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Entrepreneurship: How does one come up with a great business idea?
KK
KK
Karl Karafiat answered:

I have three somewhat connected points on that one.

1. Ideas are overrated.
Everyone has ideas. Heck, I believe if we two would sit together for 30min we could produce 5-10 really reasonable ideas for a business. Unfortunately ideas don't do anything. They just sit around and rot. Execution is where the game gets real. How to bring an idea to life? Many services you are using where tried countless times before they succeeded. Bottom line. You can have all the great ideas in the world - what you need is the expertise, grit and angle to play them out to their potential.

2. Timing is everything
Trying to hit a small moving target with one arrow in your quiver. Thats about it. The target is your timing slot. Identify it.

3. How to generate ideas?
I use two active methods (besides reading and contemplating constantly) to generate ideas if I need to:

a. Talk to smart people. Listen. Listen more. Ask smart questions. Connect the dots.

b. Force yourself. Train your idea muscle. I came across that line of thought while following James Altucher. I believe he still sits down every morning and forces himself to write 10 Ideas down. Every morning 10 ideas. That would give you 300 a month. 3600 per year. The quantity alone should ensure that there is something of value for you or others. The trick is that it will be very hard in the beginning. Torturous. But over time easier. You'll get used to it. Its like training a muscle essentially.

Side effect: You will think a lot about ideas and over time get very good at identifying edge cases, bottlenecks etc. So you will learn to answer your initial question all by yourself just by doing that.

Hope that helps!

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