Listen To Your Ideas

Listen To Your Ideas

by Michael Southon



The Internet is a highly creative place. Every day

people are launching new business solutions, writing

new software, creating new scripts that do things we

couldn't imagine just a few months ago. And in the

publishing world, a quiet revolution is taking place.

People who never dreamt of being authors are writing

and publishing their own eBooks.



A key to succeeding on the Internet is your ability to

come up with new ideas. But where do creative people

get their ideas?



One day in the mid-1970's a young man stumbled into a

diner somewhere in the United Sates. Slung over his

shoulder was a kit-bag that contained everything he

owned. He was unshaven and needed a shower badly. He

had very little money, but enough for a phone call.



He rang his bank and asked how much was in his

account. A woman's voice informed him, to his

amazement, that the balance in his account was four

million, three hundred thousand dollars. His name was

Richard Bach. Six months before, he had submitted a

short story, barely 10,000 words long, to a New York

publisher. For the last three months he had been

living the life of a nomadic 'barnstormer', sleeping

in fields under the wing of his bi-plane. He had been

completely unaware that his manuscript, titled

'Jonathon Livingstone Seagull', had become a run-away

best-seller.



Years later, Richard Bach talked about how he got

ideas for his writing. He referred to what he called

his 'Idea Fairies', silent intimations that came to

him and whispered in his ear.



To capture those ideas you have to be very alert,

because they're often barely audible. They'll come to

you unexpectedly, early in the morning, when you're in

the shower, or late at night as you're drifting off to

sleep. Or they may come to you after meditation.



Meditation is an excellent way of tapping into your

creativity. Why? Because in meditation you go beneath

the surface level of thought, where most of us spend

most of our time. In meditation you dive down into a

much deeper current, a subterranean stream of

creativity that runs through all of us.



As well as being alert and keeping an open mind,

another key way to get new ideas is to read.



Ideas are living things, and like other living things,

they meet and fertilize each other. When you read an

article or a book, your ideas are coming into contact

with someone else's, and something new is born.

Indeed, that's the very reason the Internet is so

creative; millions of minds are coming into direct

contact in a way that has never before been possible

in human history.



This process of cross-fertilization happens

spontaneously and beneath the level of conscious

thought. Suddenly you'll have a new idea and you won't

even know where it came from. So when you're feeling

stuck or feeling that you've run out of ideas, read,

read, and read some more.