SDS 066: The best ideas

Hello and welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast. Today I wanted to share something with you, something that I realised for myself not that long ago. As we all know, in this world that we live in, ideas are very important. Whether it’s global ideas that drastically change the course of humanity, or whether it’s small ideas that help you succeed in your career, or even in your home, in your daily life, or better educate your kids, or do whatever in life. Ideas and thoughts are very important because they make us human. They make us not just robots who are performing tasks, or performing mundane activities and doing repetitive things all the time, ideas help us thrive. Ideas help us drive our lives to the better. 

What I noticed for myself is where I have my best ideas. And for me, it’s in the shower. You will be surprised, but most of my ideas, probably 80% or 90% of my ideas, all the way from high school to university to career to now my business, I’ve always had them while I was in the shower. It is just incredible. I don’t know why, it’s like maybe I have time to think, time to slow down, maybe it’s the water. I have no idea. It just keeps happening, all the time. So now I’ve kind of conditioned myself, or I’m more aware of the fact, and so whenever I need to think about something, if I don’t have an idea during the day, then I’ll try to think about it again when I get into the shower. Or when I am in the shower, I start thinking about my business. I start thinking, I condition myself to start thinking about, “Ok, so what’s going on now? What expansions are there? What other courses I can create, what’s going on in the team, and so on.” And ideas just come.

And so today’s episode is just a quick, I wanted to quickly share my revelation about this and maybe inspire you to think of where you get your best ideas. Maybe it’s while you’re driving your car (although you should probably be more focused on the road). Or maybe it’s while you’re eating. Or maybe it’s while you’re listening to music. Or maybe it’s just before you go to bed. Or maybe it is when you wake up. Or maybe it’s when you go for a jog. Another place where I get a lot of ideas is when I go for a jog on a treadmill. Because I get into a meditative state, and if I’m running there for 20 minutes or so, I wouldn’t say I get ideas, but I can actually solve very complex problems.

I remember back in December 2015, just before I created the R programming course. I was thinking to myself, how do I tackle this challenge? R has such a steep learning curve, how do I get all this, how do I explain this in a very approachable manner so everybody can understand it. And I understood exactly how to do it while I was on a treadmill. So think about your life. Even if you can’t remember it now, try to be a bit more vigilant over the coming week, or even weekend, and try to think, the next time you come up with a cool idea, something that is really going to benefit you, just register for yourself what were you doing at that time? What activity? Were you cooking? Were you sleeping? Running? Jogging? Swimming? Anything. There’s always – there might be – “there’s always” is probably not the best way to say it, but there might be a consistent pattern, like what I found for myself. And maybe you can exploit that to your advantage in the future and get into that pattern more often, or whenever you’re in that pattern, make yourself ponder those things that are really important to you where ideas would be helpful.

So that’s what I thought of about ideas, and hopefully that will be useful to you. Give it a go. See what you find this weekend and I’d be really curious to know where you come up with the best ideas. And on that note, I hope you have a fantastic time ahead over this weekend, and I can’t wait to see you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.