Business Bricks

by Tom.

The secret to making anything doable is to lower your bar. Say it’s done before it’s done. Say it’ll do and take another look in the morning. The following post is throwaway. But it’s done. And, as many editors know, the most appealing quality of a piece of work you’re waiting for from a writer is doneness, not goodness.

A Technique for Producing Ideas
by James Webb Young
* producing ideas is as definite a process as the production of Fords. you run an assembly line for ideas
* gather raw material on 3″ by 5″ ruled cards
* masticate
* seek relationships between your cards
* get bored of the process
* get a second wind
* make absolutely no effort to work on it, and put it out of your mind
* constantly think about it
* out of nowhere your idea will appear!
* put the idea to work on the cold, grey dawn of the morning after
* recognise that a good idea has self-expanding qualities

A Technique for Reducing Ideas
by Charlie Davies and Matt Weston
* reducing ideas is as definite a process as the production of Fords. you run a disassembly line for ideas
* think what you would do if only you had the money
* lower your bar
* keep lowering
* until you can lower no more
* cut your idea in half
* keep cutting
* until your idea is uncuttable, like an atom
* do your atom

Or Matt’s tiny strategy for starting meetups
1. choose somewhere you don’t mind sitting on your own
2. decide at the beginning you don’t even mind if it’s just you by yourself (you can always take a book/ a paper/ some work)
3. have no agenda (then it can emerge and people can turn it into what they want/ need it to be)
4. be a bad host
5. list it on upcoming.org
and add it to the business bricks group there
or mail me, and i’ll add it for you
matt at businessbricks dot co dot uk
6. tell anyone you know
7. keep it simple and commit to doing it for a set amount of time (i’d always be in the mad hatter, 10am, friday, wearing one of two tshirts (allowing for laundry emergencies) and i’d be there every week till xmas)
8. let it change. (it became 9am not ten.) let go of it. so you don’t even have to turn up