPR recently interviewed a keynote speaker from the Aspen Ideas Festival on where ideas come from. Following are my Top 20 Take Aways

1. It's a process of connecting people, understanding their needs, and getting inspiration from what they care about

2. How do we know if our ideas are relevant to others? Just ask them

3. There are three types of ideas: (a) Painkiller; (b) Vitamin; (c) Product

4. Passion + Sweat Equity (99%) = Execution

5. Feedback is the breakfast of champions. Try it out with a prototype first

6. Failures are the core of innovation. Passion => Brick Wall => Resilence => Fail Faster

7. Face-to-face conversations allow dialogue and idea exchange

8. Space allows one to nourish the mind, body, and soul

9. Create a collaborative environment

10. Ideas frequently come from accidents or mistakes (like 3M sticky notes)

11. See the problem in a different light to allow it to float/bubble to the surface (subconsciously)

12. Eureka moments happen when using our intuition to listen on a different level to see the pattern more consistently

13. Eureka ideas are only the beginning, the rest is just hard work

14. You have to have a prepared mind, a structured kind of mind to process

15. The 3 most important things that matter in building a great idea...TEAM, TEAM, TEAM. Teams must have a cross-disciplinary and have different experiences or frames of references

16. The discovery process...Where is it that we want to go, what do we want to create?

17. Create a problem statement for the team to solve

18. Stillness vs. activity (combination of stimulation and relaxation)

19. Ask the question. Depending on how you frame it, you will come up with a different answer.

20. Constraints (like time and money) actually help us know what to bounce off of. Too few constraints make it difficult to generate new ways of thinking. You need parameters and time deadlines

Who are your Top 10 Thought Leaders? Who are your Top 10 Advisors? Are you surrounding yourself with the right people to generate the next great idea?

Top 10 Books That Changed The Way You Think

Recently asked the question, "What are the Top 10 Books that Changed The Way You Think?" Here's a list of responses I got

1. Ghadavad Gita: A New Translation - Stephen Mitchell
2. Orbiting Giant Hairball - Gordon McKenzie
3. Complexity Crisis - John Mariotti
4. A Million Miles in 1000 Years - Donald Miller
5. Pour Your Heart into It - Howard Schultz
6. Where are all the Customers' Yachts? - Fred Schwed
7. Good to Great - Jim Collins
8. Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne
9. The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch
10. The Next 100 Years - George Friedman