Episode 57: Jeremy Utley: Ideaflow- Generate as many ideas as possible

About Jeremy Utley:

My first guest on The One Percent Project this year is the exuberant Jeremy Utley. Jeremy is the Director of Executive Education at Stanford’s d.school and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering. He is a celebrated keynote speaker and co-author of the brilliant book "Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters.". Jeremy co-teaches two wonderful courses at Stanford, Leading Disruptive Innovation (d.leadership) and LaunchPad, which focus on creating real-world impact with design and innovation tools. Jeremy intended to use his time in Africa and South America as a springboard for a career in economic development when he applied to Stanford's Graduate School of Business, but a contact with the d.school while working at an Indian start-up altered his plans. He learned throughout his time as a post-graduate design fellow that how he worked was more significant than what he accomplished. Today, Jeremy works to assist individuals in transforming their established self-perceptions and learn, like him, that it is possible to contribute creatively to the world without being exceptional.

His book “Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters,” is a product of his journey in helping people develop the skill of generating new problem-solving ideas. Jeremy believes one can cultivate the habit of generating ideas with practice and techniques he explores in his book, much like any other habit. Once that is achieved, innovation flows naturally.

The conversation yielded great insights on practising the meta-skill of idea generation, the novel concepts of idea ratio, idea quota, and innovation sandwich to facilitate business innovation in organizations, attracting and retaining innovative people, finding better problems to solve, and much more.

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Key Highlights:

  • Quantity over Quality: Jeremy says that the quality of ideas is a function of the quantity of ideas. Quantity is more important than quality, as quantity leads to quality. When we think about ideas or come up with ideas, we only think about good, which limits the variability of our thinking. Variability and volume are two key drivers in producing great outcomes. The challenge is that people produce many bad outcomes, but most just want good. They try to get rid of the bad, and in doing so, they undermine their ability to generate good. If you want to get quality, focus on quantity.

  • Judge Later: Jeremy discusses that research proves that people aren’t good multi-taskers. If we are trying to generate and evaluate simultaneously, we do both poorly, and the net output is zero. It is better to generate ideas without evaluation and self-criticism simultaneously. Ideas can be separately evaluated in the future for best outcomes.

  • Every Problem is an Idea’s Problem: According to Jeremy, a problem is that for which there is no answer. What needs to be done in that case? The answer is that lots of ideas are needed to solve that problem. It’s fundamentally, the way to discover the answer is to generate lots of ideas.

  • What’s Idea Ratio? Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling* once famously said, “to have a good idea, you need to have a lot of ideas.” Based on that, the idea ratio is meant to demonstrate the kind of volume of material needed to succeed. Research at Stanford suggests that to get to one commercially successful outcome; one needs to start with about two thousand ideas. The truth is ‘multiple orders of magnitude more.’ That’s the ‘idea ratio.’ One needs a couple of thousand ideas to get to a good one. If you want to bring breakthroughs to market routinely, you need to generate thousands of ideas as a part of your team practice in life.

  • Ideaflow’s correlation with the Success of an Organization: Jeremy says that organizations tend to sunset because the problems they’re solving are no longer relevant or the process of solving the problem becomes irrelevant. Companies that do a good job of framing the problem to be solved and delivering and updating solutions to it are high-idea flow organizations, and those are the organizations that persist over the long term.

  • Creativity and Idea Quota: Jeremy says that creativity is the capacity. It’s just like learning to play the piano or another language. It’s the art of learning to solve problems with novel solutions. Everyone can be creative. Jeremy’s favourite definition of the word creative comes from a seventh grader in Ohio who said, “Creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of.” This can be done in any arena, whether it is writing an email or delivering a sales presentation. To practice a skill or a capacity and to grow a capacity is to attend to it regularly. And very simply, the way to practice creativity is to practice doing more than the first thing you think of. This Jeremy calls an idea quota, where you articulate a problem that you know you need to solve every day, and instead of thinking of “the right answer,” try to come up with ten answers. When we exercise our thinking muscles, it gradually becomes reflexive, and ideas start to flow naturally.

  • Why not Hackathons? Hackathons drive innovation but are not an effective way to develop thinking capability. Most hackathons can be an intense workout in bringing new ideas. But running a hackathon for innovation is not any more than holding a race for building health and fitness capability. They are different things. For most people and organizations, innovation equals the hackathon. That is a flawed understanding and tantamount to saying fitness is equal to race.

  • Innovation Sandwich over Brainstorming: The typical approach to brainstorming is to get into a room, define the problem, come up with solutions, and select the solution to proceed with the next step. Jeremy, in his book, suggests an alternative method known as the innovation sandwich. Research suggests that all those things should not happen at the same time. Innovation Sandwich has four parts. Part one: send the prompt to the distribution list or the invite list in advance and give them time to consider the prompt themselves. Part two: people arrive at a room to share and build on one another’s ideas, not criticizing and not deciding on the solution. Part three: instead of deciding at the end, tell the group that we’re going to decide when we meet next week. Then part four is coming back together and discussing the ideas we generated in the first meeting and the potentially better ideas that have come to us in the intervening period.

  • On identifying, recruiting, and retaining innovative people: What can one do to retain a creative team? Foreground volume and options as an important part of their team’s process. In attracting talent, it should be made clear that the organization is the kind of place where creative work is valued. It also comes down to how you are positioned in the market, what people are saying about working for you, and what kinds of job descriptions you are posting. There are ways to convey that creativity matters and is measured, valued, and nourished in the organization. Attracting is more about communicating that clearly. If you do a good job of nourishing creativity, retention and attraction tend to take care of themselves.

  • How to Search for Better Problems to Solve? Talk to customers and understand their lives, where they are, the problems they are trying to solve, and the major focus in their life. Keeping a bug list, as advised by Bob McKim, also helps. If you keep a bug list, you become attuned to opportunities in a way that somebody who is not attuned to problems just doesn’t.

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Entrepreneur.com: How to generate 100s of ideas in 1 hour?

In this conversation, he talks about:

00:00 Intro
03:01 When it comes to creativity, why is quantity more important than quality?
04:28 Why shouldn't you be judging yourself when coming up with ideas?
05:32 What does he mean by "every problem is an idea problem"?
06:42 About Ideaflow
07:22 What is an Idea Ratio- How do you calculate it?
08:41 How does Idea flow co-relate with the success of an organisation?
09:36 How to learn creativity and turn it into a daily activity?
13:14 How to make a hackathon an effective way to drive innovation?
14:33 How to run effective brainstorming sessions?
16:46 How to identify, recruit, and retain innovative people?
19:23 How to use Ideaflow as a metric for organisations, companies and startups?
23:39 How is storytelling tied to idea flow?
24:48 What is his counter-intuitive insight from teaching entrepreneurship?
26:52 What is the nicest thing anyone has done for him?

Transcript:

Pritish: Welcome, Jeremy, to The One Percent Project.

Jeremy: Thank you for having me. It’s very nice to be here.

Pritish: A brilliant book. It’s simple, easy, and has a lot of ideas on how to look at creativity and how to generate more ideas that could be impactful and effective. So, when it comes to creativity, why is quantity more important than quality?

Jeremy: People don’t realize that the quality of your ideas is a function of the quantity of your ideas. So, it’s not that quantity is more important than quality, as quantity leads to quality. If you want to get quality, focus on quantity. Again, it’s not that it’s more important, but it’s the way to get there. I go all over the world teaching from Stanford to Tokyo or Tel Aviv or Topeka, Kansas, anywhere in the world, and when I tell people I help them come up with ideas, I always get the same response. Do you know what people say no matter where they are in the world? They say, “how do I come up with a good idea?” I said, “that’s not what I said. I said I could help you come up with ideas. Who said anything about good?” But people can’t even let themselves think of ideas without thinking of good ideas. That’s a very limiting factor to realise. When we think about ideas or come up with ideas, we only think about good, which is incredibly limiting in terms of the variability of our thinking. Variability and volume are actually two of the key drivers in producing great outcomes. The challenge is that they produce lots of bad outcomes, too, and most people just want good. They try to get rid of the bad, and by getting rid of the bad, they actually undermine their ability to generate good.

Pritish: A follow-up would be, why shouldn’t you be judging yourself while coming up with ideas?

Jeremy: It returns to this idea of filtering, and self-censorship is a real enemy of creativity. Charles Limb’s a researcher at MIT who did an MRI scan of jazz musicians and freestyle hip-hop artists. He discovered that when jazz musicians went into their creative improvisational state, what happened to the blood flow in the brain was that the part of the brain that is responsible for judgment got shut off. What enables jazz musicians to improvise is their ability not to judge simultaneously in moments of active creation. When you think about your own idea generation, if you are critical, if you are examining, it turns out we don’t do both well. We aren’t good multi-taskers. If we are trying to generate and evaluate simultaneously, we do both poorly, and the outcomes have been demonstrated repeatedly. It would be much better if you generate without evaluation and then separately if you evaluate.

Pritish: In your book, you say every problem is an idea’s problem. Double-click on that.

Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. Fundamentally what we mean there is that problems only yield to one thing, which is solutions. A problem is only a problem if you don’t have to solve it. If you have a task or something you need to get done and know how to solve it, that’s not a problem; it’s just a task you got to get done. A problem is that for which you don’t have a good answer or answer. So, when we say every problem is an ideas problem, we mean that you realise a problem is something for which you don’t have a good answer. Then you can say well, what do I do when I don’t have any answer? The answer is that I need lots of ideas. That’s what I mean by every problem being an idea’s problem. It’s fundamentally, the way to discover the answer is to generate lots of ideas.

Pritish: Based on that, let’s get into the book, Ideaflow. Tell us the hypothesis behind it, how it came through, and what it solves.

Jeremy: The basic idea with Ideaflow is that you need a volume of ideas, and you need to be having them, generating them, and testing them routinely. Picture a flowing river with a constant stream of new ideas and experiments. It is so important because there are always new problems to solve. It’s not as if we exist in a static world without change and disruption. Changes, disruptions, and new problems are continuous. Therefore, you need a continuous practice of generating novel solutions and testing them to find their fitedness with the problems that haven’t emerged. In Ideaflow, the notion is that how many ideas are you coming up with over a period of time? How many can you come up with? How many do you come up with? That’s a simple way to measure Ideaflow.

Pritish: In the book, you also have an idea ratio. How do you calculate that?

Jeremy: The idea ratio is meant to demonstrate the kind of volume of material needed to succeed. We’ve talked about you need many ideas to get a good idea. Linus Pauling once famously said, “to have a good idea, you need to have a lot of ideas.” But the question is, how many is a lot, Linus? He had two Nobel Prize awards, and he would have almost won a third Nobel Prize if he had discovered the double helix structure of DNA before Watson and Crick. What are a lot of ideas? How many do you need to get to those three potential Nobel Prize-winning ideas?  What astounds people as the research at Stanford suggests, to get to one commercially successful outcome, you need to start with about two thousand ideas, and that is shocking to most people. Most people think they need twenty to thirty ideas to get to the one that works. The truth is its ‘multiple orders of magnitude more.’ That’s what we call the ‘idea ratio.’ You need a couple of thousand ideas to get a good one. That doesn’t mean that before you do anything, stop and come up with the two thousand ideas. That’s not what we are saying. It means that if you want to bring breakthroughs to market routinely, you need to generate thousands of ideas as a part of your team practice in life.

Pritish: How does Ideaflow correlate to the success of an organization?

Jeremy: Ideation is the fountain of youth for an organization. Organizations tend to sunset because the problems they’re solving are no longer relevant or the way they solve the problem is no longer relevant. Western Union, I don’t even know if they’re still a company, but the reason that they have declined is that we don’t need ? anymore and now, payments by check cashing are going down in certain parts of the population. If you look at Blockbuster, they thought that they were a rental store. They didn’t realise that they are a ‘watching movies at home’ store or a ‘watching movies at home provider.’ So, they didn’t do a good job updating their solution to the problem or framing the problem. Companies that do a good job of framing the problem to be solved and delivering and updating solutions to it are high-idea flow organizations, and those are the organizations that persist over the long term.

Pritish: You argue that creativity can be learned and turned into daily practice. Can you double-click on that?

Jeremy: Creativity is the capacity. It’s just like saying the piano can be learned. No one would argue that you can learn the piano, or no one would argue that I just can’t. They may not exert effort or attention. That’s their prerogative, but it’s not unlearnable. Another language is not unlearnable. Creativity is the same way. It’s the art of solving problems with novel solutions. It’s a learnable skill just like anything else and a capacity just like anything else. The whole division of the world into creatives and non-creatives is absurd and we have this problem we see it in society. There is creative industries and non-creative industries, there is creative and non-creative companies, creative divisions and non-creative divisions, creative teams and non- creative teams, creative individuals and non-creative individuals. So, from the highest level of the industry to all the way down to the individual, we have bifurcated the world. But, it's a superficial and unnecessary and false bifurcation. The truth is everyone can be creative. I guess ultimately it comes down to what does it mean to be creative. My favourite definition of the word creative comes from a seventh grader in Ohio, middle of America. She said, “creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of.” Isn’t that beautiful? Creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of; I love that it has no reference to the arts. Often when we think of creativity we think of the arts. This seventh grader said that it is doing more than the first thing you think of. You can do that in any arena. I am trying to write an email, what should the subject line be? If I want to be creative, do more than one subject line to an email. If I am delivering a sales presentation and I want to be creative what does that mean? Have more than one calls to action and try them all. And then what is meant to practice that you are talking about. Practice is a learnable skill. Just as the pianist plays their scale, my daughters take piano lessons and play scales all the time. Swimmers swim laps, they are swimming laps regularly, right? To practice a skill or a capacity and to grow a capacity is to attend to it regularly. And very simply, the way to practice creativity is to practice doing more than the first thing you think of. We essentially call that an idea quota, where every day you articulate a problem that you know you need to solve, and instead of doing the default thing, which is to think of “the right answer,” which, you know for very few of us are there are we facing a problem that only has one answer. We are not mathematicians. Most of us are facing problems that have a hundred possible answers. An idea quota says that instead of coming up with the right answer, try to come up with ten answers. Crazy, ordinary, brilliant, stupid, illegal doesn’t matter. Shift the goal from quality to quantity. As you practice that muscle, you naturally find yourself in that reflex. In the meeting, you are less precious when someone comes up with ideas. If somebody asks a question, you are willing to throw something out there because you’ve learned something critical: the following. There is no cost to saying a bad idea. None. And yet we don’t do it because we are afraid of what people are going to say or what we will think. So, we don’t grow the muscle; we don’t grow the ability. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Pritish: I took away the point of writing multiple subject lines, and in a given period of time, as mentioned in the book, it’s brilliant. Why do you think hackathons are not an effective way to drive innovation?

Jeremy: It’s not that they are not an effective way to drive innovation. It’s that they are not an effective way to develop the capability. Hackathons can be, you know, to have an intense workout or to have a race or sprint, that’s another way to the hackathon, is great. It can actually push people who have trained and exercised. But a race is an exceptional thing to do from time to time among people who have trained. But if you get a bunch of people who haven’t trained and haven’t stretched or aren’t strong or flexible, and you tell them to race, you will have many injuries. I think there’s something like that with the hackathon or a sprint. People are pulling hamstrings, the proverbial hamstring, because they are sprinting and they’ve never stretched. They’ve never done any warm-up or any kind of strength training. And so, we say that judicious use of a sprint is great; hackathons can be great. We leverage them ourselves. But don’t mistake running a hackathon for innovation any more than you would mistake holding a race for building health and fitness capability. Those are very different things. For most people and organizations, innovation equals the hackathon. That would be tantamount to saying fitness is equal to race.

Pritish: How should we run effective brainstorming sessions? Many organizations do brainstorming, and a lot of innovation leaders run brainstorming sessions. What are your suggestions for running effective brainstorming sessions?

Jeremy: We have written a full piece in Entrepreneur magazine about this that really breaks it down a lot. So, folks who are interested, I’m sure you can provide it in the show note. I think one of the simplest ideas, and perhaps the most important, is what we call an innovation sandwich, where we say that when you are in a brainstorm, everything doesn’t happen in that moment. So that typical approach of brainstorming is we all get into a room, and then we say what the problem is, and we come up with solutions, we make a selection, then we commission action or proceed with the next step. What we say with the innovation sandwich is that research suggests that all those things should not happen simultaneously. Let’s break them out over time; specifically, we want to alternate between individual work and consideration and group work and consideration. So, the way to do that is called four parts. Part one: send the prompt to the distribution list or the invite list in advance and give them time to consider the prompt themselves. Part two: people arrive at a room to share and build on one another’s ideas, not criticizing and not deciding on the solution. You have to do some work there to create psychological safety. Part three: instead of deciding at the end, tell the group that we’re going to decide when we meet next week, which will be part four. But in the time between now and the time we meet next, what we want to invite you to do is continue to consider the problem and consider our belief that the best ideas probably are going to occur to us collectively between now and then. We haven’t thought of them yet. If we all collectively agree that we are going to continue to marinate on and consider the problem we’re trying to solve, it’s highly likely, that we are all going to think of better ideas between now and our next meeting. Then part four is coming back together and discussing the ideas we generated in the first meeting and the potentially better ideas that have come to us in the intervening period.

Pritish: How do we identify, recruit, and retain innovative people?

Jeremy: Let’s start with retaining, which is a very interesting aspect of this. I think one of the challenges for folks who enjoy creating is not feeling like they have the space to create or that they have permission to create. One of the simplest things you can do as a leader, if we talk about the leader’s job, is to enable work to happen, in this case, to enable creative work to happen. One of the important things you can do is draw the creativity out of your team and cultivate and nurture it. What that looks like? Again, going back to the seventh grader’s definition of creativity, what that looks like is when somebody comes to you and says here’s my idea; what’s the creative leader’s response? What’s the response of a leader seeking to cultivate creativity? What else are we trying? That’s great. What else are we trying? I want to see a few more. Robert McKim, one of the legendary creators of the design program at Stanford, famously said that anytime the student would ask for feedback, he would say, “show me three,” which is a really powerful leadership technique if you think about it. Astro Teller*, who is the head of Moonshot to Google’s X facility, said he always asks people for five solutions. Whenever they try to solve a problem, he asks for five. If you dig into it, he will tell you that many times, the team might try to game this system. They try to bring four dummy ideas and one really good idea. He said he has observed that the dummy idea seems every bit as good as their good idea. But forcing them to go to the process of generating alternatives actually leads to better results. So, what’s one thing you can do to retain a creative team? Foreground volume and foreground options as an important part of your team’s process. Now attracting is a totally different question: Is it clear that this is the kind of place where creative work is valued? And there are all sorts of things that come down to how you are positioned in the market, what people are saying about working for you, and what kinds of job descriptions you are posting. There are ways to convey that creativity matters here, and we measure, value, and nourish it. Attracting is more about communicating that clearly. To me, the question, I mean, we already talked about nourishing but retaining; if you do a good job of nourishing creativity, my observation is that not only retention but also attraction tends to take care of itself.

Pritish: How can we use Ideaflow as a metric for our organizations, our companies, and start-ups?

Jeremy: What you want to do is you want to be in a routine of generating volume. For start-ups, crafting and commissioning experiments is one of the key behaviours. One of the most important things a start-up founder can do is run experiments and be very clever about how they devise and resource them. If you are committed to experimentation as a means of learning and experimentation as a means of data creation and validation, you very quickly start to realise that you need more ideas. I got to have more ideas if I am running experiments, I need to have more ideas as a kind of case in point here, I would say, generally speaking, if I am talking to an organization, I am trying to help them assess what I've seen is there I will say just answer this question, “which you feel a bigger need?” You don’t have enough ideas, so you need more ideas, or you have a ton of ideas and need to know which are good ideas. I’ve never heard somebody say I don’t have any ideas. Everybody thinks they have tons of ideas. Everyone says you know what we need; we need to know which of our tons of ideas are good. So, I go great. I am not voting; that’s fine. Let’s build a routine and a robust ability to experiment. You know what? Any organization realises they don’t have nearly as many ideas as they thought they did if they commit to experimentation. I don’t have to convince them of that. They start running experiments and realize they need many more ideas. So, to me, a robust practice of experimentation also requires rigorous ideation practice.

Pritish: How do you search for better problems to solve?

Jeremy: One of the things you do is talk to customers. Sounds crazy, but you actually get in your customer's life; you go where they are, and you aren’t just talking about your establishment, your story, your restaurant, and your service center. You go into their lives, where they are, and you seem to understand the problems they are trying to solve and the main points in their life. And not only what’s the friction of an experience you have created but what’s the problem they are trying to solve. That tends to be Robert McKim, whom I mentioned earlier, who often said, “show me three,” he also told students to keep a bug list. This is in the 1960s, that’s long before computer programming came into common parlance. He’s not talking about computer engineering; he is talking about keeping a list of the things that bug you, the things that bother you, and you write them down. If you keep a bug list, you become attuned to opportunities in a way that somebody who is not attuned to problems just doesn’t.

Pritish: What examples do you have of innovative companies in recent times? Are they companies that were innovative and probably have stopped innovation, and what are the present-day innovative companies?

Jeremy: Obviously, I’ve seen people who fall from grace, GE, IBM, Kodak, Nokia, BlackBerry, all storied organizations. The list is actually really long of organizations that were innovative and then fell from grace. I think that we’re in a huge time of upheaval and disruption. I look at what Amazon has done is pretty incredible, but they are in the middle of some woes themselves. I looked at what Netflix has done, and same thing. I love studying the history, the press, studying what organizations are doing now. There’s a chapter on our book website which is free for anyone to download; the website is www.ideaflow.design. The chapter is called ‘How to think like Bezos and Jobs?’ There are seven techniques that Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos routinely used to stir up their thinking and deliver breakthrough thinking. So, they are a couple of heroes of mine, but I think nobody can afford to remain complacent. No one can afford to be static or stagnant; you’ve got to continue. It’s almost like swimming upstream: if you’re not moving forward, you are moving backward.

Pritish: How is storytelling tied to Ideaflow?

Jeremy: It’s a good question. There are a few things. One is that if you want to engender enthusiastic collaboration, you must have a compelling narrative or story. If you want to get people to work with you, you must have a story; that’s critical. Specifically, part one of the most important aspects of the story that most people neglect or don’t appreciate is that there has to be rich emotion. We want to be sterile, logical, reasonable, and emotion-free in business. It turns out, from the brain’s perspective, cognitively speaking, emotion centers are where our decisions are made. The rational brain doesn’t make decisions as my colleague Robert Shafer at Stanford likes to joke that the rational brain has been given to us to rationalise decisions we make elsewhere. It is hilarious because we are not reasoning creatures but feeling creatures. Our reason tends to rationalise what we have already felt. If you want to enlist the enthusiastic participation of collaborators or enthusiastic engagements among customers, you’ve got to find ways of harnessing emotions. The story is one of the best ways to do that.

Pritish: What is your counterintuitive insight of teaching entrepreneurship for the last thirteen years?

Jeremy: From entrepreneurship especially, I would say little data trumps big data. So many people value big data; you hear a lot about big data and the value of large data sets. We can be deceived; however, if we think about the number of data points is the only thing that matters. The question is the quality of the data. To use an example, I used to be a management consultant, and I often found myself running surveys in malls and things like that. I found that I can, by force of my personality and even being pathetic, approach you in the mall food court and say, “excuse me, Mr, I hate to bother you during dinner, but I just had a couple of questions for you. My boss has this idea, and I was wondering whether you think it’s any good. Do you think this is a good idea?” What you say is, “sure, buddy, tell your boss he’s got a great idea.” Now I put it on the clipboard; you said yes. So, I can do that ten thousand times, that’s a big data and I come to use the boss and I say boss nine thousand and nine hundred people that I talked to said that you had a good idea you go wow nine thousand. Big data is not good data. The question is, what’s the quality of the data you are creating? And the entrepreneurs we work with rarely have the resources or capacity to generate large data sets. We are trying to get them to generate high-quality, highly credible data sets. The way to do that is by means of experimentation: craft, clever, scrappy experiments that yield meaningful proprietary information that the entrepreneur can use to build conviction in a particular direction.

Pritish: Before we close, what is the nicest thing anybody has done for you?

Jeremy: I don’t know if this is the nicest, but I would say I have a mentor in my life who has spent countless hours on the phone with me, talking about challenges I’m facing, empathizing, caring, and reaching out. As far as I can tell, there is nothing in it for this person, yet they are so faithful in their encouragement, perspective, and wisdom. I continue to be astounded by it.

Pritish: You will be surprised how often most of the guests have a similar answer. It’s amazing that how almost everybody comes up saying that they want to thank a mentor who selflessly has actually contributed hours of their time.

Jeremy: Maybe just build on that and say a little bit more about what I shared earlier because I think it’s useful: I wasn’t always thoughtful or deliberate about cultivating mentors, I wasn’t always in my life. I valued it as an idea, but if you asked me who mentors me, I would say I don’t know. And someone wise, a mentor of sorts, told me that I should be spending, on average, one day per month with my mentors, and at that time, that was a huge aspiration and, so to say, eight hours a month. Let’s say two hours a week to break it down if there are four weeks. Now, look at my calendar, are there two hours this week with a mentor or a few mentors? And when I put it like that, I realised I am in a mentor drought. I don’t ever meet with a mentor. So, it was a real epiphany for me. This was a few years ago. I would say I haven’t instrumented it precisely; I can’t say that I always spent eight hours a month with a mentor or something like that, but I would say that kind of encouragement might be like meta encouragement. We say Ideaflow is solving the problem of solving problems. It’s like a meta-skill that unlocks all these others, in so far as mentorship is important, helping someone see how important mentorship is actually like a meta-skill. So, for me, that kind of that comment sent me on a development tour. The thing is, nobody is going to ask you to be their mentee.  Nobody is sitting around offering a mentorship. It has to come from underneath, as it were. Mentorship isn’t imposed from above; it’s requested from underneath. You cannot ask anyone to be your mentor because that’s intimidating or pathetic. But to say I really value you, I’d love to I would like to spend some time chatting with you, and if that conversation goes well, I would really love to follow up on that conversation and talk about things as they have unfolded. That would be natural; it doesn’t have to be weird. But no one is arranging mentors for you. It's a responsibility you have to take for yourself, and maybe you could say the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for me is inspired me to take responsibility for finding mentors for myself.

Pritish: Brilliant. Jeremy, that’s a great place to close this conversation. Thanks for being on the show.

Jeremy: It’s been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.



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