A MUCH better way to come up with amazing ideas

I noticed a few days ago that it has been two years exactly since I registered the domain www.confidencelive.com

I remember buying it. I was sitting on my sofa, browsing dropped domains with the word 'confidence' in (look, once a nerd, always a nerd OK) and I saw it. That's cool! I bought it. Left it. Thought nothing else of it.

A few weeks earlier I had been to watch a really awful play. It was so bad I can't even remember exactly what it was, but it was one of those where a small, ambitious theatre company decides to "reinvent Shakespeare" and Friar Laurence says "These violent delights have violent ends and in their triumph die!!!" in a contrived cockney accent whilst standing on a graffiti covered steel barrel. You ever been to one of those? I feel like we all have at least 15 times. Juliet was probably wearing converse and a studded belt and Romeo probably had a blue mohawk.

Anyway, the performance was poor but the venue was...beautiful. I remember looking around at the ceiling thinking (though not really thinking, it was closer to feeling, sensing) is this it? Is this the place?

I had no idea what place I was looking for, or why.

Though I could feel I was brewing something. Something with a venue. Something with a stage. Was I going to put on a stand up show? Was I going to do more comedy? I didn't yet know, but after going on a decade (!) of running a business, I have learned that when we are brewing something, when something is gently emerging from the undergrowth of our minds, we have to incubate it. We can't force it out with strategy and planning, we have to live our lives, and let our brilliant minds percolate something magnificent for us.

So I did. I wrote in my journal 'I can feel I am brewing a new idea. I don't know what yet, but there's a stage. It'll come'.

And a few months later, the idea of Confidence Live as it is today began to ripen.

I had no idea.

Autumn, winter is the time for this...germination. All of my best ideas seem to seed when the days draw in. There's something reflective, quiet, about the changing seasons, that gives us more space for quiet, allowing these new, neurologically quiet, whispers of possibility be heard.

If you ever need to be creative, to come up with strategies, ideas or products let me leave you with this. Ask yourself the question:

If I knew what I was about to do would be a total success, what would it be?

Plant the question and let the response come to you. Don't try to answer it, just plant it, fellow GARDENERS OF OUR MINDS.

Who knows what will follow.

Thank you, have a wonderful weekend.