- Hello, welcome. George Swift from Bigger Brighter Bolder.
Today I want to share with you a few slides - to share with you the importance of cross pollination of ideas.
One of the themes I talk about a lot is, you not going it alone. Don't just rely on yourself. At the end of the day, as business owners and entrepreneurs, of course, we do have the weight of the world a little bit on our back, and the success or failure of our business is going to be down to us, predominantly, anyway.
So, of course, we need to take massive responsibility for everything, however, we don't want to make it unnecessarily difficult. And actually, if we can share some of that load - share some of that burden, share some of that problem-solving, that creativity - we can really get ahead a lot faster, have a lot more fun in the process, and we will end up more successful.
Today, I'm talking about the importance of cross-pollinating ideas, and you need other people in order to do that. So the analogy I'm going to share with you is jokes. Bear with me...
If I said to you, "Tell me a joke," the chances are you'd freeze and not remember a joke. If we were at a dinner party, and someone says, "Hey, tell me your favourite joke," you're like, "I can't remember, I can't remember."
Then suddenly you'll remember a joke and it'll be the one that's not appropriate for the company you're in, right? You might remember one rubbishy joke. You'll think, “But hang on, I know thousands of jokes. I can't think of any right now.”
Same with ideas. Problem solving and creative ideas, new product ideas, innovation ideas, how to sell, how to market, how to position yourself, how to hire, fire, whatever it might be...
You want ideas. You want creativity, new ways of doing things, right? In order to create new results, better results.
This diagram represents all of the ideas you're capable of having, it represents all of the jokes you have in your head. Most of them you can't access. Interestingly though, this one has all of the jokes they know while you have all the jokes you know. They might have some shared jokes that you both know. However, you've got a lot of unique jokes in here that you can't access right now.
But person number two tells you a joke – let’s say it's a mother-in-law joke. Yeah, those sort of parties. So, you suddenly remember ten mother-in-law jokes! You remember one, which reminds you of the second, and the third and a fourth. And then your jokes remind this person of all the jokes that they know. So, actually, by having a second person in this equation, it gives you much more access to all of the jokes that are inside you. More importantly, right now, it gives you much more access to all of the creativity and ideas generation that exists in you. Does this make sense?
So, just having a second person present will stimulate much more of what you've already got going on in here. You'll also get, of course, access to all of their knowledge, all their creativity as well.
So, not only do you have all of your jokes, you'll also end up with all of their jokes as well, or access to all of those jokes. There'll be some crossover in there where you share certain jokes that you both know, but there'll be a lot there that are not common. And therefore there's a great opportunity - now you’ve just massively increased your access to new jokes - or in the case of a business, new ideas, new solutions, new problem solving.
However, there's also, what I call the third way. And the third way is at the intersection of this, which is when you have all of your jokes, they have all of their jokes, and together you create a new joke that neither you or the other person has.
So, in business terms, you have your way of doing it and they have their way of doing it. So, now you get more access to your own creativity and ideas. You get access to their creativity and ideas. And then there's this incredible cross-pollination in the middle where these intersecting points are - where you now get all of the ideas that neither of you had that were sparked because of these two ideas rubbing up against each other. A third idea comes.
I sometimes refer to this horticulturally, very inaccurately, I'm sure, by saying if you want a pink rose, you get a red rose and a white rose, rub the roses up against each other and get a pink rose. I know that's not how it works, but you understand the premise, right?
If I want a redder pink rose, I take my pink rose and a red rose and I get a slightly redder one. If I want a whiter rose. I get my pink rose and a white rose...
So you end up with all this possibility because you start with two separate things. You get all of that, and all of that. And you get all of the new stuff in the middle. So if you bring a third person in, it starts to become exponential, right?
In this case, a third person brings in seven ways of solving that problem - your way, each individual other person's way, three ways there - yours and two others. Plus all of the intersecting ideas between you all. Plus, that idea in there.
If you were writing jokes, for example, say for a comedy series - they do this now all the time - you'd have a writing team, right? I think Friends was the first one that did this, maybe it was The Simpsons. But one of those was the first where they had maybe ten, twelve, maybe sometimes more writers involved, because the resultant ideas were much, much better than any individual person had or any smaller group of people had.
So there's a limit on that. You don't want a hundred people writing an episode of the Simpsons, but you might want five or maybe even ten people's input, right?
It becomes too noisy and too much if you have 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 people involved in this, however, there'll be a specific number that's really good.
For us, in our Masterminds, we typically have about ten people. In some of our other group coaching, we might edge that up to around 20 people, but it's a slightly different format of forum. In a straight Mastermind, anywhere between eight and about twelve people is absolutely spot on and perfect. You might not want to be part of a mastermind per se. You just need to make sure that you have people around you that you can share ideas with. And if you have these people around you, you will come up with exponential ideas, which makes you exponentially more capable of solving the problems that you face in your business - the challenges that are always going to be present.
If you don't have the right people around you, as always, please reach out and talk to us, because we have groups of people already doing this exact same thing. And we're having real, unprecedented success across all of our groups at all levels doing this. But, either way, make sure that you are not trying to do it all on your own - you're not taking all of the burdens of all the problems you face on your own.
There are other people out there that can have a creative input into your business - into your success. It's a much better journey. It's a much more fun, enjoyable journey when you share it with other people. And it's an easier one as well, and the results will be exponential.
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