Good ideas come from action more than thought.

Typically what happens when you think a lot and you ponder a lot, you get into a loop. And you’re really focusing on conscious thought, which is not a very good way to get breakthroughs because your conscious brain cannot process a whole lot at once. In fact, even though there’s probably a million stimuli coming around from you at once, your brain only takes in about seven bits of all of that.

So think about this. Go to a supermarket and try to be consciously aware of every single noise that is going on; the footsteps of all the different people and the different sounds that each different footstep makes because different people are wearing different shoes and they weigh different; the noises from the intercom going on; the pushing of the carts; people picking up items — the sound of that.

And not only that, all the sights. Try to look at everything at once. Look at every single banana that’s laid out. You can’t do it. Your brain can basically take in, psychologically speaking, about seven bits of information at once; seven things through its senses at once. So you can only really keep track of — between your senses of taste, smell, sight, hearing, and feeling/touch — those five are split up to take in about seven bits of information.

And so thinking is very poor because conscious thought is limited. However, unconscious thought is pretty much unlimited. So even though consciously you’re able to process seven things in the store, unconsciously you’re able to process millions of things going on at once — simultaneously. And that’s the thing you have to tap into to come up with good ideas. So get this…While you’re taking action on something and focusing all of your conscious thought on that one thing, your unconscious mind is allowed to kind of wander and go free. You’ve freed it up. And what it’ll do is it’ll start wandering around and it’ll look at things and connect dots while you’re working. And that’s going to allow you to get all of your breakthroughs.

And get this — which leads us to our second point here — most projects require a lot of action. So think about it this way…You might have the idea for exactly how you want to approach the copy. This is how it works for me. If I’m writing copy for a project or a product or for a client, I can pretty much know exactly what I want to say in that copy in about 10–20 minutes. So I’ll say, “OK, this is what I’m going to hit on for the hook. This is how I’m going to open it. This is where I’m going to go to next. These are what I want to touch on in the benefits, and I got a good idea on the guarantee I’m going to write,” and all that other stuff.

So it takes me about 10 or 20 minutes to really map it out, but it usually takes me 2–3 hours to write it and then another hour to design it. So think about that. The writing part is slow; the thinking part is very easy. Well, while I’m writing it that 2–3 hours is now allowing my unconscious mind to connect all these dots. I might write something consciously that triggers my unconscious mind to connect that with something else I might have been thinking about the day before. Then bing, while I’m working on that letter I have 2 or 3 hours of my unconscious mind wandering and able to connect all these dots. So all these ideas come to me.

Now the problem with that is an idea you can come up with in a second, but a lot of ideas take hours, days, weeks, months, or even years to fructify where you take it from an idea to completion. And so you’re going to have far less time to implement ideas than you are to come up with them.

And so that’s cool because while you’re taking action, you’re going to get more ideas. Because like I said, while you’re doing an action your subconscious mind works on the ideas and they connect the dots, and then you write your ideas down as they come to you.

So you’ll be working, working, boom! An idea will hit you. You don’t want to force it. Let it happen, because it’s going to happen anyway. So you just write it down really quickly. Then you go back to work, and you don’t think about that idea anymore. Boom, when another idea hits you, write that down.

And then when it comes time, when your project’s finished on the task you’re doing right at hand, you’ve got free time, if you have nothing else to do, simply grab your idea log, look through it, and find the thing that you have the appropriate amount of time to do next that most excites you and will help you achieve whatever goal you’re shooting for. It’s as simple as that.

You have to trust your unconscious mind to come up with the ideas for you. You’re not going to get them by thinking about them consciously, or if you do it’s just not a good strategy. Let’s put it this way. I think it was Archimedes who was trying to figure out a way to — he was trying to prove something with gold; how to figure out if gold was fake or not. I think the king sent him to do that. And he was thinking about it for days; all these tests.

He couldn’t really figure out a good test that was reliable for figuring out if gold was fake or not. And he’d been working on this for days, working on this for days. And so his wife finally says to him, “Why don’t you just relax for a little bit? Get your mind off of this.”

So she says, “Let me draw you a hot bath.” So she runs this hot water, and he’s sitting in the bath. He gets in the bath, and that’s when it hits him. “Ah, gold.” It’s something about the density of gold when you put it in water compared to fake gold. And he had this huge breakthrough not consciously thinking about it, but he let his unconscious mind keep going because it does that. And then he was able to see that thing. His unconscious mind connected the dots, and he was able to have that breakthrough.

How many big breakthroughs from geniuses didn’t come through conscious thought, but from when they were sleeping and they had a dream and they woke up and had that breakthrough? That happens all the time.

And so, don’t force good ideas. Let them come to you. But the trick is you got to take a lot of action. Now I know a lot of internet marketers, and they don’t take a lot of action. And that’s why they don’t have good ideas. They spend far too much time thinking about what needs to be done instead of doing something, and then when they’re doing something that’s really going to inspire their creativity in the way that they’re going to draw their ideas.

So that’s the best way, the absolute best way to do it.

Now here’s some other ways. Let’s say you have some pressing issue at hand that you need to deal with right away so you can’t let your unconscious mind wander. Well, then what do you do?

Combining Things

Well, I want to really break this point home before I give you these strategies so you can understand these strategies better. Most breakthroughs come from combining things together. There’s very few things that are completely unique ideas. It’s more of like, “Oh, OK. I see that the bank has a drive-thru window, and I’m in the fast-food business. I wonder if I can combine their delivery with my product. Oh, I can.” And now you have drive-thru windows.

But it didn’t stop there. The pharmacy said, “Well, hold on a second. I wonder if we can combine that idea with our product.” And they did that. Book-of-the-month was the same way. After book-of-the-month people were thinking, “Well, I have a CD. I wonder if I could change the distribution mechanism. So instead of selling through the stores, I sell it through the mail. And instead of selling it on a one-off purchase, I figured out a way to sell it to them with continuity.” So they combined two things that already existed, but they just found a new way to combine them together.

So when you think about that, this is what you want to do. If you want to get ideas for marketing, first study your top five favorite marketers. Then you just figure out what you can piggyback off of from them.

So for example, one of the things that I was — with these mind maps that you see right now — I bought Jeff Walker’s course. And I’ve been wanting to do video, but I’d always been held back because I absolutely hated PowerPoint. And I saw Jeff use mind maps. He used them in a different fashion than I use them, and he used a completely different program, but I thought, “Hey, wait a second. What if I could use his mind maps, but instead of using them to sell a $2,000 product, I use them to sell $7 and $17 products. And then hopefully maybe one day I’ll work my way up when I gain my reputation.”

So all’s I did was saw what he did, piggybacked off it, and gave the idea to combine it with what I was doing right now. Actually, that course again, he was focusing on product launches, but I noticed how he always positioned his launches with the offers and how he built his offers. I thought, “Well, wait a second.

That works for product launches, but what if I just applied that to copywriting?” And I did, and that was one of my biggest breakthroughs. I took something that I got as an idea from him and combined it with something in a different format, and I got a really huge breakthrough. It was a great idea, and I’ve used it ever since.

List Top Marketers

So all’s you got to do is think about who are my top favorite marketers?

What are they doing? And how can I take what they’re doing and apply it to my specific situation? I’m not saying you copy somebody because that’s not an idea; that’s mimicry. What you want to do instead is see what they’re doing and then figure out how to use that with something you can already do well or something that you already have an advantage in and then combine those to make the synergy more powerful than each one separately on their own.

However, with that said, sometimes the best breakthroughs in marketing come from things completely outside of internet marketing. So it’s also good to study non-business people and figure out how to draw parallels.

So one of the things that I noticed in music — I was big into music, and so there was a ton of things that I could draw parallels on with music and with marketing. For example, this is what I discovered in music.

There are certain portions of musicians that are all technical. They’re like, “OK, are we in the Mixolydian scale? Are we going from the 1st to the 5th to the 4th with that kind of core progression? When’s the key modality going to change?” And they’d write all of their songs from a technical point of view. And typically those aren’t very popular artists. I mean, some of them develop some small followings, but look at all the popular music and look at all the legends of music. And you start to notice it’s not so much the technicalities but the emotional responses that that music provokes from you.

Touch Emotions

So I thought, “You know what? If that’s true in music, I am sure that’s absolutely true with marketing.” And so when I started building my marketing business, especially with e-mail marketing which I’m very, very good at. I’m one of the up-and-comers in that, and I’m going to get extremely good at that in the future. And mark my words, one day I’m going to be one of the best at it. And I do that not with technical. I am the least technical e-mail writer in the world. I am not technical with the headline. I don’t try to hit all these so-called persuasion elements from a course. I have never studied a course in e-mail marketing.

What I did is apply the thing with music. I look at each e-mail as a song, and I want to write a song that touches somebody on an emotional level and evokes an emotional response with them. And so that is how I write my e-mails. And I got that big breakthrough in e-mail marketing. I quit following all the gurus so I didn’t look like a stupid copycat anyway. And if you do everything that everybody else does, you’re going to get bad results. You’re going to get the same results as they do. So I did it completely different, and that was a big idea that I had.

So what you want to do is not only do you want to study business people all the time to help you with your internet marketing business, but there’s five people you should study that absolutely have nothing to do with business. Maybe they’re humanitarians; maybe they’re artists; maybe they’re musicians; maybe they’re just interesting figures, inventors, whatever. Just find interesting people that are not primarily business-driven and business-motivated, glean ideas from them, and then apply them to your business.

Ask For Ideas

Another good way to get ideas is just to simply ask for them. For example, say you don’t know what to do next. You kinda got some things that you think you might want to do, but you’re not exactly sure if you should do them or not. What I do with my customers is say, “Hey guys, I’m really into webinars. I love them. I think it’s a great way to teach you guys. What I want to do is make sure that whatever I come up with next is going to be the thing that gives you the most value. So here’s some things I’ve been kicking around. Which one sounds best for you?”

Then they tell me; then I do it. So that’s how I get my ideas. I get my ideas from my customers. I simply ask them what they want, and then I try to give that to them. Poll your customers.

Talk with Colleagues/Masterminds

Another huge thing here is to create a mastermind. For example, I go to a lot of internet marketing seminars so I run into some people who I’ve become masterminds with. And then from them I notice all these problems they have. A lot of them have the same problems. And there’s problems I have that they help me with, but I help them with these problems and it gives me an idea. I’m thinking, “If these people are having these problems, I wonder if other people in this niche are.” And if they are, that gives me the idea to investigate it. If I get some good results, then that gives me the next idea to create a product for that. Then I have a system that I just plug into and go with.

Finally, and most importantly, I have never had a problem coming up with a good idea. My problem is coming up with too many good ideas because it has an opportunity cost with it.

And the way I did this was 60-second rule it until you hone your idea brain. And here’s the 60 second rule: You should not take any longer than 60 seconds during profit time to make a decision. If there is a decision that needs to be made, you should make it within 60 seconds.

So what kind of headline should I write? Give yourself 60 seconds and then write it. And then look at it and analyze it in 60 seconds. Should I write it again or not? If you should, then give yourself 60 seconds to write another one.

During non-profit hours when you’re not on the clock, when you don’t need to make any money, then you can spend as much time as you want. And that’s good to kind of build you up that time, but far too many people delay making a decision when they need to make the decision.

And so, if you have trouble coming up with an idea, give yourself 60 seconds and say, “I’m going to come up with as many ideas as I can in the next 60 seconds. And then when that’s up, I’m going to pick the one that most excites me and I think is going to help me the most with my goal, and that’s what I’m going to go for.”

So that’s all you got to do. And then eventually if you train yourself to think of ideas that quickly and act on them that quickly, well then guess what? You’ll always get more ideas because good ideas come from actions more than thoughts. Most people just don’t get into action mode.

When you get into action mode, you’ll never have to really want for a good idea again.