a wood. As Henry Miller said, “Even a blade of grass when given proper attention becomes an infinitely magnificent world in itself.” All life is a doorway to reconnect with the force of nature. Go outside and observe, admire, respect. Simple.
Winning Ideas Create a Sense of Awe
A winning idea, when it comes, is not like a typical, everyday “good idea.” Trust me, when you have a winning idea, you will know because you won’t be able to stop smiling or pacing the kitchen floor. Meditation and connecting with nature are powerful ways to deepen intuition and expand connectivity into a universe of solutions. The flashes of insight we receive as a result are more like complete blueprints than “wouldn’t it be cool” flights of fancy. They have us smacking our foreheads wondering why we never thought of them before, since they now seem so clear, so obvious, so perfect. Truly inspired, winning ideas induce a sense of wonder and awe.
That said, insights can take their own sweet time, and they usually arrive when we least expect them. Before I started my first company, I knew what made me mad. I knew what I wanted to fix. But I didn’t know how. Every day for several weeks I meditated and connected with nature. Lots of ideas sparked in my mind, and I was careful to jot every one of them down. However, none of them were quite right. Then one day I took quiet time just before checking out of a hotel room.
An hour later, I was walking through a busy airport terminal when the solution to the problem came to me in a flash. It was not a vague idea or a notion. It wasn’t a sketch. It was a detailed architectural blueprint, as if a diagram had unrolled on the floor in front of me. All at once, I saw the whole business model that could work to get those patients their medicine and make a profitable business. I actually stopped walking and let out a laugh that had other travelers thinking I had flipped out.
For my second company, the idea came to me while I was driving shortly after taking quiet time. I had to pull over and start writing feverishly on sticky notes. When I had it all written down, I continued driving to my appointment, but I could not get the idea to go away. So I canceled the appointment, turned the car around, drove home, and immediately set about turning the idea into a real company.
This is why you should never be more than an arm’s length away from pen and paper.
How can you distinguish a garden-variety good idea from a genuine “winning idea”? What do awe and wonder feel like? In a way, it’s like love. You know it when you feel it, and if you’re unsure, you probably aren’t feeling it. But I like how Emmy-nominated TV personality, filmmaker, and futurist Jason Silva puts it:
It is an experience of such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world in order to assimilate it. One of the ways we elicit wonder is by scrambling the self so that the world can seep through. In doing so we feel such a blast of energy and expectation that we literally want to rocket to the moon. We feel stupefied amazement every time we think of our dream. It is rapture. It is magic. Only in these moments do we experience the power of a lightning strike in our minds and nerves. It is rhapsodic. It is what I saw in my wife’s eyes every time we talked about it. She glowed. She floated. It was as if every time we talked about it, I had just placed a tiny puppy in her arms. That is awe. That is the state of ecstasy that must accompany a dream for it to have any hope of ever becoming reality.
Why is it so important to feel this strongly? First, it’s how we identify a winning idea. But just as importantly, we need to be truly inspired by our dreams, since we will need that motivation to do all the hard work they require. According to one 2015 study, experiencing a sense of awe promotes altruism, loving-kindness, and magnanimous behavior. The researchers described awe as “that sense of wonder we feel in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.”
This is similar to the peak experiences described by Abraham Maslow, who wrote that these are “especially joyous and exciting moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, wonder, and awe, and possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity or knowledge of higher truth (as though perceiving the world from an altered, and often vastly profound and awe-inspiring perspective).”
Thus, winning ideas inspire awe because they represent a profound desire to change the world in order to help others. They are solutions to problems that transcend ourselves. Yes, we may be happy for ourselves, too, but what really energizes us is feeling that larger sense of purpose, to be playing our part within the interconnected matrix of society and the world. Every time we think of our dream, we should want to dance on a mountaintop and scream with wonder and delight.
Enjoy the moment. Revel in it. Then immediately take steps to make that winning idea a reality.
Turn a Winning Idea into a Winning Company
Don’t keep your dreams in your eyes, they may fall as tears. Keep them in your heart so that every heartbeat may remind you to convert them into reality.
— NISHAN PANWAR
When people have a winning idea and do nothing about it, the idea soon fades until it is forgotten. That is, until one day they encounter someone who has turned a very similar idea into a great company. Then there follows that sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach: That person could have been living a successful entrepreneurial life, if only. . .they had done something about their idea. What stopped them? Why didn’t they follow through?
People talk themselves out of great business ideas all the time and for many reasons, but fear, negative thoughts, and a lack of self-confidence are the prime culprits. Like a kid touching a hot stove, people will convince themselves that any bad economic news, like a dip in the stock market, means that it’s the wrong time to start a new business. But running a business is never risk-free, the economy will never be perfect, and waiting for the ideal conditions only risks letting your idea die from neglect.
Don’t do that. Instead, immediately take action to make your business a reality, which builds momentum in the opposite direction. Once you discover your winning idea, incorporate it as a company. Online companies make the process simple and inexpensive (replacing the need for expensive attorney fees), and I consider this to be one of the simplest, least costly, and most effective things an entrepreneur can do. In fact, in 2018, according to the Small Business Administration, 70 percent of all businesses in the United States are sole proprietorships, and 99 percent never register their business, which is crazy given all the benefits. The legal protection alone is worth the small cost, but where it really pays off is psychologically and emotionally.
The benefit of reacting forward cannot be overstated. Once you incorporate your company, you have set your idea in motion. You have established a business, one that you own. You are the boss, and you have the paperwork to prove it. Doesn’t that feel exciting? Doesn’t that build self-confidence? Doesn’t that add to awe?
Now every time you see the paperwork, you cannot help but plan the next step, which is figuring out all the nitty-gritty details for how you will accomplish the business you’ve just created (which I discuss in the next chapter).
The RAS Conundrum: We Focus on What’s Urgent and Important for Survival
Every second, our brains are bombarded with about two million bits of data from our senses and nervous system. That’s more information than we can process into conscious thoughts, and so our brains have developed a system for filtering and prioritizing information. If our brains didn’t do this, our consciousness would be
