How Do Ideas Infect You?

You hear this story of somebody that has created something new, brought an idea to life. And you feel this queasiness because you realize that it was an idea you had several years ago.

And if you're like me, you think to yourself, "why didn't I just do something about it?"

Let me ask you a couple questions:

1) How many ideas have you had in your life?

2) How many ideas have you brought to life?

There is an easy way to measure the transfer of two different things, it's called the conversion rate. But this is different, the difference between ideas and the ideas that are created and brought to life, is what I call your Growth Rate. 

You grow by bringing ideas to life. The areas in which you grow are wide and far ranging. I'll go into these in another post. But what I want to focus on here, is how do you know which ideas are important for your life. 

After hundreds of interviews, I uncovered a model that I call the Infectious Idea Model™. Ideas infect us similarly to how diseases infect us. There has to be three things for an idea to infect you. 

1) A Source
2) A Susceptible Person
3) A Transmission Event

For you, you have to be the one that is susceptible to that specific idea and then there has to be this transmission event.

For example, when Jeff Bezos was five years old, he was one of 650 Million people that watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon, but not everyone was infected by the idea of space exploration and space travel, so what's the difference? This is what I call the Infectious Idea Model™. On another post, I'll dive deeper into this. 

Once an idea infects you, an idea meter is created for that idea in your head. All of us have idea meters in our head. Every idea that infected us has a meter that goes from 0 to 100%. And usually, our idea meters are riding at around between 0-10%, and there are certain things we can do to grow that idea meter closer to 100%. And there are things we can do to decrease that idea meter. 

Let me give you some examples, let's say as you think about an idea, you start getting distracted and you don't think about that idea anymore, you don't capture it, you don't further explore it, then that idea meter keeps going down. 

Or you start talking about an idea to someone else, and you get negative feedback. For most people, that will decrease your idea meter and for other people, that might actually increase it. 

And if you get positive feedback from your friends or your audience, it can dramatically increase your idea meter, and if people join your cause or believe in it, it has a huge impact to your idea meter. 

So why do you want to increase your idea meter closer to 100%? It's because the idea meters closer to 100% are more likely to be brought to life. 

And when you bring an idea to life, that's how you grow. You don't have to succeed with an idea or meet an expectation. The actual progress that comes from bringing that idea to life is how you grow. 

I want to invite you to join Discover Possible to learn how this can help you come up with more ideas and bring those ideas to life. Join us!