How do you innovate?

If you can answer that question, coming up with ideas for improving your business and/or life gets a lot easier.

The simplest approach I've found is to imagine you have 2 buckets:

Bucket #1: Your problem bucket

You constantly fill your problem bucket with problems you find interesting. For example:

  • Figuring out how to do work you love
  • Paying off your house
  • Fixing a bad relationship with a coworker
  • Growing a high functioning church
  • Becoming a level 5 leader
  • Etc.

Don't worry about whether you think you're "qualified" to solve any of these problems. You don't need to know all of the answers or have business ideas for them.

They can be big problems threatening the entire world, or annoyances nobody else cares about.

They just need to be interesting to you. That's the only criteria.

Get in the habit of recognizing them and adding them to your "interesting problems list."

Bucket #2: Your tool bucket

This is your place for anything that can help you solve problems:

  • Interesting technologies (for example: Alexa skills, neural networks, N95 masks)
  • Software / apps (for example: Teachable, Airtable, Amazon Honeycode)
  • Mental models (for example: thinking from first principles, inversion, second-order thinking)
  • Old ways to do things (for example: alarm clocks, shopping at the mall, balancing a checkbook)
  • New ways to do things (for example: dropshipping, virtual conferences, listing spare bedroom on Airbnb)

Become a student of problem solving. When you see a new method/tool, write it down on your "interesting tools list."

If you add to these buckets every day for a week, you'll be surprised how fast they fill up.

Once you have several items in each one, do this:

  1. Pick a problem from your problem bucket
  2. Mix and match it with different tools from your tool bucket and see what ideas come out

That's how you innovate.

Look at problems with fresh eyes and the best tools at your disposal—while constantly expanding the tools you know and the problems that interest you. Do that and you'll be able to solve problems better than anyone has ever solved them.

Example…

Problem: You run a help desk and want to get average response time under 30 minutes.

Normal solution: Hire and train more people.

OR

You've been spending 30 minutes each week expanding your tool bucket.

Recently, you ran across an article about a Georgia Tech class that used AI to answer 40% of students' questions with 97% accuracy.

Innovative solution: Hire an AI developer to write a bot to answer the 24 questions that get asked the most. This will cost you $55,000. But it will lower response time to 5 minutes for those tickets and prevent you from having to hire 2 more people.

If you keep expanding both buckets, connections that no one has ever thought of will appear.

All you have to do next is act on them.

Challenge: 

Spend 10 minutes today expanding your tool bucket by skimming a handful of science publications. (Sidenote: just saw an article there titled "Controlling mosquito populations with drones" — definitely sounds like a "2 buckets" idea!)

Or browse the first page of Product Hunt.

Or go to our homepage and cycle through interesting marketing ideas.

Sometimes, you might add a tool that feels silly or useless. I used "alarm clocks" as an example earlier. Am I likely to use an alarm clock to solve something in my "problems" bucket? Doubtful!

But maybe by associating it with the right problem, it'll end up sparking an idea for a solution that actually does make sense.

Don't worry about each tool's application. Just learn what's new and possible. Your brain will do the rest.

Happy reading!

- Bryan

P.S. If you want to learn more about this way of thinking, read this.