How To Come Up With Good Ideas | Mark Rober | TEDxYouth@ColumbiaSC

So today I'm going to try to answer a question that I get asked a lot and I always get an unpleasant answer and the question is: how do you

come

up with your

ideas

? Disclaimer, I don't mean to do that. be an incredible creative genius, right, I'm a data point, but maybe something I can say from my experience can help you in something you do in your life and the reason I was able to ask this as I mentioned was that three years ago and This was my Halloween Costume and it had an iPad in the front and back.

If you do a FaceTime chat, it looks like you have a hole in your body, which is cool. My favorite part of the costume was the Halloween party you're at. it's kind of dumb, I could always play Angry Birds, so since we have this microphone, I basically posted that video and it went viral, three million views overnight on the front page of CNN, the main complaint though is cool idea bro , but I don't have $1200 for the Halloween costume, so basically my challenge was to create a cooler Halloween costume that wasn't so expensive, right? While I was working my day job as a NASA engineer on the Curiosity rover, that was about three months before we sent it to Mars at night.

I was working on this concept so I called the company Digital Duds and this is how it works: you play a video on your phone and you slide it on like you would a shirt, so it's a really cheap, yeah, sorry, it's a little big, it's a really cheap implementation of this concept, right, you buy a $20 t-shirt and it's a free app, yeah, sorry, it's very big, so what I basically learned from this experience is that I like this feeling of publishing something and get people to watch it and get that feedback and make it look like you know your creative efforts are appreciated, so I decided that every month I would try to post a YouTube video about a creative idea and so we started a YouTube channel and now it has much more than we thought at the beginning: 42 million visits to the site and 100 thousand subscribers, which is great, certainly not a cake, but it is an exciting opportunity, so here are just a couple of real examples. quick

ideas

we put on the channel, so this is like if you put a GoPro on a ceiling fan upside down, it's like ghetto bullet time from the matrix, so this is just a GoPro spinning around you, you play the footage and it actually has this. cool looking effect or this is if you place the FLIR like an infrared on the front of an iPhone.

I'm actually stealing this woman's pin because I discovered that certain keyboards, if you touch them, leave a thermal signature so you can see where they were touched correctly, so I posted this video saying that the bad guys can use this simple solution: just rub your hand all over the keys when you're done and then it's just a meaningless thermal signature. Another idea is no. -mix watermelon smoothie so you just get a hanger to punch it's really refreshing and a little creepy I stumbled upon that and finally this idea if you use your phone's front camera and then take it to the zoo and you put like in front of the monkey exhibit the monkeys see it and they're really interested so you get these really cool pictures with just a dumb phone and before you get smug and laugh at the monkeys I actually repeated this experiment with higher order primates like Well, some of the videos also have sound, so if we could turn up the sound a little bit, that would be nice, but in the future, thank you.

So back to square one, how do you

come

up with your ideas? I think that's what people really ask. when they ask this is how can I have more

good

ideas, like how can I be more creative, because there is this myth and I like it because it's about addressing Smith head on, you know people are creative or you're not it's like it's a gift bestowed from above, you either have

good

ideas or you don't and that's not true in my opinion, curiosity or creativity is like a muscle that you develop, so for the next few minutes I just want to talk about things like basically how you develop that muscle so there are three steps that I feel like I figured out for step one we're going to go to the ancient city of Alexandria in 300 BC.

C. they did something interesting here every time a ship entered their port. They would come down hard on him, but the soldiers weren't looking for gold or spices and one of his books they took from the library and copied it and as a result they got this amazing knowledge: This database is like you know Wikipedia. from 3300 BC. C. of all these experiences of people around the world and we had people like Euclid and Archimedes who studied there and made incredible progress because of this approach, they were very curious about the world around them, they observed it and tried to solve it. these you know these problems there is this this quote that I really like the most exciting phrase to hear in science the one that heralds new discoveries is not Eureka but it is fun and the key to all good adventures if you think about it, even the The first step of the scientific method is observation.

Start by observing the world around you. A great example of this is the microwave oven. This was first invented by a guy called Percy Spencer and he was working on a radar tube that a mr. Goodbar in his pocket and all of a sudden the thing melted, which seems incredibly dangerous now that we know about microwaves, but he saw this thing melting and he was like, well, that's weird, that's funny, he had one of those moments funny and then he noticed that. and I went back and did some research and found out what was going on and from there we got the microwave, so I think the first step to being more creative is to be curious and if you think about the most creative group of people on earth, I think probably Whether it's kids like my son, they could pick up a bucket and play with it for like three hours and that's amazing with kids because they're always questioning and looking and observing and making connections about the world around them.

I think we kind of get hit like in the school system and when your guys get older, a lot of people say, "Oh, I'm just not creative, right, that's not what you said when you were in kindergarten, I think that's what." further". The creative people I know I respect are those who have been able to maintain that childlike approach and worldview. Johnny I is Apple's chief designer, a brilliant guy, and he says that for him it's almost like a curse. when he looks at objects and designs and stuff, he always asks: well, why is he that way and not this way?

It's like you can't turn that off. He always asks that question. Apple has this amazing way of making products, there you have it. It just seemed different, right? and this is a great quote about how the difficulty is not so much in developing new ideas but in escaping from old ones and a lot of times you know you imagine almost like there's a hill and everyone is trying to optimize and get to the finish line. At the top of this hill, Apple can sometimes step back and just say, "Well, there's another hill over here that's really big," so the hall

mark

of good design is when people can look at it and say : "Wow, how did you think of that?" that before, when the design in retrospect seems really obvious, I had an opportunity like this about a year ago, I was cooking a frozen burrito in my kitchen and I'm like microwaves haven't changed, I felt like for 40 years, I'm like what?

Could we do it differently since humans mainly depend on our sense of sight? So I thought since my infrared glasses are pretty cheap now, it would be awesome if you could put your burrito in the microwave and you could see it cook properly so that with a heat map on the front of the microwave you could visually see what was done, but it gets better because you could put your bowl of soup in the microwave and then go upstairs and be working and then after four minutes it's gone. It's done, you don't see all white, you just like to add 30 seconds, so it's like a different approach, right, and this one actually has a happy ending because I got a patent on this and I'm working with a couple of big guys to get it at a Walmart near you so sometime if you ever see this buy it.

I don't care how much it costs, okay, buy it, so that's the first step, be curious, so the second step, I think look at this thing called the marshmallow challenge, this guy named Tom Wu Jack does this, he He's done it about 70 times and what he does is he challenges people: it's a little bit of spaghetti, some duct tape, some string and a marshmallow and he says in 18 minutes, why do you build the tallest tower you can with the marshmallow on top and the fascinating thing about this is that he's done it many times and there's a group that consistently beats CEOs and lawyers and businessmen and that group is kindergartners seriously and the reason The reason why he explains it is because you know the adults.

Look at the situation and first of all, the first three minutes are like a power struggle over who's going to be the leader, and then once they realize that, they start building something, but they don't actually put the marshmallow in until the same moment. it ends at minute 17 and the marshmallows are deceptively heavy and then the whole structure folds and I have nothing left with like a minute left, while the kindergarteners, on the other hand, just start building right away , there is no power struggle, and the kindergarteners put out marshmallows instead. in some, on average, they put it four to five times, so about four minutes in they are already putting the marshmallow on top and in a way testing it, and because of that, because they are testing early and often able to come to a solution that actually works and literally consistently the board does it better, so I call the second step kind of a grind and for every similar design that you see from Apple behind the scenes, there are like forty prototypes of devices that you can never see Thomas Edison said he came up with ten thousand light bulbs before he found one that worked.

James Dyson, the Cyclone salesman, said he had five hundred five thousand one hundred and twenty-seven failed prototypes before he had a microphone, you know? a vacuum cleaner that actually sucks, sucks, in the sense that it sucks, was good, right, it was like a success, the point is, whatever you do, do it like you're like a sculptor, just sculpt if you're like a sculptor. you know, paint, paint a lot, if you like photography, don't say I'm not a creative photographer, just go out and take a lot of pictures, fail and learn basically what you're doing and you know that by doing this, in a way discover, you know that you fail and you learn and improve.

It's interesting to know that the guy who invented the microwave, you know, other people had the melted chocolate bar in their pockets, but he was the first person to do something about it. and I actually have that kindergarten-like approach of curiosity and trying to figure out what was going on there, so I actually had an experience where I implemented the steps one by one a little bit ago and I remember reading when I was a kid you know people go out of their way to hit turtles more than snakes, which always seemed interesting to me, so I did an experiment, so I was curious and I went out and stood on the side of the I walk alternating like snakes and turtles. and then I collected data in a lab coat to make it look official and it turns out my hypothesis was wrong so actually people gravitated toward snakes more than turtles but there are turtle killers among us who were wrong but The interesting thing is that some really cool people, like this lady, she was very nice, she started throwing plums at my rubber snake, you encouraged it to get out of the way, it didn't move, it didn't move at the end, or this guy, This guy, yeah, he was like me.

I thought she was trying to get the tarantula to safety, that's cool, but then when she got this car she just ran him over anyway or this guy was cool, like he was saving the snake. I was like, that's great and he's like, oh, that's fake. I'll take this home and give it to my wife or something and, hey, that's my snake. I'm here trying to do some science, so in retrospect I think my mistake was trying to appeal to their love of science, that was the tune out, but this is a great example of when I told people I did this and I posted a video of it, you know people like to wait, so how you use it, you crouch in the bushes for like 10 hours, like shooting car videos and stuff.

I say yes, and to a lot of people it's like you're weird, you're crazy, but that's the point, like part of the creative process is just putting in the effort, you know, putting in the time, so for step three. This is supposed to be blank, so for step three I think it's important to think about our general concept in society of what creativity is. People have noticed this, but with the Romans we actually get the word genius from them, but for them. what a genius was was like a troll that lived in your walls andat night when you wanted to have your artwork that you were working on, I would go out and sprinkle like creative dust on your artwork and this had an interesting impact because If you were really good, you're kind of humble about it because you're like, Well , I just had a really good temper, you know, that lives on my wall, but if your work kinda sucks, then you know that's what you do, what could you?

Is my genius a little stupid? So it's like there's something you could do and the kind of benefit of thinking about it this way, it gets you out, you know, it gets you out of there a little bit and I think that's the truth. It lies somewhere between the way we think about genius and the way the Romans knew it. I don't think you even partially know that there is at least a little. trolls that live in your walls, but it's important to know that part of the creative process is simply about getting lucky. There is an interesting book called "Good to Great" and this author interviewed a group of CEOs and ten of them supposedly like these companies. that will never fail, incredible and she tried to find it, he tried to find the common thread, what connected them all and what I appreciated is that all ten of them mentioned that you know a lot about what happened, they only got a couple.

They were lucky, some were lucky, there was certainly some skill involved, but a lot of it had to do with luck and as humans we don't like that as we try to assign a reason for things, there's a fancy term. It's called hindsight bias, which is when we look back at points that are actually random, try to connect them and create a narrative like an example, like if there were 1,024 of us in this room and I gave each of them a quarter cents. ten times statistically one of you would get 10 tails in a row and what usually happens is the mids kick in and then you know it's like look at Kevin like you know he got ten tails in a row look at his flipping technique, do you?

You know? his fingers and the way his wrist was and how his elbow and his posture, that's what we do, it's funny to even go back to that point with a nice demotion of the ten companies, two of the CEO he described for Circuit CEOs City and Fannie Mae because The book was written about ten years ago, which we know or didn't work out that well, so whether you call it luck, karma, or blessings, I think it's helpful to think that there is a part of this process that is a little out of place. of your control because then if you're Thomas Edison, you've built 9999, you know, light bulbs, you don't say, I give up because you realize that you trust the process, check out James Dyson, you build 5000 vacuum cleaners, it's like trusting the process and move forward. and I'm not saying don't misunderstand that about being creative, it's just a matter of luck, but my point is that when you are creative, you observe and you know, you question your world while you work hard and you build it early and it often increases your chances of getting lucky, you're basically giving yourself more quarters to flip so you can get 10 tails in a row, so my punchline today is that I think we're all a lot more creative than we give ourselves credit for, it's just about understanding the process, so back to square one, how do you first come up with your ideas?

The least secure answer I've ever given. I am proud to say that the key is to be curious, work hard and be lucky. you you