How to quickly build your idea-generating experience

- Experience makes you more valuable in the workplace but it doesn't have to take years to collect it. I'll show you how you can develop experience much faster. This will improve your ability to judge ideas and also make you better at having them. Imagine I was driven into the countryside taken to the middle of a field and shown a combine harvester and asked my opinion if it was any good. Clearly there's been some mistake because I know very little about combine harvesters. I've got three main options here. The first is I can give an opinion because I don't want to look foolish. I would base my judgment on criteria I understand like the color, how new the vehicle appears to be, and how clean it is. But these criteria don't actually help me answer the question of whether it's good or not. So my opinion is pretty valueless. Sadly this kind of decision making is pretty common in business. My second option is to just say that "I don't know how to make the judgment" and tell them to ask somebody else. I don't benefit from that. The third option is to go away and do some research. I'd read up on combine harvesters, talk to people who repair them, watch other people judging them. See if I can find some YouTube videos that might help. Find a forum of combine harvester geeks to understand their thoughts. The more work I do, the better judge I'll become. Then I've got something to offer when you take me back to that field. It's the same with judging ideas. If you put in the work, you can get good at it pretty quickly. So here's an exercise. If you want to improve your judgment, find something you think is great. It could be something within your industry or it could be something from another industry all together. I recommend you explore as broadly as you can. When you've identified something brilliant, spend time asking yourself why it's so good. Write down at least three criteria in the back of a notebook. If you're not sure, ask more experienced people why they think it's good. Very quickly, you'll start to build your judging skills. Make this habit, maybe spend 10 minutes a day finding something awesome to dissect and there's an added benefit you get from this exercise. The list of criteria that you're writing down in the back of your notebook can also be used as prompts when you're generating your own ideas. And the learnings you've collected from amazing ideas will then rub off on your own. Give it a month and then drop me a message. Tell me how much you've improved. I'm right here, I'll be waiting.