Inc. magazine recently profiled inventor/ideas man Saul Griffith and his method of generating loads of ideas, trying them out quickly, and moving on when something doesn't work. The article writer, Josh Dean, points out, "In the tomorrow-is-too-late tech culture, there's no time to analyze risk. And because tools are so readily available, there's no reason to. Just build it. If it doesn't find a market, move on."
The problem, of course, is that we have almost unlimited ideas but very limited time. Griffith says every entrepreneur's problem is, "You're always trying to find the union of things you want to work on and things that are marketable and investable."
Griffith, who won one of the McArthur Foundation 'genius grants,' calls his life a living laboratory. In his actual lab, he creates prototypes, tests them, and sells on or licenses the most promising ones to companies that market them.
As individual entrepreneurs (which is really what full-time or even part-time freelancers are), we may not have his genius, or his rewards (the McArthurg grant is big money) but I think we can still be inspired by him to generate lots of ideas, figure out ways to test them in the marketplace, and accept that failure is part of success.
(If you want to focus your brainpower, check out my book, "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done," available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers--be sure to order the version with the yellow and black cover, that's the new expanded edition.)
