There is a famous phrase “Slow and steady wins the race” always presented as a way to succeed. But in the present high-tech era of globalization where millions of creative minds produce millions of innovative ideas every day, is it still applicable?
No, not all, this recipe of success no longer works today! In the present world, there is no option to work and make progress slowly – you can’t win the race if you are slow, even if you are the steadiest. There is a modern version of this phrase that is “Slow and steady does not win the race – fast and steady wins the race”. Everyone needs to make progress daily, ‘the fast progress’. This is true for not only startups and other well established businesses, but also for an individuals’ success. As far as an individual’s success is concerned, everyone has goals and objectives in life backed up by dreams. So, what are your dreams and are you working on them? Maybe your dreams are to execute breakthrough ideas that emerged from your creative mind. The question is, are you working to bring them to life, or you just keep those 100s of notebooks piled up on shelves of ideas and designs you started, that you knew would change the world in both small and large ways – and there they are – on that shelf? Like everything and everyone else in this fast-paced, technology filled world, your ideas also need fast and steady progress. Otherwise, you may end up regretting on your deathbed why I didn’t work on my dreams to move them forward. Less Brown often speaks of the fear of lying on his deathbed and having all of the ideas that ever came to him, standing with great concern and stating specifically:
“Why didn’t you do anything with us? Out of the billions of people that exist on this earth, we came to you, and now we will die with you. Why didn’t you do anything with us?”. Similarly, you would have probably heard preachers saying cemeteries are the richest places in the world because they are filled with ideas of what could have been. Cemeteries are filled with dreams never to be. Often, we give up on our ideation because we don’t have a path, or we are satisfied with the slow pace of our ideation journey, just because we believe in the saying of ‘slow and steady wins the race’. In other words, we focus on the steadiness aspect only while ignoring the pace. Remember, speed and flexibility are also equally important, steadiness cannot work alone.
Once we start acknowledging the importance of pace and consistency, both, we would surely
advance our Ideation journey. Because when you start working on your ideas every day, you will find yourself more near than before. Moreover, your idea about a thing is always not a final idea, it may need a lot of refinements. Because there is always a potential for some inclusions and exclusions. For instance, one of the most influential scientists of history, Sir Issac Newton, had not come up with the idea of gravity in a day or two. It started from the moment when he observed a falling apple while standing under the shade of an apple tree, and it took more than two decades (1666-1687) to finally present the idea of gravity to the world. The falling apple was the start of a journey that continued for more than twenty years. It was the result of years of research, thinking, pondering, and idea sharing (with other scientists) etc. This is how breakthrough ideas emerge. Think of your big idea for a moment, what if you suddenly realize that it’s not a big idea that needs to be nourished and developed? In this case, if you keep working on your ideas everyday while making a lot of refinements, you would surely come up with what you can say is your best great idea. On the other hand, if you don’t keep up with the consistent and fast progress of your ideas and after wasting weeks, months and even years, if one day you realize your idea is not a viable idea, then? So, you have to work consistently with a plenty of pace in order to have a breakthrough idea.
Ideas come from the sum-total of our experiences. How do we think about a thing? We think about a thing by recalling the parts of our thoughts, this is also true for our ideas, i.e. new ideas and thoughts come from memories of past events. There are a series of steps, certain processes, that you can say are the inputs for all our ideas. Once we identify these processes, we would be able to execute them consciously and advance our ideation journey. These steps are particularly related to capturing experiences, experiences are reference points that allow you to ideate in scale. To fully understand the idea of ideation and to easy out this process for you, there is a tool Ideation Control Tower ICT, it’s a downloadable app available on iOS and Android. It
enables the collection, organization, and storage directly within a web-enabled task board.
You organize your experiences into categories (Flights) around appropriate groupings (Cabins) available for later reference – days, weeks, months, even years into the future – as Reference Points.
Memories, thoughts, the foundation of ideas need a catalyst to emerge. The ICT keeps them just keystrokes away, available for continuous reflection and consideration into the next big idea.
As experiences are the foundation of all ideas, you need to capture experiences consistently with a plenty of pace in order to come up with a breakthrough idea.
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