By Christopher Murphy CHAPTER 13This is the process: it’s easy, but like every seemingly simple thing, it’s
really quite difficult. Learn the process. Apply it. Repeat it. Practice it. It
will, I believe, serve you well; it has so served me.
With the weight of evidence (gathered by Pareto, Young and Berkun)
revealing that raw material is where new ideas emerge from, it becomes
self-evident that we need to put in place strategies and techniques to gather
ideas. You’ll not be surprised to discover that there are a number of tried-
and-tested approaches, not least the scrapbook or sketchbook (and their dig-
ital equivalents) to do just this. Press them into service and all will be well.
STRaTegieS
I’d like to suggest three techniques you can adopt to prime the brain with
raw material.
- Libraries
- Sketchbooks and scrapbooks
- A digital toolbelt
libraries... who Knew?
Use them! Libraries contain a wealth of knowledge — much, much more
than we have available at our fingertips through search engines. Libraries
encourage chance discovery, serendipitous unearthings when you happen
on a bookshelf rich with potential. Search engines, on the other hand, are
self-selecting: a predictable world filtered by Google. Search for a term and
find an algorithmically ranked selection merely; there’s very little luck
involved at all. (And luck, in this case, sets you apart.)
Learn to love dusty, musty libraries. There you’ll find ideas aplenty, set-
ting you apart from your peers who remain reliant on the same old digital
sources. If you’re in the unfortunate situation of lacking a neighborhood
library, fear not — book shops make a good susbtitute and if they’re sec-
ondhand bookshops, all the better!