MINING GREAT IDEAS

Nearly every week someone asks me about my writing, how I write so much or where I get my ideas. They ask: “Where do you get your ideas? And how do you keep generating so many ideas for articles, trainings, new patterns, models, etc.? How do you write so much and how do you keep writing fresh ideas?”

And often the question comes in disguised form as when people ask how many hours I sleep a night, or if I sleep! Most are surprised to hear that I get a good seven or eight hours every night. And nearly every week I come up with some new way of responding! Sometimes I say something like— “You think this is prolific? I haven’t started yet, wait till I grow up and decided that I am definitely going to become a writer!” Or, “So you want to know the secret? Okay, I steal. I read 2 or 3 hours a day and get great ideas from the great writers that I read!”

Several times recently this answer has not satisfy the questioner. They said that there had to be more. When I asked what led them to that conclusion, they talked about the synergy that I’ve created and wondered how that has come about. So if there’s more to it than just prolific reading, what is there?

Part of the answer goes back to a particular belief that I hold. I believe in mining for the best ideas by going back to the foundational and seminal writers and thinkers in an area. What is “new” is not always what is best or even what is actually new. Over the years I have found lots and lots of “new” things in Korzybski. They are “old” things if we date them from the time he penned them. And yet they are “new”— in fact, brand new—in terms of knowing the information, making the distinctions, and using them for increasing the quality of our lives. That’s why I am always out in the field mining ideas from those who have gone before. There are often incredible jewels left behind that no one has yet picked up.

When I first modeled “selling,” I first read every book in NLP, which are not all that many, then I headed to the library and had an “Oh my God” response when I saw the rows upon rows of books on sales. There were thousands of them! My next thought was, “Where do I start?” That was before everything became electronic and so at that time I could open up the back of a book and see how many times it had been checked out. Librarians back then literally stamped the date of every sign out inside the book. (And while that now seems really old fashioned, that was just back in the 1990s!) I could also look at the binding of the book to see which were the most worn. Beginning there, I would read the ones most often read and look for who they quoted again and again. Who did those authors consider a seminal thinker in that field? I would then track down those authors.

That’s when I discovered a principle that has proven useful again and again in discovering where to look for the gold. If you really want to know the current paradigm thinking in a field, find the key theorists leading that field and read them. When I first discovered NLP and took my original practitioner trainings, that’s what I did. I made it my business in the first years to read everything Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir wrote. Then I read most of Milton Erickson’s works. Yet even more formative were the actual theorists in the field of NLP— Gregory Bateson, Alfred Korzybski, and George Miller with his associates. And even later I revisited this by looking for and finding the hidden history of NLP (now in the book, Self-Actualization Psychology) and other places. And it was in tracking down the premises of NLP that I found myself right back to Maslow!

And as you might know, in 1990 after my first two readings of Korzybski’s Science and Sanity I began writing about the missing linguistic distinctions of the Meta-Model as well as some patterns that contributed to the Neuro-Linguistic approach. I’m sure others had read Korzybski, but had not seen some of the things that I found. And why not? I think because of how I read Korzybski— I read his works slowly, reflecting constantly, and looking for other things in the text that could continue to contribute to NLP.

With seminal theorists like Korzybski I read slowly, and I still do, because the writing is so “heavy, thick, and semantically loaded” with ideas. I have now read Korzybski eight times and am planning to revisit that work yet again —each time with a notebook. I have done the same with Bateson. Actually, Neuro-Semantics arose from this very mining — and led to the workshops in London with Denis Bridoux, “The Merging of the Models: General Semantics and NLP.” In the past three years, I discovered that behind Perls, Satir, and even Bateson was Abraham Maslow. He is the seminal theorist behind the whole new paradigm shift in psychology— the bright side or healthy side of human nature. More recently, moving to the application of self- actualization to business and leadership, I have been catching up reading the work of Peter Drucker. When I read his The Effective Manager I discovered where Stephen Covey got most of his ideas in Seven Habits, even many of his phrases like habits of effectiveness, first things first, etc. It was Drucker also who admitted that he was completely wrong about management and Maslow was right.

Over the past three years, I kept seeing references to Tom Peter’s classic Thriving on Chaos. I had made a mental note to find that book. I finally got that book in September and read it, then re-read it slowly. And like other seminal thinkers, here is a classic book on self-actualizing leaders and companies—although not in those words. So as I did with Peter Senge’s book in the past six Meta Reflections, so I’ll be doing with Tom Peter’s book Thriving on Chaos. It’s a great book—far before its time, a book with great ideas that still need to be broadcasted as wide and as far as we can broadcast them. So look for the results of mining in that book in some of the following Meta Reflections. And so now you know one of my secrets, which isn’t that big of a “secret,” but it is an ongoing source of discovery and one that so many in NLP have completely neglected. To our ongoing research and discovery into the structure of experience and especially excellence!