Choose Yourself! (16 page)

Kevin Faul:

Find someone you don’t know who interests and inspires you, then figure out how to reach them. Send them a kind note on LinkedIn or Facebook. Hit them up on Twitter. But research them first. I guarantee a quick conversation or e-mail exchange with someone inspirational will also inspire you. “Touching” someone who has made the impossible possible helps you realize that your ideas are also possible and inspire you to do more. Don’t underestimate the power of being social.

The idea muscle is a natural side effect of putting the Daily Practice to work. When you are physically healthy, when you are around the people you love, when you exercise your idea muscle, and when you cultivate an ability to surrender to the reality around you, it frees you up so you can become an Idea Machine.

Everywhere you go, everything you see, every problem you confront, you will instantly be able to react to every situation that stands in your path. You will be like Spiderman with his spider sense that instantly reacts and knows what to do even before the problem surfaces. You don’t have to believe me on this. I am only saying that this has worked for me and helped me to find great success. Try it for yourself and see. Maybe it will work for you, too.

TEN IDEAS TO START YOU OFF

I’ve given several talks and workshops where I handed out waiter pads and asked people to start writing down ideas. Sometimes people get a little anxious. So I give them a couple of guidelines.

1. Write down as many ideas as you can.
You can’t ask people for just one idea. They get very nervous because that one idea has to be the BEST idea.

2. Share and combine ideas.
I call it having “idea sex” with each other. After they’ve written down their ideas, everyone picks a partner and they combine ideas.

Some of the results have been amazing. At one workshop, I asked people to come up with book titles, then combine their book titles with a partner and come up with a table of contents for the first book title on their combined list. I have yet to hear of a book from the people who went through this process that I didn’t instantly want to read.

But the reality is, most ideas are bad. Most of my ideas are bad. I want you to feel comfortable coming up with hundreds of bad ideas. After I wrote the “How to Become an Idea Machine” chapter, I decided to come up with a list of ideas, a list that could help at least a million people. The key to ideas like this is to make sure you know what the next step is: e.g., you can’t just say, “A time machine” unless you can actually spec out a time machine, which personally I am incapable of doing. So that idea is not on the list.

“Help a million people” is not a mandatory requirement for an idea list. It’s just the idea list I’m going to create today. Having that criterion avoids genius ideas like “Lindsay Lohan plays Princess Leia’s daughter in the next
Star Wars
movie.” Admittedly (take note, J.J. Abrams), that is one of the best ideas anyone has ever heard. But it won’t really help a million people. (Hmmm, I have to think about this for a second…no, no, it won’t help a million people).

Feel free to steal any of these ideas. If you want to give me a cut, that’s fine also.

A)
I wrote down an idea here but I deleted it. It was simply too embarrassingly bad. I’m not afraid to admit when ideas are bad. More on this later.

B)
Klout as currency. Think about it. It makes sense. If I give $5 to a donut shop, that means a lot less than if Barack Obama gives $5 to a donut shop. If Barack Obama buys a donut for $5 then that donut shop is the “Presidential Donut Shop.” B’s $5 is a lot more valuable than my $5. The $5 is just paper after all. It doesn’t matter who holds it. Klout plus currency equals value in today’s world. So it makes complete sense that people with higher Klout should be able to buy more things, because their currency is more valuable than mine. And when they buy things that infers Klout to the seller, who can either buy more things now, or even sell services at more expensive prices. This creates a natural social pricing mechanism around goods and services.

The world is heading in this direction anyway. Look at Oprah. Oprah has an infinite Klout score. If she bought a pencil from me, my Klout score would go up 80 percent, give or take. The middle class is disappearing. The temp staffers pay for goods with scrip, and rich people buy Twitter followers. We’re moving toward a Klout-currency world anyway. Making it actually happen will encourage companies to create bigger value for their customers so that the value of their profits will go up, causing them to hire more people, etc.—a virtuous cycle.

C)
Cryogenics for depressed people. Sometimes I know that in “the long run” things will work out. But I get scared about the short run. Another thing we all know is that time heals all wounds. But how much time does that mean? It differs per person. Let’s say I get wounded. Metaphorically. Someone shoots me down and I feel bad. I might need a day or two to get over it. No problem, I step into my cryogenic tank and program it to wake me in a day. Or if I lose a loved one. That might take a year or two. Freeze me and wake me up on my birthday. Then I can look around, see how I feel, and go back under again. By the way, I don’t age at all while I’m frozen, because all of my genes and chromosomes are at absolute zero. Sometimes it’s financial. I might make an investment that will pay off in five years but I have little money now. No problem. Wake me in five years. Wake me when Twitter goes public.

D)
Use global warming to solve global warming. I don’t know why nobody has thought of this yet. Just look at the words
global warming
. The surface of the planet is getting hotter. That means it’s giving off energy. Use photovoltaic strips (you like that?) to harness the energy coming off the planet to reduce our need for carbon-based energy. BAM! Problem solved. The beauty of this is that if there is no global warming, then the technique won’t work. No problem! Go back to carbon then until the planet starts heating again. I used to go out with someone who worked on Al Gore’s campaign. Hey, A*, if you read this and if you still have any feelings for me will you please contact him about my idea. He has a $10 billion fund, give or take, that he lives off of and he can really help me out here.

E)
3-D printing of humans. 3-D printing seems to be the latest tech fad. But whatever. I don’t even know how it works. But here’s what “3D Human Printing” is. Let’s say I can’t make a meeting tomorrow that’s in India, eight thousand miles away. But I really want to go. I get in my suit at home and turn it on. In the conference room in Bangalore, another suit opens up. It opens its eyes. On the video screen in my suit I see what those eyes see. I move my arms and that suit moves its arms. I talk and that suit talks with my voice. Video conferencing can never replace face-to-face meetings. And even though this is sort of like advanced video conferencing, the minds of the other people in the room are basically psychologically fooled into thinking I am right there with them. It’s just like if you take a robot and give it a human body, many people think it’s almost like an actual human even though it’s just a computer. This is one idea I can invent personally. And I have motivation. I don’t like to travel. I like to sit at home and do nothing. With this invention I can travel all over the world. I can even go to Easter Island. This is sort of like Teleportation 101.

F)
Advertising in houses. This sounds ugly at first: an ad on a wall in your house? Maybe in a frame like a picture. Or a mirror. But here’s the deal: I get the price of my house reduced if I agree to allow advertising all over the house. Like if I’m sitting in the bathroom and I see “daily deals” projected onto the shower curtain. The ad agencies agree to subsidize part of the price of my house. It gets better. As part of this, they have software that listens to all my phone calls. Forget “social media.” Let’s see what I’m interested in when I’m ACTUALLY being social, e.g., talking to people on the phone. If I say on the phone, “I’d really love to go skiing this year but I can’t afford it,” I start getting offers for skiing trips at a discount on my shower curtain. It’s win-win-win. I make money while talking to my friends. My house is cheaper. And companies sell more, improving the economy, hiring more people, and life goes from “bad” to “good.”

G)
Happiness hotspots. For ten years I’ve been getting business proposals like “with our product you will get alerted when your friends are close by.” I actually think now is the time this will actually work because of the rise of phablets like the Galaxy Note. But forget that. When I want to see my friends, I’m not an idiot. I just call my friends and say, “Hey, let’s meet for coffee.” But let’s make this localization thing really life-improving. Studies show that it’s better to be around positive people than negative people. Positive people uplift you, negative people bring you down. So let’s do this. Everyone wears an earplug that takes constant scans of your brain activity. The brain scans are matched against a database of ten thousand brain scans labeled “happy” or “sad,” and then use standard speech recognition techniques to classify the user brain scan as either “happy” or “sad.”

NOW, on my Google Maps on my phone I can see shades all over the map. The brightest colors denote areas where the happiest people seem to be. The darker colors denote areas where negative people are. So if I’m trying to decide today, “Hmmm, uptown or downtown?” I can look at the Happiness Map to see where the happiest areas are and go there. Who cares if my friends are there or not? I’ll make new friends in the happy hotspots!

H)
Forty percent unemployment. The reality is, most people should not be at work. Why? Other than the many reasons already elucidated in this book, it’s simply because most people are bad at their jobs. It’s rare that someone is actually good at what they do. I know maybe ten people who are good at their jobs. This is not a criticism. It’s just a fact. And basically, robots are better. That’s why Apple is moving production back to the United States, because too many Chinese people were killing themselves in their factories. Robots don’t kill themselves, and they get the job done faster.

So what society really needs is 40 or 50 percent unemployment. Here’s how you do it. My solution starts off communist but ends up libertarian. Basically, companies get incentivized to replace all humans with robots. The excess profits you get from firing people gets taxed at only half the rate. All of those “robot taxes” get put into a government fund that is used to subsidize the people who are fired (just like farmers are often paid subsidies not to farm). The subsidies, though, run out after three years. So you have three years from the day you are fired to start a new business. Hopefully the business uses robots instead of humans or else you won’t be able to compete against your higher-margin competitors. If you can’t start a business, then you end up being a temp staffer somewhere. Don’t say this is heartless. This is the way the world is going. That’s why the middle class is disappearing. Robots are the new middle class. And everyone else will either be an entrepreneur or a temp staffer. Don’t shoot the messenger here. It’s already happening. I’m just trying to figure out a way that we can actually accept the 40 percent unemployment or “underemployment” (already at 20 percent) that is coming.

I)
Brain dating. This is a slightly different take on “G” above. No dating service works. The divorce rate is going up. Many people are not happy and end up cheating. A friend of mine recently got his results back from 23andme.com, which takes your spit and tells you everything you didn’t know about yourself or things maybe you knew but forgot, like how old you were when you first experienced shame. I just sent my spit in two days ago and the day after they sent me a note telling me the price had gone down from $299 to $99. So I got screwed again by life but do I regret it? Of course not. That’s the way I roll.

My friend got his results back and I asked him what the biggest thing he learned was. And he said, “That my father is my real father.” He said, “A surprisingly large number of people are finding out that their biological fathers are not their real fathers.” Why? Because people make mistakes. They get into relationships that are confusing, and they use confusing solutions to get out of them. Or even worse, they have babies.

So let’s solve this and end a lot of misery. Take the brain scans of a thousand couples who are happily married after forty years. You know, the couples who say, “Well, we’ve had our problems but we’ve survived.” Get rid of them. NO PROBLEMS. They are out there. Just a thousand couples of the 2 billion couples on the planet. Now average the brain scans together.

When you sign up for the brain dating service, you have to submit your brain scan. It averages your brain scan with the brain scans of all the women in the database. Then it matches the results against the database of one thousand happily married people. Whichever combination for you results in the closest match to those thousand brain scans, you get set up on a date with. Price: $10,000. The technology is there, people. Why aren’t you entrepreneurs on top of this already?

J)
A “Like” button in my contact lenses. I just read they are making contact lenses that can read texts. That’s nice. I like to be in constant communication with everyone I know all the time. But let’s take it one step further. I meet you, I like you, BAM, I blink twice quickly and my contact lens registers the like. Now you go about your day and other people who meet you can immediately see, “James has 158 Likes today.” If you’re having a bad day maybe you have only five “Likes.” No problem. People will avoid you on those days and give you your space. Life is stressful and maybe you need a break. Tomorrow you might be refreshed and get more Likes again. I don’t want just “social media.” I want social LIFE.

Before I get to “K,” I want to explain about “A.” The original idea was “Wi-Fi with protein.” When nomad tribes got to a new area fifteen thousand years ago they would think, “Where’s the food?” Now, in my nomadic wanderings (i.e., New York City Starbucks locations) I think, “Where is the Wi-Fi?” Wi-Fi has clearly replaced food in our minds. So Wi-Fi with protein would solve the problem, right? But here’s the issue. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how you would do it. With every idea above I can think of the next step. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all about EXECUTION. I just looked up everything I could about molecular biology on Wikipedia and I simply cannot figure out how to make Wi-Fi with protein. So I deleted that idea. No good. By the way, if you are Ridley Scott, please call me about licensing any of these ideas for a science fiction movie.