Could you be the next Mark Zuckerberg?
Facebook, Candy Crush, Bananagrams ... million-dollar ideas are simpler to come up with than you think
We celebrate the great inventors and creators of our era, but if we're honest, don't we also kind of hate them a bit too? The truth about many blockbuster business ideas isn't simply that they're brilliant. It's also that, with hindsight, they're obvious. There's nothing about the basic concept behind Facebook that I couldn't have dreamed up myself - and yet I can't help noticing it's Mark Zuckerberg, not me, with the net worth of 25bn. The same questions prompted by all manner of ultra-successful apps, games, novels and television formats: "Why didn't I think of that?" Well, sheer luck is definitely part of it: you can't just decide to have a "Eureka!" moment. But there may be ways to seriously boost your chances.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to having a breakthrough idea is the way we romanticise breakthrough ideas - starting with the original "Eureka!" moment: Archimedes' famous insight in the bath, which almost certainly never occurred. Instead, as the Nobel prize-winning biochemist Linus Pauling once put it, the way to get good ideas is to "have a lot of ideas and throw the bad ones away". Begin a daily practice of listing 10 ideas, no matter how rubbish, advises the author and entrepreneur James Altucher. Then throw the list in the bin: the point is to build the idea-muscle, not to invest emotionally in any single notion.
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