IDEA ECONOMY SKILLS: How to have good ideas that are original and become valuable?

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When the forces of ABUNDANCE start to make scarce things abundant, they change a lot of the assumptions we have about life.

Many default paths in the knowledge economy depended on specialised skills or scarce information to earn an income.
Lawyers, pilots, IT managers, accountants and other professions that currently are held in high esteem because of their earning power, are all in danger of seeing seriously reduced compensation: they are going to find that their skills and knowledge are becoming abundant, meaning it's free on the Internet, somebody from say Asia can do it cheaper or someone figures out software or a robot to automate it.

So what's the solution? Like I explained in my post about the IDEA ECONOMY, we all are going to have to learn new skills.
One obvious skill to develop is ability to have original and valuable ideas.

Most of us aren't really used to having or creating original values of ideas, and would confuse having ideas with reading books.
While books are indeed vehicles for sometimes fantastic ideas, they are not YOUR original ideas:
and they are only valuable to you if you can apply them in your world successfully.

So books might provide you with a great starting point but to have original and valuable ideas, you need more.
You need to mix other ideas with your own, and find ways to start executing ideas.

I find James Altucher to have a very useful philosophy around this concept:
His metaphor is that this capacity is like an idea muscle: if you don't exercise it, it is weak and your ideas won't be much good.
His quote:
IDEAS ARE THE CURRENCY OF LIFE. Not money.
Money gets depleted until you go broke.
But good ideas buy you good experiences, buy you better ideas, buy you better experiences, buy you more time, save your life. Financial wealth is a side effect of the “runner’s high” of your idea muscle.

I think this is going to apply more and more in the future. The option of being a generic corporate "drone" and earning a decent income is fast going to disappear as we transition out of the knowledge economy.
Because, if your job can be described in terms of productivity, a real drone or computer can and will take it from you.
If that is not yet technologically possible, your company probably is spending most of the time cooking up ways to outsource your job.

So time to get creative, literally... being a generic knowledge economy professional is a sure way to becoming obsolete.
You have to become valuable because of what you offer is something that can't be outsourced, automated or is not easy to find.

The original post from James is here, it is very long but might be the most lucrative post you read long term, IF YOU APPLY IT!

Some excerpts on how to start building your idea muscle:
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2014/05/the-ultimate-guide-for-becoming-an-idea-machine/
" A) WHAT DO YOU MEAN – “IDEA MACHINE”?

You will be like a superhero. It’s almost a guaranteed membership in the Justice League of America.

Every situation you are in, you will have a ton of ideas. Any question you are asked, you will know the response. Every meeting you are at, you will take the meeting so far out of the box you’ll be on another planet, if you are stuck on a desert highway – you will figure the way out, if you need to make money you’ll come up with 50 ideas to make money, and so on.

After I started exercising the idea muscle, it was like a magic power had unleashed inside of me. It’s ok if you don’t believe me. Or maybe you think it’s bragging. There are many times when I don’t have ideas. But that’s when I stop practicing what I am about to advocate.

Try it for yourself. I’m not selling anything here. I have no reason for you to try this. I just want to share my exerience. It’s like part of your brain is opened up and a constant flow of stuff, both good and bad, gets dropped in there.

From where? I don’t think about it and I don’t care. But I use it.

In early 2009 was one of those times when I desperately needed to do this. I was fulltime either trying to find a girlfriend or I was trying to start a business or both. I was also going broke in the stock market and losing my home (until I personally saved the entire stock market – see my book).

Every night, I’d have waffles for dinner and a bottle of wine and start writing ideas down. This is before I went paleo (no waffles!) and stopped drinking alcohol (five years sober!) and I was writing 10-20 of the most ludicrous ideas a day down.

And you know what ? It worked.

B) How do I start exercising the idea muscle?

Take a waiter’s pad. Go to a local cafe. Maybe read an inspirational book for ten to twenty minutes. Then start writing down ideas. What ideas? Hold on a second. The key here is, write ten ideas.

C) Why a waiter’s pad?

A waiter’s pad fits in your pocket so you can easily pull it out to jot things down.

A waiter’s pad is too small to write a whole novel or even a paragraph. In fact, it’s specifically made to make a list. And that’s all you want, a list of ideas.

A waiter’s pad is a great conversation starter if you are in a meeting. Someone at the meeting will eventually say, “I’ll take fries with my burger” and everyone will laugh. You broke the ice and you stand out.

A waiter’s pad is cheap. You can get about 100 for $10 (but you can get one for free here). This shows you are frugal and don’t need those fancy moleskin pads to have a good idea.

Oh, and I just found out another reason for a waiter’s pad while I was writing this. Someone with alcohol on his breath, a bottle in hand, looking like he could crush me with one hand, just came up to me in the cafe I’m sitting at and asked for money. I held up my waiter’s pad and said, “Can I take your order?” and he said, “OH!” and he walked away.*

D) Why ten ideas?

If I say, “write down ten ideas for books you can write” I bet you can easily write down four or five. I can write down four or five right now. But at six it starts to get hard. “Hmmm,” you think, “what else can I come up with?”

This is when the brain is sweating.

Note that when you exercise in the gym, your muscles don’t start to build until you break a sweat. Your metabolism doesn’t improve when you run until you sweat. Your body doesn’t break down the old and build the new until it is sweating.

The poisons and toxins in your body don’t leave until you sweat.

The same thing happens with the idea muscle. Somewhere around idea number six, your brain starts to sweat. This means it’s building up. Break through this. Come up with ten ideas."

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