Some Ideas Are Worth Having Even If They Never Happen.

Good morning. 33 days today. I'm Dean Jackson. I've been journaling for over 30 years now and I am going through journal by journal sharing insights and ideas that I've learned so far in these 30 years.

So, every morning we come out here and have breakfast at the same place. I open up my journal and I find something interesting to share right here and one of the things I think the big lesson of this is being creative. Just allowing yourself to creatively think about things that may never come into the world. But the exercise of doing the things without constraint, without limiting or trying to censor yourself can have a big downstream impact.

So, I mentioned that at this period in my life, 1996, I've been Pagan and I were traveling all over the country doing big real estate seminars with Joe Stump and we would we were like flexing our creative wings at this point, right? We're learning and seeing all the different ways that we could apply the things that we're learning, especially to business ideas. So, this one of the pages in this journal is titled Eben's brilliant idea number 1009. And we would come up with book ideas or business ideas or things that were just kind of challenging us to come up and and uh flex our creativity.

But the general idea here was that popular psychology and opinion is that you can't change other people and it's all about changing yourself. But not so, you really can change the other person. So, when you take a contrarian position like that, like how to change the one you love, I see in this the seed because I exercise that thinking muscle, this was the seed of stop your divorce, which seems like a contrarian thing of what you seemingly getting what you want. We ended up I did a book with a with a hypnotist called the hypnotize your husband, which again was in that vein of how to change the one you love.

It's an underlying thing that we all really want to do is we all want to modify other people's behavior so they do the things that we want them to do. But this was the funny thing. So, we outlined how this could work. We'd thought about 101 ways to change the one you love and we thought what would be really neat is if we asked a hundred or hundreds of women what they thought they would love to change about the one they love.

Can you imagine like doing at a mall or in a park or somewhere anywhere? You could probably do this on Facebook now at just putting up a thing. If you could change one thing about your husband or about anybody else, what would you change? And then we thought, you know, these books could literally write themselves if we did the research right.

So, we'd ask a hundred or more people some simple questions and then have a panel of professionals get together in a focus group setting to kind of strategize over how have change the behavior that people are looking to change. So, we thought about, you know, who is who are professional change agents? So, a dog trainer, and a lawyer, a psychologist, a teacher, a drill sergeant, a priest, a hypnotist. And you start to see what would be really interesting is just to ask these people in their professional opinion, what would you do to get somebody to change this behavior?

And we could present the survey results in the book, have a cartoonist do an appropriate cartoon for each behavior, graphically provocative, slightly satirical. And so, you can visualize this book as a as a gift, as a funny kind of situation, cuz this came from us thinking about wha- what kinds of books do people buy? Like, often people buy books as gifts, or they buy books as for someone else. And sometimes the more provocative titles are ones that are that have the biggest impact.

It's not about the best book being the winner, it's sometimes the most provocative idea. When you think about Mark Manson's book of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a [ __ ] that book, 100% of the success of that book is based on a provocative title. There are 20 other books that would share better and more useful information inside of them, but they're presented in a way that's not as provocative as a title like that. So, I still I think this idea and and the importance there's a lot of ideas in my journals that never see the light of day.

But, the essence of doing them that's almost like um musician or a band just riffing or jamming and thinking and out of it may come the seed of something that you turn into something. Um so, I think there's a lot to be said for that. Another one of those ideas that we came up with was what we had a working title of calling the tube of joy. And we were at the airport and we thought a kiosk with these nice tubes that and I mean look at these like engineering drawings of how you can present this merchandising situation of looking at how to put stuff in a tube that people could give as a gift and we thought you could have four different, you know, select a single target market, a golf tube with some golf balls and a golf towel and tees or a ball repair uh um tool or a tennis tube with things that tennis players would use and a tennis magazine, a video, strings, grip wraps.

You could have a wedding tube, a baby tube, a birthday tube, a anniversary tube. People are like impulse purchasing something that they're they need a gift right away and there it is and that so much of what we were doing in the journals is just having fun and not caring what's going to come out of it because the seeds of those could turn into uh something else. So, that's my encouragement for today. Just be creative.

Just let your mind go. Think about what if without any constraints on yourself. And sometimes you may find something that turns into something in the real world.