Daniel Restrepo @DanksRestrepo At what time of the day do you brainstorm business ideas?
ANSWER:
I have a waiters pad on me all the time. I brainstorm all day. If someone says something even funny to me, i write it down. By the way, brainstorming sort of implies most ideas are bad. You can’t judge your ideas. Just write them down. Judge later.
The other day I was watching the BBC show “Peep Show” in the afternoon with Claudia. It’s a hilarious show. I didn’t have my waiter’s pad on me but I had a book (“1.d4” by Boris Avrukh). I wrote in the back pages of the book. Claudia was getting annoyed because I kept pausing the show.
I was writing things the characters were saying that were funny to me.
One guy was thinking about the other: “he’s like the Copernicus of the anus”. I thought that was funny. Wrote it down. Then he thought about himself: “I’m like a horny Gandhi”. Funny, because he’s really passive but wants to have sex all the time. Wrote it down
Then I was thinking about the characters and how they could be really smart but different things bring down their intelligence and I was trying to figure out by what percentage.
So I wrote down: paranoia subtracts from intelligence. Resentement does by about 30%. Honest/dishonesty increases/decreases intelligence by about 50%. “Maybe a post” I wrote.
Then I got an email from @ReadHeavily which gave me a quote I wrote down: “each story has to teach one how to live”
Then I thought of another post idea: what’s the difference between sympathy, empathy, and pity.
So that’s one example.
Then another example: I was having a stupid google+ argument with someone. This guy thought it was a shame the octomom was posing naked. It was like lighting his life on fire. He could not BELIEVE she would pose naked for money to support her children. He wanted her to have five children instead of eight. He had all sorts of opinions about the octomom.
But it gave me an AWESOME business idea. Which I may or may not do. But I wrote it down anyway. 2 page specification and sent it out to a programmer. We’ll see.
But there’s no better time to brainstorm than right now.