Worst idea ever

- Have you ever heard the phrase, "Think outside the box"? I'm going to teach you a technique that actually helps you think outside the box for real. I call it Worst Idea Ever. This is a super fun technique that lets you engage in the dream process in an unexpected way. Here's how it works. Step one, identify your problem to solve. Earlier, you chose the problem, so keep that in mind for this technique. Step two, come up with a list of all the worst possible ideas you can to solve your problem. Yes, I really mean this. Grab a piece of paper and pen. Set up your piece of paper by drawing two columns on your sheet. You'll write all your worst ideas on the left-side column. This may come easy for you or it can be a bit of a challenge, so I'm going to give you some prompts to help you with this. What's something that would get you fired, sent to jail, sent to the HR office, something you wouldn't want your mom to hear about, something you wouldn't want posted on social media, something you wouldn't want your closest friends to hear about it? Yeah, that's the type of ideas we're going for. Remember, this is called Worst Idea Ever. You should smile and chuckle at this. When I run this technique in person, people literally laugh out loud. It should come to that. So if you're not laughing, your ideas aren't bad enough. Push to make it worse. Now, let's move on to step three. I want you to review the list you just came up with, and I want you to consider what the opposite of those things are that could solve your problem. You're not looking for a literal opposite, but a figurative opposite for it. The idea is to see if you can solve your challenge with the fresh inspiration you came up with by considering what the opposite principles are of your worst ideas. See how many opposites you can create for each of your worst ideas. I'll give you an example of how this works so you can see it come together. My problem is I want to create a better way to host networking events. Here's one of my worst ideas to solve that. I could have each person share their most embarrassing stories and photos when they meet someone new. That's a pretty bad idea, right? So what might be the opposite idea? Remember, we're not going for literal opposites, but figurative ones. So what if people shared one of their favorite memories from their childhood or from the past year when they met each other? Or what if they shared one of their favorite stories of their favorite people? Are you getting how this activity works? It's a lot of fun and incredibly powerful. I love this tool because it allows you to reduce the pressure and stress of getting the best ideas out right away. No one ever comes to a meeting wanting to get the worst ideas out, that's what we all fear. So instead of worrying about it, you start with it and you get all the bad ideas out of the way so you can get to the real quality ones. But here's the new problem. Now that you have a lot of great ideas, how do you know which one to choose? I'll talk about that in the next video.