Yes, this reminds me very much of the principles written about in ‘frustrated songwriter’s handbook’ which in essence tells you to form a group of people, (a writers lodge) where everyone goes away and writes something stupid like 20 complete songs in a 24 hour period, then you all sit around together and listen to each others songs. The whole idea is that you are forcing your way past mind blocks, and it doesn’t matter if you have bad ideas because they just get turfed.

Maybe the same principles could be applied to brainstorming business ideas etc…. its the whole inverse Parkinson’s law thing I guess.

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Anyways, I started off by coming to comment on the article before getting side tracked.

The whole working backwards thing is a great idea…definitely useful for so many things…especially business…its so easy to get caught up in the excitement of starting a business that you forget what your really trying to achieve!

Yeah, being able to trash an idea that isn’t working and moving on quickly is a nice skill to develop, and one that takes quite a bit of confidence and just a bit of masochism to really get fully comfortable with.

I imagine it could be developed with daily exercises, like quick-format brain-storming sessions with a friend about a fictional business idea or some such. Anyone have experience with training methods of this kind?

I think that I do this quite a bit – I get a random idea and then see if I can apply it. The skill here (which I am rubbish at) is having the confidence to bin the idea quickly – it’s all about the editing and believing that another idea will come.

Great! Let me know how it turns out! It usually works for me.