Confidence Classic: The Method to Solve Any Problem Fast with Jeremy Utley

23:22So you picture a bell curve. That's how ideas fall, which means what? Most of our ideas are very ordinary. A small percentage on the right-hand side of the distribution are extraordinary, and a small percentage on the left hand side of the distribution are stupid, right, or dumb. This is the distribution of ideas. It's fine. What most people do is they say, I want an asymmetric distribution, or I only want the good stuff. And so what that means is they don't allow themselves to think of the stupid stuff or the bad ideas, the dopey ideas, to use a Steve Jobs-y-ism. So what they don't realize, though, is by cutting off one end of the distribution, they actually chop off the other end of the distribution as well.

24:02And what they're left with is a bunch of ordinary, safe ideas. By refusing to allow themselves to think of dopey ideas, they prevent themselves from thinking of delightful ideas too. And I would argue, by the way, when your colleagues back in the day, as you said, would say, Heather, you're such a creative person, you probably had a lower degree of self-censorship than others. And people forget your bad ideas very quickly, right? It's not that we move forward with bad ideas. It's we give ourselves permission to think of them and share them because it stimulates a higher variability conversation and quality is a function of the variability.

24:42Heather Monahan:As a manager or leader, one of the things I challenge my team always to do is whenever you come to me with a problem, I want you to bring a laundry list of possible solutions that we can discuss, right? I want them in the habit of like, just write down crazy ideas. I just want to hear them. Okay. You might think it's different, right? Who knows? And then cut to, I was thinking about this when I was reading your book, when I wrote my first book, Confidence Creator, I thought, oh my gosh, what do I name this thing? I took out my whiteboard that I, this is what I did in business every day. And I wrote probably 500 different titles.

25:11Heather Monahan:And then every day I'd wake up and I would challenge myself to cross off 10. This one sucks. I don't like that. I don't like that. And then I would just keep coming back to the room, you know, just a couple of times a day and say, no, I don't like that one. And then ultimately at the end, Confidence Creator was the only one that was left. I'm like, you win, that's it. But I would have never thought of that one had I not sat there for days just writing down whatever crazy idea popped into my head. No, it's brilliant, Heather. That's brilliant. That is the instinct to generate volume first is an instinct that we should all be cultivating.

25:42And we actually talk about a daily practice. We call it an idea quota, as you know, where every day, instead of trying to come up with the right answer, air quotes here, because none of us are mathematicians, right? The problems we're trying to solve don't have one right answer. They've got lots of possible answers. And so shifting your goal from what's the right answer to on a daily basis, what are lots of possible answers is an incredible mental shift that actually is, you know, you think about if you wanna build your biceps, you do curls. If you wanna build your creative muscle, generate volume.

26:15And we call it a daily idea quota. And I mean, I do it every day. I wrote a little chatbot kind of script to actually give me a back and forth because I like the interplay. But the other day, I mean, we live in a house that was built in 1908. Just to give you an example, the kind of problems I'm talking about. It's not only new products, new services, and people wrongly think of innovation as it's got to be a market facing thing. For me, it affects my parenting. We've got this house built in 1908. We tell our girls, we have four daughters, tell them all the time, don't run in the house, don't slam the doors, kind of the standard rules, right?

26:45And who listens? Nobody listens. They're slamming doors and running around. And the other day, one slammed a door in the other one's face. The other tries to push through and shattered this 114-year-old window. And thank God she's okay. She didn't cut herself or anything, which is great. But now there's glass everywhere. And importantly to me as the homeowner, there's now an irreplaceable 115-year-old window lying in shards on the ground. And so then the question, the problem for me is, what do I do? How do I respond? What's the consequence? And if you think about it, there's kind of a very short list.

27:18It's like, okay, let's take away the devices. Let's ground them. Did we talk about taking away the devices? Right, really quickly, like, that's all we got. And I said to my wife, I said, Michelle, we got to do an idea quota. And we sat down, just like you did with your whiteboard and your, you know, book title ideas. And we generated 10 ideas. And by the way, the 10th idea was awesome. And we never would have gotten there if we had just were trying to debate the merits of, do we ground them or take away their iPads? right? It actually, the first thing is generate more ideas than you think you need.

27:51Because the truth is there's no empirical evidence that suggests the first ideas that come to our mind is the best. But there's a ton of evidence that's, it's called the Einstein effect. I like to call it the anti-Einstein effect. Because the Einstein effect, documented first in 1942 by Abraham Luchens and more recently by researchers at Oxford, what they determined is when a human being thinks of a solution to a problem, not just a market problem, but a parenting problem. When we think of a solution, two things happen. One, we cease the search for other solutions. And two, we are blinded from seeing better solutions.

28:26And this has been demonstrated in a number of innovative studies. But the point is, if you're aware, I have a tendency to fixate on my first idea, and there's no evidence, empirical, academic, or otherwise, that suggests my first idea is the best idea. Then you start to shift your orientation. Let's go for volume here. What was the cost? The only cost to me and my wife in that moment was the five minutes it took us to generate eight other ideas. What if nothing had happened? We would have lost five minutes. And by the way, we were just hemming and hawing in the kitchen anyway, right? It's not like we were doing anything with those five minutes, but the potential benefit is astronomical.

29:02There's an incredible learning opportunity we were able to capitalize on as a family because mom and dad said, let's just spend a couple minutes seeing if we can come up with alternatives.

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34:04Heather Monahan:all right let's get into this concept that an idea is actually a connection and if you can give us some of the examples with legos it's just so visual for me i love it very simply if you you know i've got a five-year-old girl and you know research suggests that there's not a human being on earth that asks as many questions as a five-year-old girl and i can attest to the truth of that statement. And if she asked me, what's an idea? I can't use a definition that requires her to pick up a dictionary. It doesn't work, right? So very simply, and that to me is like a good litmus test for any of my definitions.

34:38Can Corey understand it? Okay, if so, then we're in good shape. And what I understand based on my understanding of the underlying kind of neuroscience there is our brains aren't creating from nothing. It's impossible. X in a helo creation, as it were, doesn't happen in our brains. What our brains do when they're creating is they're connecting. They're connecting things that we already know. And maybe we hadn't thought about connecting before, right? And so you could say that an idea or the kind of phenomenon of having experienced an idea is experiencing a new connection. And that's actually really valuable.

35:11It's not just a semantic difference. It's a meaningful difference because when you realize, because a lot of people, you say, hey, come up with an idea and they freeze in their tracks. Like you just asked me to have a tiger, right? Well, no, idea is not a tiger. An idea is just a connection. And I can look down and connect things. You know, okay, I've got a remote and I've got Clorox wipes sitting on my desk. Remote and Clorox wipes. Oh, wow, what if you had a self-cleaning remote? That's interesting. What if you could point at something that you wanted to clean and it would clean itself? I'm just, you know, these are ideas, right?

35:42What have I done though? You might go, wow, that Stanford genius thought of the point and click. No, I just combined two things, two stupid things sitting on my desk, right? And the point is, and it's just like Lego blocks to use your metaphor. You just bring these two things together. You know, I'll give you an example. I work with a company that's in the electric vehicle space. We'll remain nameless. And they're working on this problem called range anxiety, okay? So the engineer there, she's telling me how everybody's worried. Am I going to get as far on a charge as you say I will? Okay, and so this is a phenomenon known as range anxiety.

36:14Many people are familiar with it. Well, she told me the other day, she's in a coffee shop. And she said, you know, I couldn't help eavesdropping. You know, a couple of folks in military fatigues walk in. And all of a sudden, I'm like, what are they talking about? And I said, Mary, don't apologize. That's a fantastic creative strategy to eavesdrop, right? It's input gathering. So she's eavesdropping. And she said, I overheard them talking about how for jet fighters, they have a small fuel tank, so they don't take them back to the base. They do what's known as a mid-air refueling for jet fighters.

36:42And she said, it was just like a light bulb went off. And if, you know, you and me and your listeners, we had this collective hallucination right now called an idea. We go, wait, range anxiety? Maybe they are refueling? What if we, and you just, everybody just put these two Lego pieces together and felt like, well, I'm a genius, right? And you are. Turns out we have a supercomputer on our shoulders. And the question is, what are the cognitive inputs we're feeding into this connection equation, right? Going back to Kessler's definition of creativity. It's the collision of apparently unrelated frames of reference.

37:16And when you realize that the collision or the connection is the creative act, you start to get much more open-minded to accepting inputs, overhearing and eavesdropping at the coffee shop, right? But this notion that an idea is just a connection is an incredibly empowering one because it really, it makes ideas not intimidating.

37:37Heather Monahan:It's so true. And that just reminded me of the story of the admin assistant who was working on the typewriter and having to erase things and erase things and then went to painting class and was told don't erase paint over it and her light bulb went on in that moment and she applied that back to the typewriter and then she created whiteout I mean that was an incredible way to connect those dots but she would have never operationalized the idea had she not been taking a painting class yeah it's that that's bet nesmith graham she's a hero of mine she's from she's also a texan I'm a Texan. So I've got to give a shout out to her.

38:11But her son, by the way, started to ban the monkeys. I don't know if you know that, which is kind of cool. But yeah, an amazing story. And the point is those aren't exceptional. People hear the stories and go, wow, how neat. Well, I go, what's your hobby? And what bearing does your hobby have on the problem you're annoyed by? Bette was annoyed that she spent her days erasing mistakes by this newfangled technology called a typewriter. And every secretary of that era was annoyed too. But what she had that they didn't have was she was a single mom working side hustles and goofy odd jobs to make ends meet.

38:45And when that painter said, bet painters don't erase mistakes, they paint over them. She had a cognitive input that very few other secretaries of the day did. I could paint over instead of erase a mistake, right? But all she was doing there, if you get to the, I mean, it's an incredibly exceptional innovation. And I love the story. She worked with her son's high school chemistry teacher to perfect the formula, right? It's really cool. Worked with a local paint store employee to get it just right. But if you abstract a level from the exceptional Bette Nesmith Graham, what you realize is it's a human being who is doing a couple of things.

39:21One, she's aware of problems in her life that could be solved. We call that keeping a bug list. It's an assignment that's been given at Stanford since the 1960s, long before computer programming entered common parlance. We don't mean write down a list of errors in code. What we mean is write down a list of the things that bug you. What bothers you? Keep a bug list, right? And Bette Nesmith Graham was intimately familiar with this one thing that bothered her. And then the second thing is look for connections. In the world around you, as you're interacting with your family and your hobbies, just entertain the possibility of connections.

39:55and true, many connections will be fruitless, but the person who's not looking for a connection doesn't find the connections that are there. That's actually research that's been conducted by Carl Dunker. People who aren't looking for connections don't see them. People are looking for connections. And so the question is like, I guess it's kind of, what do you want? Do you want a bunch of false positives and the real one? Then look for connections and you'll find one, right? Or do you not want to exert the extra energy and do you say, well, there's a lot of false positives there, so I'm not going to bother?

40:30Then you're probably not going to end up with a novel connection. And again, it's a numbers game. Which set of numbers do I want to be playing with? Do I want to not look for connections and therefore not waste much time and therefore not have many new ideas? That's great. You get your time back and you don't have many new ideas. Or do you want to look for connections, many of which will be fruitless, many of which feel like a waste of time that ultimately leads to the breakthrough? The downside is it's not nearly as efficient. The upside is it's the only way to break through. And when people realize these are the odds I'm dealing with, and I'm not voting, you get to choose, I get to choose, but you basically have to choose which distribution do you want to put yourself in?

41:08Do you want the delightful ideas? You've got to come up with dopey stuff. Or is your goal to have no dopey? That's fine, but you're probably not going to get to delightful either.

41:19Heather Monahan:It's so similar to that whole idea of you have to fail fast. You've got to try things, test and try and make it a discipline and a practice and accepting of it. And then you'll become more confident. And then when you have that breakthrough, that's the proof that you need that you are on that right path and keep producing again. OK, what about the idea of seed and sleep? The notion there is the subconscious is a phenomenally powerful engine for synthesis and for processing. And it's unique. Our subconscious is unique, especially when we're sleeping in that it's undirected. So the difference between waking and sleeping is when you're waking, you can kind of somewhat be in control of at least your conscious thoughts.

41:59When you're sleeping, the reason that there's, you know, that your weird Aunt Thelma shows up at like a train station with your college girlfriend, you know, like, why? Because there's no regulation over what the combinations are, right? So it is, it's actually a really interesting example of what we were talking about earlier, like numbers wise, it's trying on thousands of combinations, most of which are fruitless and leave you kind of waking up going, huh? But the point is, when you start to recognize that John Steinbeck once said, there's rarely a problem that isn't resolved once the committee of sleep has convened.

42:35You know, Reed Hastings, the founder of PayPal and LinkedIn said, I never go to sleep without giving my subconscious a problem to work on. Right. And the notion of seating and sleeping and solving is before you go to bed, think loosely about a problem that you're trying to solve. It could be in your work. It could be in your life, not to like trip yourself into not being able to sleep, but just kind of familiarize yourself with it. And then allow yourself in your subconscious, the ability to kind of stew on it. marinate on it overnight. Then when you wake up in the morning, write down a few ideas.

43:10That's actually the input to an idea quota, where in the morning, after you've kind of prepared your mind for subconscious processing, write down what comes to mind. And they don't have to be great ideas, right? They don't have to be even good ideas. It can just be write down whatever comes to your mind, having gone through that consideration process. A number of times, I can't tell, I mean, for me, I've actually committed myself to the practice of keeping a notebook by my bed, which is incredibly inconvenient and frustrating because, you know, especially right as I'm falling asleep, I do not want to deal with the interruption of writing something down.

43:48Right. But I, you know what I hate more than that is being a hypocrite. And if I tell other people they need to do it, then I've got to do it that, or I got to stop talking about it. And now that this is memorialized in a book forever, I have to be willing to wake up in the middle of the night. So I wake up and the other night, I'm dealing with a problem at work. And right as I'm falling asleep, great idea comes. And my thought was, can I just chant it to myself? I'm going to remember this. I don't need to go, like, I don't want to rouse myself from sleep. So I kind of chant it to myself a few times.

44:16I thought, you know what, this is not, this doesn't count. I'm not doing what I say people should do. So I roll over, I, you know, turn on the bedside lamp and I write down my idea. And then I go to sleep or, you know, I waste 10 minutes because now I got to fall back asleep. In the morning, the first thought that comes to my mind is the idea. And the second thought that comes to my mind is I knew it was a waste. I didn't need to wake up. I'm so bummed. I missed 10 minutes of sleep. You know, I'm muttering to myself as I find my house slippers and I go and I grab the notebook and I start to tear the page out and I look.

44:47Heather, it's a totally different idea.

44:50Heather Monahan:I knew it was going to be from what you taught us in the book because you said so quickly, once you write something down, it's unbelievable how quickly you'll actually forget what that was. It's amazing. I would have sworn if you had put a lie detector on me, I would have sworn I woke up thinking of the same idea. And the truth is when I woke up, I had two spectacular solutions to the problem I was thinking about the night before. Not just one, but I only would have had one, which is better than zero, but I only would have had one if I hadn't had the discipline of writing it down in the middle of the night.

45:18Heather Monahan:It's incredible. And you talk about that it's important at school that you teach us and that you actually talk about the importance of writing down, not typing things into your phone. Why is that? Well, because there's something about the act of writing. I don't know if it's spatial or what, but it encodes the knowledge in a way that I would say I find very meaningful. It's not that apps are bad. As they say, the faintest pen is stronger than the sharpest memory or something like that. I can't remember the exact gist of it. So writing it down somewhere is better than nowhere. I find notebooks, there's something more tactile, more gratifying about flipping through a notebook and it jogs memory of where you were when you wrote it down.

45:56And it brings all sorts of contextual information back that for whatever reason, a typed out note doesn't. But that being said, typing things out, putting things, you know, Stephen Johnson, Dan Pink, many authors talk about having things that they call spark files, files where there's tons of inspiration there and they comb through them on a somewhat regular basis. I think that discipline is wonderful and it's for sure better than nothing. And for most people, you know, we can get into the finer points of like, what's the technology, what's the tool? The simpler point is, do you write ideas down?

46:25it's the simplest way you can show reverence for the ideas that grace you at their presence is write them down and if you don't have a place or two or ten where you write things down however much you might say you're an ideas gal you're probably not right so who is the book idea flow for well you know if you ask my mom what she says for everybody because the other day i was talking to her and she's you know she's got tons of projects going on she's not she's not employed in any full-time capacity, but she said, she took issue. She said, this, you say this is a business book, but I'm not a business person, but this book is very useful for me.

47:02So the, the mother answer is it's for everybody, which I love. And I appreciate, thank you, mom. If you hear this, the truth is what we hope to do is equip professionals who've never seen the problems that they're trying to solve in their day-to-day work as fundamentally idea problems, meaning fundamentally, problems only yield to solutions. And every solution starts as an idea. And if you recognize that the greatest way to generate the most successful solutions is to be in the habit of generating lots of solutions, all of a sudden, you solve the problem of solving problems for good.

47:42Heather Monahan:It's so powerful. And the stories are so engaging. And there's so much tactical direction here. Jeremy, I love IdeaFlow. Where can people find it? Where can they find you? On the web, obviously, ideaflow.design is the book website. You can get information there. There's a free chapter. Folks can download How to Think Like Bezos and Jobs. Obviously, a couple of my heroes. I've got a website where I blog regularly, jeremyutley.design. I'm on Twitter, LinkedIn. I'm easy to find online, as you found as you're doing your research. And I love hearing questions from people and comments from people. And it's a real joy to get to share these ideas with the world.

48:17And I look forward to seeing how it impacts people's lives and work.

48:20Heather Monahan:Well, I love the book. It's definitely helped me out. I know it's going to help the listeners. So guys, go grab Idea Flow. Now, if you are working on any problem, this thing is going to give you the solutions and the answers. Jeremy, keep up your great work. And thanks for being here today. Thanks for having me. Until next week, guys, keep creating your confidence.

48:46Heather Monahan:more excited for what you're gonna hear start learning and growing inevitably something will happen no one succeeds alone you don't stop and look around once in a while you could miss it i'm on this journey with me