Episode 132
How to have a big idea
John Parkin knows a good idea when he sees one. As a formed Creative Director of one of the most innovative and exciting advertising agencies of the 1990s, he knows a thing or two about coming up with ideas. He's helped create big ideas for big brands, and he's also had one big idea of his own that has transformed his world.
His big idea? F**k It. It led to John leaving his job, Him and his wife Gaia running countless F**k It retreats, and more than 1 million books sold.
The happy startup is Carlos and Laurence’s big idea. 10 years ago many people didn't get it or thought they were weird. But people remember it, and all around the world it seems to make sense.
They’ve had people run various happy startup meetups in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, the middle east and all over Europe.
If you haven't yet hit on your big idea, this episode with John explores the power of a big idea, How you can spot one, and how to have one of your own.
Links
Transcript
Today we're joined by Mr.
Carlos:Fuck it himself.
Carlos:John Parkin of well, I'm gonna get you to just give us a potted history, what you're up to at the moment now.
Carlos:And today we're gonna be talking about this idea of big ideas, uh, where they come from, how we get them, uh, what they're about.
Carlos:And yeah, hopefully you will leave this session with, uh, at least a way to find the big ideas yourself and why that would be helpful.
Carlos:But before we kick off John, how are you and yeah, how would, for those of, uh, the audience who haven't met you before or heard about you, gonna share a bit about what you do now and maybe a bit of a potted history of your work.
John:Thanks, Carlos.
John:Yeah.
John:Uh, what I do now is, well, Fuck it has been the main thing in the last 20 years, which is, which is an idea as to how to bring relaxation and kind of eastern ideas to the west through a, through the Trojan horse of a Western profanity.
John:Um, It's been pretty much what we did and then set off a whole rash of books with fuck on the cover.
John:Uh, so we were virtually there whenever, 15 years ago.
John:Uh, before that.
John:So in the nineties, we both, me and my wife spent quite a, quite a while in a fantastic advertising agency in London as creatives.
John:Uh, and then, uh, uh, I was creative director for a short time before I left, and then Chief Shaman actually, because I was doing various weird practices that I took then into the agency.
John:So I'd every lunch, I'd, uh, just take people into trance to come up with ideas, to help with various, various, including working, you know, working with clients with that as well.
John:So, yeah, kind of always been, always ideas has been my thing, really.
John:So ideas for big brands, like Levi's, Tango, Häagen-Dazs, so that was, that was the nineties.
John:And then we're both, we were both interested in this, the kind of eastern stuff, alternative spirituality, alternative health.
John:So we kind of left that world and went to Italy, Gaia's Italian, set of a retreat center and that, it was in the first year that we came up, we real not came up with the idea.
John:We realized saying, fuck it was a kind of a therapeutic thing.
John:So that's, that set us off and that's what we've been doing for these last whatever, 15 years.
John:So we've closed the retreat after about seven years, and now we just wander around teaching.
John:We've been teaching, fuck it but I teach people how to relax really.
John:That's my thing.
John:Uh, and Gaia's more therapist.
John:So she teaches how people, how to be themselves.
John:So those are the two sides of what we do.
John:I'm relaxed and she's being herself
Carlos:Telling people to chill the fuck out.
John:Yeah.
John:Really.
John:Which is becoming increasingly important.
John:I read an article this morning about the Guardian, about four experts on why AI could lead to our extinction, which didn't start my doubt day well, but it's, yeah.
Laurence:My wife read that exact same post and she was trying to read it to me.
Laurence:I was like, look, I've gotta get out the door.
John:You don't wanna know.
John:I don't wanna know.
John:But it's really it's, of course it's coming in so many ways, but it made me ponder this thought.
John:I heard.
John:I watched a video between Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry recently, and Jordan Peterson says I'm, as he went through his bio, Stephen Fry's bio, he said, I'm suffering from a serious inferiority complex here.
John:I thought, if Jordan Peterson can have an inferiority complex.
John:My observation, my, my sense today is I'm starting to get this feeling of having an inferiority complex around machines, which is a, and I'm guessing quite a few people are starting to think that and feel that.
John:And I'm, I'm, I'm guessing that apart from, I come from Notting, where Luddites come from, there's the Luddite movement was from Nottingham.
John:So apart from fearing the machine, whether it's through its murder, you know, uh, in war or taking out, taking our jobs, we've got a serious contender in terms of species that we're creating.
John:So, very interesting, yeah,
John:I never, I was never, I was sitting outside earlier.
John:I was never jealous of a, like I got spade.
John:That kind of a tool that helps us and has helped for hundreds of years.
John:I've never been jealous of tools like that.
John:I want not jealous with a spade, but as soon as the spade starts to think better than me and talk, then I might.
Carlos:Welcome to AI Made Simple with John Parkin.
Carlos:Here to spread fear and, uh, despair.
Laurence:When is a spade not a spade?
John:Well, it's, we gotta, we gotta get our big ideas in soon, really before AI can make it and can come up with better and bigger ideas.
Laurence:So I was, I was chatting to someone this morning at this event, and he was sharing his frustration in what he was trying to do and we set an exercise, trying to think of success in lots of different ways about money, time, relationships, and impacts, not just
Laurence:about making money and that he was sharing this frustration that he couldn't quite make it work, so it's not happening for him yet.
Laurence:And so I was sharing about this today's call.
Laurence:And I suppose my curiosity is really about how some ideas stick and some don't, and how some people seem to get lucky with something, and something just catches on.
Laurence:And less about am I doing the right thing?
Laurence:Because it feels like so many people are doing the right thing.
Laurence:They just don't get that bridge to the audience or they can't find something, a hook to connect people to the people they wanna serve, and so it's frustrating 'cause they're trying, and it's not happening.
Laurence:And so my curiosity is partly about how you create that bridge, but also how we can learn about, how experts in inverted commas do it.
Laurence:IE people who are paid to do this day to day, IE someone like John 20, 30 years ago, and anyone who works in the creative field where their job is to find that bridge.
John:Well the bridge is exactly the thing.
John:And one, one observation I have is that, yes, 20 or 30 years ago there were people like me paid to do it as experts.
John:And I used to think then back in the nineties, that I was only really good at it 'cause I was paid to do it.
John:Not, 'cause I was paid to spend time on it.
John:I was paid to spend 60 hours a week getting good at coming up with ideas and I did become good at it and that anybody could do it.
John:I did think that and that, I generally do think that if you spend time and you know what to do, you can do it.
John:So that's the first thing.
John:But you're also exactly right about the bridge.
John:I mean, I wrote, I was just thinking a little bit before we started about the how to have a big idea bit.
John:What I wrote down was, well first of all, we have to know what we've got.
John:We have to know who we are and what our skills are.
John:And it's very ba this is a very basic summary of all the things that a product and we can be, isn't it?
John:But what am I, what have I got?
John:So what assets have I got?
John:Uh, and who am I?
John:And so that kind of, that, that.
John:Overlapping bit of Venn diagram of passion and skill or ability or product, whatever it is.
John:So that's that's what I've got.
John:And then the audience is like, know what, so if I know what I've got and then I know what people need or want or what their pain is, what they need is what their pain is.
John:If I know what people's pain is and then exactly what you are talking about, I talked about it as the well, the idea that joins it, but the bridge is exactly it.
John:It's the bridge between this and that.
John:And that's all we're talking about.
John:That's what communication is and that's what marketing is.
John:That's all it is.
John:I could never understand how people that have a, a kind of moral issue around advertising per se, advertising or marketing per se, 'cause it's just the bridge between what people have and people that need something.
John:And this then how you do it, that can be unethical or whatever.
John:So that's what we're talking about.
John:We're talking about that bridge.
John:And once we isolate it like you've done already, it's really then useful.
John:'Cause you kind of go, okay, I need that bridge bit.
John:I need to get good at creating the bridge bit.
John:And that's where the big ideas are, that's where they rest.
John:And, uh, the issue, the problem is most of us don't even realize that we need a big idea.
John:And then we might think we've got a big idea and we invest a lot of time and money pushing down that route.
John:But um, ideas, yes, it's some of them stick, some of them don't.
John:There's some that you really feel it's like with Fuck it, we both, we clearly have the experience, but we both knew that could be really, really big.
Carlos:There's a book Laurence put me onto many years ago called, was it Smarts, Hearts, Guts and Luck?
Laurence:Uh, yes.
Laurence:Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck.
Carlos:Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck.
Carlos:So I was hearing there, there's an element of you, you have to come up with ideas, firstly.
Carlos:You'll never get a big idea if you don't have an idea.
Carlos:So you need lots of them.
Carlos:So there's that, yeah, smart stuff.
Carlos:There's also, it's something you're passionate about, something that, you know, you love with the heart stuff.
Carlos:Um, you then have to communicate, get it outta the world, you know, be courageous, the guts stuff.
Carlos:And then this is luck element, whether it catches on.
Carlos:And that feels a bit less in control, but is there a way to mitigate that?
John:Well, the fantastic thing about, uh, media now, it used to be in terms of the luck.
John:When we had a, whatever, it would've been a 2 million budget for a kind of brand, and you had to have the idea, share it amongst your team, share it with the client, then hire a company to film the thing, and then put it out on broadcast media, spending another couple of million or whatever, if you, and they used to say 50% advertising works, but just dunno which 50%.
John:That's the luck bit.
John:The great thing about now.
John:And I, you know, you can test things all the time.
John:You can just get ideas out there.
John:So just putting, I mean, I, I mean I, it is funny 'cause this is why agencies, this is why most companies need agencies and it's why as entrepreneurs or small businesses, we need some good people who understand about these things.
John:'Cause it's, it's hard to do it for yourself.
John:We can talk about how to do it for yourself and we do it for ourselves, but I know I'm not as good at doing it for myself as I'm for other people.
John:And end up doing it for myself.
John:I'm doing it for myself all the time.
John:But, so yes, that thing you said, Carlos, about the quantity, that's always been a key thing.
John:So I've been a pretty much a professional ideas person since I was, whatever, 18, really.
John:And I've always had the thing of quantity is more important than quality.
John:I say that and when I have to, I have to then say, then people have read my book, go, yeah, you can see.
John:But it's a rule.
John:It's a rule that really helps create the creative process.
John:And I, I do tend to find, I mean if I, if you have that as a rule and that what you do, you just say you're just suspending the critic.
John:It's very hard to have a critic sitting in the room in your head at the same time as having ideas.
John:You can't do, you have to separate the two parts of the process.
John:So you to separate, so we've got, if we've got the bridge, that bridge has gotta be built with massive amount of stuff, you know, for that lots, lots of brick or steel or whatever it is you build the bridge with tons, you'd make the biggest, the tallest bridge ever and then start to knock bits off if you want to.
John:But that's the way I do everything.
John:I mean, I used to do it with ads.
John:If you had to come up with one poster, remember the first poster I did in the early nineties was for Sky.
John:To have have an idea for one poster that went out in London for a tea, for a program, and we just came up with like 300 ideas and for one thing could sit there for two days and then bang.
John:But if you've got that thing, I need to come up with 300 ideas, in there is gonna be something really good.
John:You then clearly need somebody, you can spot the good one.
Carlos:And that process of coming up with 300 ideas that, you know, for a lot of people that, that's intimidating.
Carlos:I'm trying to come up with one idea.
John:Yeah.
Carlos:Is there something you can offer to help, uh, particularly that solopreneur who's, you know, they've got something, but yeah, there's they, they, they're really buying into this idea of the big idea, but that feels really like a roulette wheel.
Carlos:But you're saying that, you know, there's a way towards it.
John:Absolutely.
John:So, yeah, to separate it, uh, first of all.
John:So yeah, let's forget about the 300, but let's say you wanted to come up with a, a kind of name for whatever it is that you offer.
John:Instead of, you know, we'd normally kick around.
John:We're not, you know, I dunno what, four or five names.
John:So you sit there and you come up with 30 without judging them, without having somebody judging them, and you write them all down.
John:And you do it in a space, in the, in a creative space, which means you have to protect that space.
John:I have a kind of meditation thing I do.
John:Or it's, yeah, I call it the antidote to meditation because it's for people who can't do meditation.
John:Uh, it is called circle time .And it's about protecting your space and then everything being okay within that space is very kind of permissive meditation.
John:So anything is fine.
John:And it's the same for creative space and creative time.
John:So we have to protect it.
John:You make sure nobody's gonna disturb you.
John:And you set the time you're gonna do it for.
John:It would be really great way to do it.
John:I'm gonna, 'cause we kind of go, come some ideas, 10 minutes, like, okay, I've done it.
John:It's a bit tense.
John:Let's say you have to create everything to relax.
John:The ideas, this part of our brain, the right brain is just astonishingly.
John:There's a billion ideas coming up from here or coming in, wherever it's coming from, whether it's coming out, coming, coming from the universe and just pouring in, or whether it's coming from our subconscious and all our collective learning, there's just a part of this brain that if you, once you know where it is and you take the lid off, you can't freaking stop it.
John:And so you just, we need to learn to access that and that my problem is because if, if my thing is to relax, so I'm good at relaxing.
John:The moment I relax, I just wanna calm down, I inadvertently take the lid off the ideas part of my brain.
John:Go, oh, we can do this, we do this.
John:Which is very excited.
John:That side of me is very excited.
John:Oh, you go, no, calm down.
John:Calm down.
John:You wanna calm down and get more ideas.
John:But yes, to get to find that space.
John:And to get into that space for a, uh, protect it, protect the space, and protect the time, and then protect the integrity of the creativity.
John:So quantity matters, quantity, not quality.
John:I don't care what this looks like.
John:I'm not bothered about finding the big idea.
John:All I'm bothered about is creating loads of ideas.
John:And then you, then there's, then you separate it, and then there's another stage.
John:It's another room.
Carlos:So I think one of the challenges, I've seen people have is this self filtering that happens before they've even said anything.
John:Yeah, yeah.
Carlos:They can't get it out for, well, I was gonna say for fear of their own criticism, or someone else's criticism.
Carlos:And today it springs to mind because we were running a masterclass on, uh, effortless Success and the, and Vic Sanderton who, who is supporting us, she works with overachievers and perfectionists.
John:Yeah.
Carlos:And one of the issues with perfectionists is that, you know, it has to be perfect before it's actually done.
John:Yeah.
Carlos:So getting that, ID, even just getting something out of your head is hard.
Carlos:It sounds like a safe space is important here,
John:I think in to get over that thing, the, yeah, the tight, the, the inner critic and everything else.
John:This will probably help, as well as the quantity thing, which is one way to, to do it in the supply side of ideas, the, the other thing to say on the kind of recipient, the demand side of ideas, which is how I receive ideas, let's say as an audience.
John:Uh, I'll say this, that the biggest ideas are unlikely to be recognized as such at the beginning.
John:So if you go and share it with people, most people can't see it, most people can, most people will say, oh, you can't do that.
John:You can't do that.
John:You can't say that.
John:You couldn't do that.
John:Could you do that?
John:So if once we know that there's a few, there's a few consequences of that knowledge.
John:One is that we should not be sharing ideas easily with other people, especially groups, do not share them with groups of friends, yeah?
John:Maybe share them with one person, you know, is very good at this stuff.
John:Uh.
John:the other is that not only can we be wrong as we generate the ideas and the supply side, but we kind of need to let the wrong stuff out.
John:So it's, it's a little bit like trying to stop that shit before it starts in our brain.
Laurence:Mm-Hmm.
John:It's like, okay, my inner critic gonna have a go, but it's gonna probably, if I've done it in groups where I've had big groups with people coming up with ideas, and there's somebody sharing an idea and other people hearing it.
John:When somebody go, people kind of, it depends what rules you set for how they hear the idea and, and how they give feedback.
John:But let's say you don't put many rules in, somebody, the people kind of go, no, you can't do that because that's already been done by, or, you can't do that because of the rules in the da dah.
John:Or, no that's not gonna work.
John:I'm much sure fill your idea and the user saying, I'm much prefer your idea to the idea that's familiar to because we, like, if you're not professional, if most people like familiar ideas.
John:I mean for, didn't Henry Ford say if I'd asked people what they wanted that have set a faster horse?
John:It's like this, it's like, it's slightly confusing when you're talking about the kind of need of the market or the pain of the market.
John:But still, once we know this thing of it's likely to be an idea that doesn't feel comfortable, then it's kind of good.
John:It's good at the beginning then to kind of go, okay, I'm just gonna spew it out, not worry about it.
John:'Cause it's likely that the thing I'm trying thinking I shouldn't be doing could be the idea.
Carlos:It makes me think of a journaling.
John:Yeah.
Carlos:And just sometimes you just write and write and write and write until you don't, you know, dunno even what to write.
Carlos:And then within that something profound or useful comes out, but a lot of it is gibberish.
Carlos:And the other thought was, I was thinking about, I dunno if you remember back in the day when we used to play with Lego.
Carlos:And I'd be looking for that piece that I needed.
Carlos:And I'd either rummage around in it, in the box, basically with all the Lego squirreling around, I'd never find it.
Carlos:Or I'd just take the Lego out, take it all out, and as I got rid of it, got it out, I would have less and less in the box and I'd be able to find the piece as opposed to just like churning it inside me.
John:That's absolutely right.
John:It, it is.
John:And it's right in there and uh, that they then come to how to spot an idea.
John:But in terms of this, the kind of stage process, yeah.
John:If one, and again, knowing that it's hidden in there, you just have to get all the Lego out the box and throw it all over the floor.
John:So it is kind of weird with a Lego thing.
John:It's a bit like what we mainly do is we get a massive box.
John:We may not know the box is full of Lego, but I put our hand in, we pull three bits out and try to make something, and then we start spending money on whatever we spend money on to get this thing out there.
John:And we've just had three bits of Lego.
John:It's like what?
John:You're setting up a business, you only took three bits of Lego out.
John:Are you crazy?
Carlos:So like, I like this idea now of like this, you get it out all over the floor.
John:Yeah.
Carlos:It's,
John:it's a whole load of stuff.
John:And then, okay.
John:There's this process of essentially picking out the bit that you need, what the idea is,
Laurence:which one's the crap one, which one's the gold?
Carlos:What is that process like for you?
John:it's interesting.
John:It's a bit harder for me now 'cause I've done it for so long.
John:I mean, as I thought about this before we, we talked.
John:I think one really good thing to do.
John:In, in a sense it's a muscle that we have to train.
John:It's not something that does, comes naturally like many muscles.
John:You know, I've been learning about sales recently and it's not something that I understood or ca or came naturally.
John:So I'm, I now under, I've trained myself and it, so I understand it more.
John:So I see how sales works in the world.
John:And I think big ideas are the same.
John:So the training process, it's not like ev not like three evening classes a week or anything, but it's pretty much starting to see where ideas exist in the world and where the big ideas are, which was actually easier, I think 25 years ago when there was in the kind of broadcast limited world, there were some, there were big ideas and people would know about them.
John:It'd be a big, and we'd get some of it.
John:But generally, as everything has been digitized and multiplied, which is what it is now, everything's massively multiplied.
John:It's a little bit more difficult to have common big ideas.
John:But I'll give you an example in this training.
John:So I was just reading again this morning about about films.
John:And they're, they're hoping that Tom Cruise can be, can save the summer, aren't they?
John:Save the cinema this summer with his Mission Impossible.
John:' cause what?
John:'cause Indiana Jones has flopped.
John:And it's, I go, we go to the cinema's.
John:Nobody in the cinemas at the moment.
John:It's like they need a big.
John:So you're sitting there kind of going, so, Steve Spielberg couldn't do it, and Harrison Ford couldn't do it.
John:And they couldn't do it, and they couldn't do it.
John:But Tom Cruise is doing, so what's different?
John:What's Tom Cruise thing?
John:But with Tom Cruise, when you start to think about and what publicity he's getting at the moment, or what he's pushing as the publicity, and I've noticed this over the last few months.
John:He's the guy.
John:Apart from him being, there's a weird, there's a, anything that's really successful, if you analyze it, you will eventually find the very big idea in there.
John:And the big idea is usually to do with dissonance.
John:There's usually a juxtaposition and dissonance in there when you take it apart.
John:Or some kind of weirdness or some wrongness.
John:Now bit of the wrongness about Tom Cruise is he's 85 and he looks like he's 12.
Carlos:Yeah,
John:it's like, so there's one thing and he's, there's another big idea in there, which is that he's doing his own stunts, which is just.
John:So I'm interested in seeing that film now, which we are seeing on Monday, because I know that when he got his motorbike and he goes off the cliff, he did that six times in one day, and he said whether it's true that's the most dangerous thing he's ever done in his life and you know, it's really dangerous.
John:And this picture of him hanging onto an airplane, it was a real airplane that he's actually, you know.
John:So he's cr whether it's him, whether he's the genius or whether this genius is blah da da, that's a big idea.
John:A very interesting constructed, big idea around Tom Cruise that's now attached to that film.
John:And the film, whatever it was last summer, that saved, saved the cinema last summer.
John:So you go, you then kinda go, why aren't the geniuses doing the same for the Indiana Jones stuff?
John:What did, what would it have taken to give that the thing?
John:It probably needed to be Harrison Ford's last ever film.
Laurence:Mm-Hmm.
John:Or he died on, I dunno what it's like this, there's gotta be something we, so, so we hook onto what there is a, it's almost if we live in a market of ideas.
John:You know, there was a market of products way back then.
John:There was a market of kind of images and now there's a market of ideas.
John:So the big ideas will, in this massively overpopulated market ideas, the big ideas will stand out.
John:Anyway, back to the point we gotta train ourselves in spotting these.
John:So if we look around at everything that we consume, everything that hit makes, it becomes a hit, uh, the bars and restaurants that are working, the TV that's working, and try to understand what's in there that's making that work.
John:And it's usually some notable different dissonant juxtaposed idea that's then yes, hooked into, as we've talked about.
John:Uh, there's like, that's the bridge for something.
John:It's the something that people need at that moment, and it's expressing the passions and the skills of the people that are providing it.
John:So I'd say that's the first thing.
John:We're just, if we need to get good at spotting in the, or seeing in the world the big ideas and when we're better at that, even if we're like, you know, beginner level, then when we look at our own ideas or our mates' ideas will be better equipped to kind of go, okay, there's something in that, 'cause that feels very weird.
Laurence:Well actually the thing that came to mind when John was talking was when I started being a web designer, I didn't go to design school, so I felt a bit like an imposter.
Laurence:Well, I wasn't an imposter, I didn't know how to design.
Laurence:But one of the first things I did was just look at good design.
Laurence:But what, how does design work?
Laurence:So like what what does a good logo look like?
Laurence:What does good graphic design look like?
Laurence:What does a good web design look like?
Laurence:And so, in some ways, I probably made more progress than people who knew some of the fundamentals because I sort of broke down what was working and tried to go in with that beginner mindset.
Laurence:And like you said, it was, it became a skill to learn rather than something that you're born with, which was my original story of some people just born with creativity, which they probably are, but you can still learn, I think, some of these skills.
Laurence:So for me it was just finding, yeah, things I liked that was like role models or good brands that resonated with me at the time, and I think maybe that's part of this is big ideas might be different for different people, won't they?
Laurence:I watched the Wham documentary last night, which is a good example of that I think is they, you know, like them all load them, they made a massive impact in four years in the eighties.
Laurence:Started off with a bit of a social mission.
Laurence:Some of the sort of lyrics were very punchy, and then they sort of morphed more into a pop, sort of a pop duo, that got a lot of stick from the music press.
Laurence:But it was an idea that stuck to guys from the suburbs of London sort of traveling around the world and making, uh, a lot of people very happy through their music.
Laurence:So yeah, that's an idea that I think you not, you don't have to like it or load there, but you won't forget Wham, like everyone's got a Wham sort of story I'm sure from their youth or even hearing it more recently.
John:It's good with music, isn't it?
John:You can look at for whatever people's range of bands is that are interested in the ones that really sta apart from the music, it's interesting.
John:It's not just about the music being good.
Laurence:No.
John:It's usually a whole mixture of things that, and there's usually the juxtaposition, juxtaposition of something with something else that makes it really stand out.
Carlos:I was just thinking about in terms of the music, I'm not a massive music fan, but one of the band that stood, or the group that stood out for me when I was growing up were De la Soul.
Carlos:And in a world of hip hop, which was very kind of, aggressive right?
Carlos:Raw?
Carlos:Hippie hip hop, just like.
Laurence:Mm-Hmm.
Carlos:Attracted me different.
Carlos:Wow.
Carlos:And it was, yeah, I could identify with it because I didn't feel like that kind of yeah, that, the energy of aggression.
Carlos:I say, I would say so.
Carlos:So with that there's this thing about the contrast.
Carlos:But I wanted to hook onto, because some of the things we're talking about are really big ideas.
Carlos:And, you know, big ideas and big markets, and a lot of the people are listening to this don't have necessarily that scale or don't believe they can reach that scale quite yet.
Carlos:But, you know, I'm hoping the idea of a big idea is still helpful.
John:Yeah, I think it's, I think it's more than helpful.
John:I think it's, I would hesitate to say it, but I think it's essential.
John:It, it clearly depends on one's different definition of big idea.
John:But I'll give you an example of a kind of creative starter that really helps people through the creative process.
John:As to, this is a bit.
John:A bit of a how to spot a big idea or how to create a then spot a big idea.
John:I often say to people just imagine you are talking to a mate in a cafe or a pub and you are telling them your idea that is as simple as that.
John:And if they kind of go, if they go, all right, yeah, sounds, that sounds interesting, isn't it?
John:Then you haven't got the idea.
John:And you can, most of just can imagine sharing it and what they think.
John:And what we're after is when you share it, this idea, your idea, your brand, the thing that you are gonna spend your life, investing time and money in, when you share it with your mate in the cafe stroke bar, you want them to kind of go Blimey.
John:you know, tell me more.
John:Or where do I get it?
John:Or fuck me.
John:How what?
John:Or you can't do that.
John:Are you crazy?
John:Are you completely out of your mind?
John:How can you think you can?
John:So those are the responses that you're after.
John:So if we're, what, wherever we are on that scale, and most of us are, I mean, I, that's where we are with us, offering ideas to a relatively small audiences.
John:And I do just that.
John:And I've, I've just created a, a product this, uh, an idea this year called Super Relaxers.
John:And we can do this when we've got products that are really related to ourselves and our story and what we do, it's amazing how you can cut your own life.
John:You can all the, it's a bit like the thing of like the gold is in all the stuff.
John:So if you've got my life, which is full of loads of stuff, it's got, I've got a story.
John:I was interested in relaxation 'cause I was really sick.
John:I went and found people who could, were really good at relaxing.
John:So kind of gurus of relaxation.
John:And I learned from 'em over years and years and years.
John:That's one part of my story that I've never really talked about that much before.
John:But in this case I wanted to, I thought, okay, that's, I went and found these really good people that were really great at relaxation.
John:They're the kind of super relaxers, the people who the best, the gurus of relaxation.
John:And I, in the end I learned from them.
John:I got their kind of secrets.
John:So you're still probably starting to hear now how the market, the sales and the marketing speak of what I'm an offering starts to form.
John:Because I've never really thought about this before.
John:But I've actually got a story there where I've basically worked with 20 people who are the very, I, I call 'em the 1% of super relaxers, the 1% of the population who were super relaxed.
John:And there's basically do, they do have secrets.
John:I know their secrets and I'm now offering their secrets to people.
John:So when I sit with, if I'm now imagining, I've got an idea, okay, they're, yeah, it's kind of nice, nice, nice name, Super Relaxers, I've invented it.
John:It's only applied to hair products, actually.
John:That's right.
John:When I looked it up, it's conditioner.
John:Absolute conditioners.
John:I'm super relaxers, so I've now.
Laurence:Not laxatives,
John:Not la, that's true, fortunately not.
John:So I've now got a new, I've coined something, I've got a name.
John:It is me.
John:It's my story.
John:It's authentic, it's true.
John:But I've gathered all the bits together and I have it as a really nice story.
John:So how does it work in the cafe?
John:I've not, it's not a controversial title, but in the cafe, I just need to tell a bit of the story.
John:I was so sick that I was in hospital every year.
John:You remember my mate, you remember when I was so sick that, you know, I went out and met those guys?
John:Well, actually worked out the habits that they have that they don't, didn't even know.
John:And I've put it together into like 18 top habits.
John:Uh, do you wanna know what the top one is?
John:And they go yeah, yeah.
John:What the fuck is the top one?
John:The top one is, and off you go.
John:So that's not controversial, but it's, I hope it's, it is relatively engaging, and that's the idea.
John:So we have to have something at its most basic and a big idea is a neat way to call this thing.
John:We have to have some hook that's gonna stand out.
John:Because I mean, uh, so I'll just say this quickly 'cause we didn't, this is the kind of starter of this, the reason why we want big ideas is because they travel fast in this world.
John:They amplify rapidly.
John:They, you know, and especially in the digital world, they can go to from this to that in incredibly short space of time.
John:Uh, and it also means they're cheap.
John:So anything that people will talk about, it's much cheaper than spending money to tell people about them in their face, yeah.
Laurence:By the way, your sales training's working well 'cause I was totally sold there.
John:Okay, good.
Laurence:I'm like, tell me the
John:one, at least one give you one nugget.
Laurence:What do I have to?
John:I'll tell, I actually tell you.
John:I will tell you one, I will tell the, one of the main ones actually, which is, uh, and this is genuine.
John:This is what I noticed they all did, and what most people don't do, which is about taking relaxation seriously.
John:Most people don't really think about relaxation and yet stress is the thing that's, that's the heart of most people's issues.
John:It's the thing that's probably gonna kill most of us in one way or another.
John:And yet we don't, we take, we might take diet serious, they might take exercise seriously.
John:We don't take relaxation seriously or seriously enough.
John:We don't study it, and we don't have a, we don't usually have a practice around it.
John:So that's one of the biggest secrets.
Laurence:Love it.
Carlos:So what was coming across for me when you're talking is, even in the, so in the name Super Relaxers, there's a contrast that's standing out for me.
Carlos:Super.
Carlos:Fast, big, you know.
Carlos:Relaxers.
Carlos:Ah, you know, there's already some kind of, a bit of cognitive dissonance for me.
John:Yeah, yeah.
Carlos:The other aspect was it's speaks to a particular person very well.
Carlos:It's like anyone who finds it hard to relax, whereas, you know, you know, because someone who doesn't see that problem or doesn't experience that problem is gonna be like oh, nice name.
Carlos:But for someone who needs to super relax who's like, I need that.
Carlos:I want it.
Carlos:Tell me more.
John:And you are right Carlos, about as well, about the, at some level, and this is a bit sales, uh, some of the sales things I've been learning, we only really want to create messages that are appealing to the people that we want to offer things to.
John:Uh, which makes it really good.
John:I mean, there's, somebody said, you know, that actually did know who said it, but it was uh, love me or hate me, and there's no money in the middle.
John:So we do mean, and we all know politically that the polarizing thing kind of works sadly to, to a sad effect on the gro global scale.
John:But at some level, marketing, uh, and sales and the world where we're offering stuff to where it needs to polarize.
John:If we're gonna make something stand out and people, so we want the people who might buy it to resonate with it and like everybody else can switch off.
John:They can even hate it, yeah.
Laurence:You wanna be a filter.
John:Yeah.
Carlos:The other thing that I heard when you were talking about super relaxers, it, you know, you talked about an authentic story and with this um, process of just finding lots of ideas, I'm connecting it to some of the stuff that we do on our Vision 2020 program about your own story of change or the stories of change that you've experienced in your life.
Carlos:Because they are potential, sources of things you can offer others.
Carlos:So in your journey of finding a way to relax because you couldn't, or you, it was making you ill, you've found that could be something you could offer to others.
Carlos:And in that.
Carlos:It isn't everyone in the world.
Carlos:It's people who've experienced what you've experienced, and because of that, you have an empathy for what they are experiencing and what that means for them.
John:You're absolutely right.
John:I mean that and the, that process you're building in a lot of potential success with what you've said because, yes, it and let, that's why I said about the thing of cutting our own, uh, bio, cutting our own story is dependent on the market need at some level because you're right, I mean, I've got various transformation.
John:If, If I think about it, I've got lots of transformations in my life.
John:You name any subject, I'll have some transformation.
John:Talk about money.
John:I'll have a transformation story.
John:If I thought about it, there's some point in my life where I understood something about money for example.
John:If you're talking about, I dunno what it is, you know, gardening, I'd have some transformation story.
John:So I'm talking about relaxation and transformation story.
John:So the idea is that if you are, if we're talking to somebody's pain, to somebody's need for help with that pain, we reflect back our re our relevant transformation story.
John:So if it's, if we're talking to somebody who's in physical pain, then I want to tell my physical pain to healing transformation story.
John:So that exact, exactly that the, we look at our own changes.
John:But it has to be, we have to then pull out the relevant one, dependent on the story the, the, the, the need that we're trying to address, which is not, you know, it takes a, that's quite, that's, that takes quite a bit of intention, doesn't it?
Carlos:Yeah, I feel there's a few things, a few ingredients that I'm, I'm spotting here.
Carlos:Um, firstly, there's the skill and the practice of just being able to just get lots of ideas out there without self filtering and without judgment so that you have something to work with.
Carlos:Then part of that is also these ideas ideally are authentic.
Carlos:So in a sense, if they are part of your own journey of transformation, change something you experienced a, a benefit that you are, have been part of or have had experienced yourself, then that, that's another ingredient.
John:Yeah.
Carlos:And then you talked about this idea of the bridge.
John:Yeah.
Carlos:And it's how we tell the story of this thing, you know, what is it about this particular idea?
Carlos:How is it that we mold out these 20, 30 ideas?
Carlos:There's that thing there that feels authentic and has some quality of contrast, of polarization, of cutting through a lot of stuff that can then lead to connecting with people in the outside world.
John:Absolutely, yeah, and it might, you know, as you say that I'm thinking it might well be that the story is so compelling in itself that it might, doesn't necessarily have to have the contrast.
John:I may well be, I may well be undermining my own original argument there, but, you know, I can imagine a very compelling story that's so bang on reflecting the pain to pain, to healing transformation or pain to success transformation, that it would kind of work that people engage.
John:It depends on the context, doesn't it?
John:It depends where you are telling the story, but you're absolutely right.
John:And I think you know what you say about authentic.
John:I've always thought that about, I thought this in the nineties when I was doing the advertising.
John:As long as the piece of communication is authentically representing the thing you are trying, it's gonna work.
John:Uh, if you are and it will work.
John:And that means that's also an amoral situation.
John:So if somebody's, let's say if somebody's evil with an evil company and they authentically say to the world, I'm evil with an evil company, anybody out there who's evil can you pay me a grand a month?
John:You're gonna get lots of buyers.
John:So that's authentic.
John:So authenticity again, is gold.
John:Uh, if you can.
John:So if we can mix together, this kind of.
John:Actually, I just saw Anya in, um, in chat was talking about, polyvagal theory.
John:And it's interesting, there is, this is the Stephen Porges stuff.
John:The polyvagal is Stephen Porges, he he realized in the early nineties the parasympathetic nervous system that we thought it was divided into two sympathetic parasympathetic parasympathetics, two sides to it, dorsal and ventral.
John:So the ventral vagal, and I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about the space that we should be operating from.
John:So there's basically, the nervous system is in four parts.
John:And the space that we are talking about, the space where we can create big ideas from, is actually a very specific level of nervous system, the way the brain's operating.
John:And it's generally, it's ventral vagal.
John:So it's when we're calm, it's called stillness or immobility without fear, actually.
John:So these four quadrants, and this is Gaia's, my wife's model actually, but the four quadrants are stillness, immobility, uh, without fear, then stillness, immobility with fear.
John:On the other side is activity, action, or mobility with fear, which is fight, flight and still and then action and mobility without fear, which is kind of playing, dancing, working, getting on in the world and everything else.
John:But the place we want to go to, I reckon, for ideas and the big ideas is that very particular part, which is stillness, immobility without fear.
John:And that means then that feeds into everything we've been saying today.
John:I'm not scared that the I'm not scared that I can't get the idea.
John:I'm not scared that I'm not gonna come up with the idea.
John:I'm not scared that, not scared about anything.
John:I'm in that place of just like, gonna fuck it, I don't care.
John:I'm just gonna come up with 300 ideas.
John:And so our whole system goes into a very particular place.
John:So thank you.
John:An for a polyvagal nervous system.
Carlos:I'm glad you, you kind of talk about that stillness without fear.
Carlos:It makes me think of this idea, well being, you know, just to, as a contrast to always the doing.
Carlos:And particularly being in a space of openness and available for whatever is coming up.
Carlos:And I wanted to sort of mention that because many of the people who are interested in our work, usually going through some kind of transition, they've like been living or working in a certain way that's not working.
Carlos:What's next?
Carlos:How does that work?
Carlos:What's the big idea that I can latch onto next?
Carlos:More often than not, I think the people that we are able to help the most are the people who are habitual doers, particularly the doers with fear.
Carlos:And so there's this space of being without fear that will open up to possibilities and ability to come up with the ideas and maybe the big idea.
Carlos:And so I, I just wanted to offer that.
Carlos:As a way of thinking, you know, now thinking about our work and, you know, what's the big idea for us?
Carlos:The big idea is to help people to be without fear so they can work out what the next big idea is.
John:I get it.
John:And I get you've been doing it absolutely.
John:Intuitively.
Carlos:Yes.
John:And what I suppose what you are doing, you've just spotted, you've spotted your own big idea at some level, and we're sharing what the physiological reason is for that, that works.
Carlos:To add onto that because that's only come to me now just listening to you talk.
John:Yeah.
Carlos:And the other aspect I was gonna maybe insert into this process of finding the big idea is yes, ideas come from within.
Carlos:But also through conversation, through in safe spaces, through just listening and learning and just talking about, not even the ideas, but just hope, aspirations, other people's ideas, they become manure or fodder for your own ideas if you allow them, if you're not holding too tightly onto one idea all the time.
John:Absolutely.
John:Which is the in that space as well, which is the stiller karma without fear space, there's a kind of, you think of Daoism, the kind of the soft and the moving.
John:And at some level we don't have to be in just one.
John:It's like, it's almost we, I'm imagining you guys are, you are plugging people into that space, and then you fill up and then you might go out.
John:What you then need is action, either mobility, hopefully without fear, but sometimes with fear, you know, where a lot of us are mixing between the different states.
John:But the problem is that most people can't access that still space very easily.
John:So to help people plug into it in one way or another is really good.
Carlos:That's super relaxed.
Laurence:The one thing that comes to mind for me is this, I think a lot of people that we come across, they wanna find the big idea that's going to make money.
John:Yeah.
Laurence:That's the kind of pressure that they put on themselves is, yeah, but is it gonna make money and is it worth pursuing if it's not?
Laurence:And I, if I can't see a clear way to making money at the start, then I might not pursue it.
Laurence:So I suppose how can we take the pressure off there of trying to predict what will work and what won't
John:At some level I mean, it, because it, yes, it may, well, that may become the FA fear in there or a preoccupation that blocks the, uh, blocks the flow, I suppose.
John:And I aup, I suppose that then one just has to follow, join the dots, or it's a bit like paint by numbers.
John:Okay, I need to put that aside.
John:I need to create a safe space where I'm gonna have a hundred ideas, or you apply a creative process to the preoccupation with the moneymaking aspect of it.
John:What are 30 different ways to make money from this?
John:I read this morning, maybe it was in that article that somebody had, uh, type tapped into Chat GPT about how can I turn this a hundred dollars in my pocket?
Laurence:Oh yeah, he started like an affiliate campaign, uh, marketing company.
John:20 worth, 20, I dunno, worth 25 grand overnight, basically.
John:So, yeah, this, the, we need creative ways because it, you know, you can, if you preoc if you, this is the problem.
John:This is what I've spent the last 30 years interested in and doing, really.
John:It's.
John:It is tension and fear of any, in any form that blocks us and blocks the flow and blocks our energy, literally.
John:That's what it, that's it blocks the energy in our bodies.
John:It makes us sick and it stops things happening.
John:And so that, you know, bang on the subject that you've been, we're talking about this morning about effortless success.
John:At some level.
John:I was gonna say, success is hard to have unless with a lot of effort.
John:I think people do achieve success with effort, but they end up very tired.
John:And it's possible, I think, to achieve higher success with a degree of effortlessness.
John:And that's my experience in my life.
John:So, and it's much, much more fun and better for us and everybody around us if we can achieve the success with that.
John:But um, yeah,
Carlos:There's something here well, a theme that's popping up for me here is fear.
Carlos:Either fear of judging or your ideas being judged, fear of getting the wrong idea, fear of not making enough money.
Carlos:And I would like to just invite anyone who's listening is, like, most of us who are thinking about starting a new business, have a level of privilege to be able, even able to think about that.
Carlos:And so I feel we can be hijacked by fear when we don't need to.
Carlos:I'm gonna say that a bit cautiously, but something how we can deal with that fear somehow to allow us to, like you say, get into that space of creativity, whether it is with the idea or with the money, so that we can then experiment, play, try lots of things.
Carlos:'Cause I'm very also conscious, very much of it isn't a linear process.
Carlos:This is quite messy and there isn't a set timeframe over which this can definitely happen.
John:True.
Carlos:And so there's, we need space to do that.
Carlos:And if we, if you don't have space to do that, then don't yeah, don't beat yourself over the head, you know, don't, uh, put yourself down because it's hard to do that stuff when you are needing to know whether you are gonna pay the rent or the mortgage next week.
Carlos:That's a challenge.
Carlos:So I think there is an opportunity to do, if you have the opportunity to create that space, you will find ideas.
Carlos:But don't be too hard on yourself if you're finding it hard to do that because fear is in the way.
John:And, and Carlos, I mean, you're absolutely right and I mean, it's a whole other.
John:At least hour, isn't it?
John:To talk about how to overcome fear, uh, and how to maybe work with fear, and at some level to bout to to know that fear will happen and to allow its place in your life.
John:It's a bit like worry.
John:We're always gonna worry about shit.
John:You know, the psycho, the best psychologists advise things like having a worry time.
John:Like you just put aside 20 minutes and you worry.
John:Like hell for 20 minutes and it actually works really well.
John:So there are ways that we can deal with fear, but we can't make, usually can't get rid of fear.
John:We can train.
John:We can bring it.
John:It's part of the game really, isn't it?
John:And it's how we are not just in that we're in other things as well and we know we're in control.
John:We can move between it and something else and, acknowledge it.
John:Acknowledging it is really important and I'm working with it.
John:But yes, big topic, but you are absolutely right.
John:It's the, it is the fear in there that is often stopping us.
John:'Cause it puts us into either freeze or I or flight.
John:So running away, getting too aggressive and too much adrenaline or just not able to move.
John:And we've all probably all experienced the think about, oh my God, I just dunno what to do.
John:I dunno what where to move with the business.
John:Now I can't even send an email.
John:I dunno what to share.
John:It's like, what if I say the wrong thing?
John:That's just no good.
Carlos:That's great.
Carlos:Well, I'm looking forward, uh, to a future book, John, where you explain how to stop fear hijacking your big idea.
Laurence:I wanna read Super Relaxers first.
John:That one's coming.
Carlos:Awesome.
Carlos:I hope those of you who are searching for your big idea have some thoughts or ideas that you can go away with in terms of starting to empty that Lego box of stuff.
Carlos:Before we leave, is there any final thing you want to share, John, with people listening?
John:I had a thought this morning, having been in the industry, that the creative thing is, it's almost what makes us different.
John:Talking about, we go in a circle here.
John:It is probably what makes us different to the machines, the joy of creativity.
John:And so if we can put aside the fear, the creative life is not just what can give us joy and can create amazing things, but it can be the thing that leads to our success.
John:And we, if we, especially if we're living in an ideas market and an ideas universe as we do, it's the i, the big, the best ideas the big i, the biggest ideas, even in very small markets that are really winning.
John:So what an amazing what an amazing combination that can be, that we can be joyfully creative and paying our bills and our mortgages as well.
Laurence:I was actually gonna mention a book, which I found amazing recently, Rick Rubin's book.
Laurence:I dunno if either of you have read it.
Laurence:The Creative Act, uh, I think it's called The Creative Act.
Laurence:But yeah, Rick Rubin, the music producer, there's so much wisdom in there about how to just unlock your ideas and, so much wisdom about this stuff.
Laurence:And a big part of it for me was actually quiet, an endowment.
Laurence:The, the inputs and actually just creating a bit of calm in your mind for ideas to emerge, which I think isn't new.
Laurence:But I think a lot of the time people are fearful is because they're comparing themselves to others.
Laurence:They're seeing what other people are doing online and just feeding themselves with so much information that they just end up debilitated by that.
Laurence:So yeah, maybe that's the message for me is how do we quieten that external noise so we can tap into our own creativity?
Carlos:What was coming to me, while we're talking about business and getting ideas out in the world, I'm wondering, I'm curious about finding the big idea for our lives.
Carlos:What is that creative process that allows us to tap into a new way of being?
Carlos:And what is that headline, that big idea that we can hold onto?
Carlos:And you know, one of the things that we do with our programs is like, all right, what would you love it if?
Carlos:What does success look like?
Carlos:And for some of us, that's quite hard because we're so conditioned to think in a certain way.
Carlos:And so I hear this process of getting a big idea for your business.
Carlos:I'm wondering how you could apply that for a big idea for your life.
John:This is, This is another hour again, uh, Carlos.
John:We might be back, get you back at some point.
Laurence:I think we need a week in amounts.
Laurence:This.
John:I love that.
John:I, and like, you know, something I'll say this about my thing, which is, I think one of the reasons I'm quite good at the creative big ideas thing, uh, because there's psychological reasons underneath all of this stuff.
John:And as a kid I wasn't listened to very well.
John:So I, my adaptive thing was I have to kind of do tell stories or be a certain way to get.
John:So I became very good, very young at, simul, telling something different, telling a story, being funny, whatever it was.
John:And that, that then starts to feed into, okay, is that the big idea around my.
John:So it is, that's rooted in the psychology as well.
John:If we can understand the psychology and adaptations that we've had, start to understand that and then see, yes, what is the big idea?
John:Probably around healing some of the early pain and then expressing that in our lives.
John:And it might well be, a lot of people might have it already, but it's a fascinating subject.
Carlos:So is that you and Gaia coming back?
Carlos:Then we're gonna have a chat about the big ideas of our lives?
John:Love to both come.
John:That'd be lovely, yeah.
Carlos:Awesome.
Carlos:Okay.
Carlos:That sounds like, that sounds like we're gonna have to arrange that one.
Laurence:Yeah.
Carlos:Awesome.
Laurence:We'll get some, uh, microdosing in.
John:Great.
Carlos:Alright everyone sign up for your little drop of acid.
Carlos:Thank you.
Laurence:That's the upgraded version.
Laurence:That's a really super relaxed version of.
Carlos:I'm not sure.
Carlos:That might be
Laurence:stressful.
Laurence:Or maybe the opposite, yeah.
Laurence:Depending on how your day's been going.
