Good Idea! Now find a better one.

A good idea is a very simple thing. It is a concept, vision, or way of accomplishing something that is valuable to at least one human being.

And that human, that person, is key. If no person values an idea, it’s worthless. To qualify as a good idea, one person, even the idea’s conceiver, must think it’s valuable.

In other words, a good idea really isn’t all that valuable. The saying is true, Ideas are a dime-a-dozen. There have been no shortage of crackpot ideas deemed pure genius by one person. It’s a sad fact that most ideas, despite qualifying as “good”, are in fact drivel.

But to prove that our idea is the golden exception, we often develop brilliant objective measures for why our idea, our approach, our method is the greatest thing since remote garage door openers and we use these measures to prove that our idea is good, nay! Great. Ironically, the problem is we’re right! Those measures do prove that we’ve got a Great idea.

But more often than not, what we’re looking for is not a good or even great idea, it’s a lucrative idea. And an idea is lucrative not based on the idea itself, but on the benefits it produces for other people.

Quantitative benefits, emotional benefits, practical benefits. However you add it up, it’s not about the idea and it’s not about you.

The moral of the story? Don’t search far and wide for ideas. Anyone with a little creativity and some florid prose can craft a brilliant idea.

Find benefits and then look for specific ideas that can produce those specific benefits. The more lucrative the benefit you target, the greater the potential for the ideas you find.