Create A Winning Idea

1961: “There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States.” — T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner.

Winning Ideas Create a Sense of Awe

A winning idea is not like an everyday idea or even any idea you ever had. Trust me, when you have a winning idea you will know because you won’t be able to stop smiling or pacing the kitchen floor. That flash of insight is not just ‘wouldn’t that be cool?’

Because meditation and reconnecting with nature are such powerful ways to deepen intuition and expand connectivity into a universe of solutions, the winning ideas we receive are more like complete blueprints and they are so inspiring as to induce in us an immediate sense of awe.

A May 2015 study, “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior,” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It found that experiencing a sense of awe promotes altruism, loving-kindness, and magnanimous behavior. The researchers describe awe as “that sense of wonder we feel in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.”

It is an experience of such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world in order to assimilate it. One of the ways we elicit wonder is by scrambling the self so that the world can seep through. In doing so we feel such a blast of energy and expectation that we literally want to rocket to the moon. We feel stupefied amazement every time we think of our dream. It is rapture. It is magic. Only in these moments do we experience the power of a lightning strike in our minds and nerves. It is rhapsodic. It is what I saw in my wife’s eyes every time we talked about it. She glowed. She floated. It was as if every time we talked about it, I had just placed a tiny puppy in her arms. That is awe. That is the state of ecstasy that must accompany a dream for it to have any hope of ever becoming reality.

The Winning Idea Methodology

The method for creating a winning idea, full of awe, is simple. We figure out what makes us mad. We meditate on it. Then we go for a walk in the woods and the blueprint to fix it arrives.

If this seems somewhat unscientific, it is how I started all my companies and it never lets me down. Of course, there is a little more to it. First we have to develop a strong intuition so that we can tell the difference between just another idea and the real thing.

Discovering what makes you mad is one side of the coin. Knowing how to start to fix it is the other side. The winning idea is a problem-solution package. To create that winning package requires developing an understanding of a few scientific facts and deepening intuition.

Not long after I got married, an investment opportunity came my way. The architect of it was a man I had known well and worked with successfully for a number of years. He was perfectly qualified to find and present the opportunity, and I was keen to get involved. After a few meetings with him, I had pretty much made my decision to get involved. We’ll call him Roy.

While preparing dinner one night, I asked Lyn, what she thought about the opportunity. She listened intently and seemed enthusiastic until the moment I mentioned Roy’s name. She had never met Roy, and actually I had never mentioned him to her before then. No sooner had his name left my lips when Lyn said, ‘He’s bad news. Don’t get involved with him.’

I was taken aback, and then my emotion switched into indignation. I asked her how she could possibly say that when she didn’t know Roy and had never met him. It seemed to me a grossly unfair judgement. She shrugged and repeated her prognosis, ‘He’s bad news. It won’t go well. It’s up to you, but I’m just saying.’

I repeated my objection to her advice, and she shrugged again. So confident in Roy and his investment idea was I that I dismissed Lyn’s intuitive advice. The investment went ahead. At first things seemed to go really well. One year later, Roy absconded with the money and I was left temporarily broke.

Today, no matter the project on my desk I will ask her what she thinks about it even though she doesn’t understand much of it. I just mention the topic or the name of the vendor I am working with. When a new person pops into my life offering something, I simply run the person’s name by Lyn and she gives a thumbs up or thumbs down gesture.

In our private life I have also benefited from her intuition more times than I can count. I recall clearly one day when we were eating breakfast together. It was a normal morning and our two dogs, Freddie & Mabel, were lying by my feet in the kitchen.

‘Something’s wrong with Mabel.’ Lyn said suddenly. I looked down at two perfectly content dogs, both just having all but inhaled their bowls of food. I countered that they seemed alright to me.

‘I think she needs to go to the vet,’ she implored. Again, I argued that she seemed fine to me. After all what would I tell a vet when I got there… she seems fine to me but Lyn has a feeling about her? That seemed not just daft, but a waste of the vet’s time.

For the next two hours I dismissed all her concerns and countered her suggestion that we take the dog to the vet. Then she started to get angry with me, and I reminded myself of how strong was her intuition. Partly responding to that and partly to avoid a row, I conceded to take Mabel to the vet.

Mabel leapt in the car with all her normal energy and enthusiasm and on the drive to the vet I apologized to her for what she was about to unnecessarily go through. At the vet surgery I blurted out a feeble reason for being there, but the male vet smiled. He said he had many years’ experience of women’s intuition being the only thing that saved an animal’s life. Feeling chastised I sat back as he performed a routine examination.

Mabel’s temperature was raised slightly, but not to cause much concern. Then as he felt around her lower abdomen, the expression on the vet’s face changed to concern. To cut a long story short, within an hour Mabel was undergoing surgery for a serious intestinal problem. Two days later Mabel was home and on the path to recovery, but the vet’s last words to me were ‘If you had brought her in even an hour later, she would have died.’

There are two obvious discussion points here. One is about understanding this feminine power of intuition. The other is why do men like me still refuse to listen to their partners and their own inner dialogue?

To round off examples of intuition it is not always there for the serious stuff in life. For years, I have taken part in an annual soccer prediction fantasy league with a bunch of equally soccer-mad mates. Seeing how much fun I had with it, and also because she has met and enjoyed the company of most of the participants, Lyn asked if she could join up. She hid her gender as the only woman in the league with the team name ‘Bewildered.’

Bewildered has won by a country mile all three seasons since. What the other participants don’t know as they study injury lists, form, historical scores etc. is that Lyn leaves her predictions until the last possible moment and then completes the form in less than a minute. She puts no apparent thought into it.

Have you ever had a moment where you felt as though something wasn’t right? Perhaps stepping into a parking lot late at night, or feeling negative around someone without knowing why? And if you’ve experienced this before, have you shrugged it off, dismissing it as illogical nonsense?

We are great at dismissing this powerful force called intuition. Not everyone, however, is blessed to be married to one of the world’s greatest intuition filters! Male or female, in a self-made company this force is absolutely crucial for your success. It is an ancient force, one that warned us of a coming storm or enemy, but also one that helped us track food, water and shelter. Today, for most people it has been replaced by rationality and decision making replaced by consensus. There is no place for that in a self-made company. We need to feel and act quickly.

I have always been fascinated by intuition. What it is, how it works, how to get more of it. Fortunately, for you and I, we have Lyn to coach us through this part of the book and the techniques I describe are the very ones I use to deepen my own intuition.

These days my intuition is good. It will never match Lyn’s, but it is better than most people’s and it has been essential in my business life, especially when it comes to choosing the right vendors, investors, or making critical strategy decisions. The good news is that you don’t have to become as good at it as Lyn, you just have to make small improvements, deeper connections, and then everything changes for the better. If you figure out a way to bottle and sell it, I am your first investor.

What is Intuition?

We can easily dismiss the so-called experts who claim intuition is simply heightened body language observation skills. When Lyn can determine the intent of someone she has never met and cannot see, such explanations of intuition become inadequate.

In essence, we need both instinct and reason to make the best possible decisions for ourselves, our businesses, and our lives. Unfortunately, most people have grown up in a society in which intuition has been devalued, even ridiculed as sorcery or foolishness. Over time this means we pay less attention to it and lose confidence in it.

In business, the way companies are structured means decision-making becomes about consensus. Only when the majority agree is a decision accepted. There is no room for the lone voice or the one person who says ‘I know it makes logical sense, but it just doesn’t feel right.’ The lone voice becomes a dissenter. People are shy of admitting they have a hunch because in most workplaces it will be ignored or laughed at. In a Successful Startup, however, that hunch can mean the difference between success and failure. You have to reignite it.

Until about a hundred years ago science wasn’t even aware of the role of our unconscious, but studies now show that only 20 percent of the brain’s gray matter is dedicated to conscious thoughts, while 80 percent is dedicated to non-conscious thoughts.

Intuition, however, isn’t an invisible and mystical thing. The latest scientific discoveries allow us to understand how it works, which in turn helps us understand what it is. Two quantum physics principles help us out.

When I mention the two words ‘quantum’ and ‘physics’ people’s eyes usually glaze over. Quantum, however, just means ‘how much’ and physics is the study of the relationship between matter and energy. So, quantum physics is simply an understanding of how related they are. We need to understand this relationship because we are creating a business seemingly out of nothing. That nothing, however, is pure energy, and although it feels anything but metaphysical when we get a great idea and incorporate it, we are in fact following the laws of energy. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed into another form. We turn energy into a business.

The first quantum physics principle we need to take a look at is a spooky thing called ‘quantum entanglement.’ The second is the more recently discovered and confirmed ‘Higgs Field.’

Quantum Entanglement

This simply means how much are the particles that make up all of us and our universe connected to one another or how entangled are they. The spooky part is that particles don’t need to be in actual physical contact to connect with each other, They connect instantaneously wherever they are in the universe. Distance and time are irrelevant. This is called non-local connection.

A trio of scientists who defied Einstein by proving the non-local (particles don’t need to be near each other to connect) nature of quantum entanglement were honored in 2017 with the John Stewart Bell Prize from the University of Toronto. The prize recognizes the most significant recent achievements in the world in quantum mechanics and is considered by many to be the top international award in the field.

“Collectively (in 2015 experiments) they have removed all reasonable doubt about the non-local nature of quantum entanglement. In so doing they are also opening the door to exciting new technologies including super-secure communications, teleporting, and the ability to perform certain computations exponentially faster than any classical computer.”

The recipients each led separate experiments in 2015 that showed two particles, so distant from one another that no signal could connect them even at the speed of light, nevertheless possessed an invisible and instantaneous connection.

I don’t plan on building super computers, but I am fascinated by the implications of ‘spooky action at a distance,’ as Einstein called it, especially with how it can play in our intuitive sense and how we can use the knowledge to get better at those ‘I just have a feeling,’ moments.

Particles aren’t ‘things’ like a particle of dust. In physics terms particles are simply ripples observed and measured in an otherwise stable field of energy. Physicists have to give these ripples names and they call them particles. Ripples of different measurements appear differently to the physicists so they give them exotic names like fermions, or bosons. Everything in the universe, including you, your device, this book is made of the same basic ‘stuff.’

Our thoughts are also made of energy, the same ingredient as everything else in the universe. When we respond to a sensory input a neuro-chemical reaction takes place in our brain in 500 milliseconds. The energy of that reaction is formatted into a thought and out it goes into the universe.

Before drawing any conclusions, we have to take a breather and acknowledge there is a constant debate between those who believe micro-events and macro-events are different sciences and that we cannot draw conclusions from what happens in the subatomic world and what we experience in the ‘physical’ world. Self-help gurus peddling abstract ideas like the Law of Attraction often make quantum leaps in assumption and association without ever understanding the underlying science. A thought, however, is pure energy and the likelihood of that energy behaving like all other energy must be high.

Quantum entanglement has recently become even spookier with the discovery that a thing called temporal non-locality occurs in which particles can impact each other even when they don’t coexist. The light from a distant star that existed billions of years before the earth was formed appears to instantaneously effect photons present on earth today and that also means that our present must be instantaneously connecting with that past. Temporal non-locality is spooky: how does one describe an entity whose constituent parts are not even coexistent?

Discerning the nature of entanglement might at times be an uncomfortable project. It’s not clear what substantive metaphysics might emerge from scrutiny of this fascinating new research by the likes of Megidish and other physicists. Clearly, though, the more we discover about the sub-atomic world, the closer physics and metaphysics become.

So, our thoughts can also theoretically connect instantaneously at immense distances, just like any particle. The temporal non-locality lends credence to the metaphysical assertion that we can tap into the minds of those who came before and those who have yet to be born as self-help gurus like Napoleon Hill famously claimed.

Is this what happens when I mention the name of a business colleague to Lyn and in 500 milliseconds, she gives a thumbs up or down. Somehow, she has the ability to send out a thought like a submarine firing off its sonar to detect a ship on the surface. She gets an instant reverberating feedback. I think the difference between Lyn and I is that we can both send the same sonar signal, but she is better at listening and interpreting the echo. Just like in the military, however, you can learn to improve your interpretation of the returning signal. It just takes practice and repetition.

The physicists John Bell and Alain Aspect established that the universe at its most basic level is non-local, every particle connected to every particle. Their work proves that information doesn’t need to travel from point A to point B to point C, because it doesn’t need to travel at all. It exists everywhere with omnipresence.

This presents us with a vision of a participatory universe in which everything is interconnected and interdependent; a seamless ‘Whole.’ Most of us have heard this before either in an ancient text or even from a “wish it were true” lecture from a preacher or snake-oil self-help salesman. Now, however, we have a deeper understanding of the how and why we are all connected. We can all trigger sonar beeps and listen for the feedback echo.

Just as Lyn instantaneously knows right or wrong, so we can instantaneously get a solution to an issue, because in the forward time motion that we call the future it has already been resolved. Whenever I get those spooky ah-ha moments, perhaps I am not creating them but tapping into them quicker than others who are relying on analysis. Perhaps they would get to the answer eventually and all I am doing is tapping into their resolution in the future and revealing it in the present. Spooky stuff indeed.

What’s truly amazing about entanglement is that communication is much faster than the speed of light. It appears to be operating instantaneously, at the speed of, well, thought. It’s as if the space-time in between the two objects being measured doesn’t even exist. Some might say it is consciousness. What matters is that we have a concept for learning how, if we can find the right tools or mechanism, we can travel instantaneously to any source of knowledge from any time. We can draw from the collective wisdom of the universe.

This is how we draw to us moments of insight and solutions to what we perceived before as issues or even insurmountable problems. No matter what major stresses you feel in your life right now you can solve them instantaneously. You can’t do it however if you spend 10 hours a day in your office. You do it by taking frequent ‘breaks.’ It is in the distraction that we deepen intuition.

Higgs Field

Then there is the Higgs. Physicist Brian Greene, presenting on the PBS’ Charlie Rose Show, with experimental physicist Michael Tufts to explain it this way:Mass is the resistance an object offers to having its speed changed. You take a baseball. When you throw it, your arm feels resistance. A shotput, you feel that resistance. The same way for particles. Where does the resistance come from? The theory was put forward that perhaps space was filled with an invisible “stuff,” an invisible molasses-like “stuff,” and when the particles try to move through the molasses, they feel a resistance, a stickiness. It’s that stickiness which is where their mass comes from. … That creates the mass….… it’s an elusive invisible stuff. You don’t see it. At this moment you are surrounded by Higgs field and also embedded in it as all matter has been since soon after the Big Bang. It fills the spaces between your fermions and bosuns just as it fills all of the universe that we know about.The particles of which you are made feel the influence of this field, and that influence makes them what they are… matter. Think of it like cosmic glue. Without it our particles would shoot out into the far reaches of space never having the opportunity to coagulate. The Higgs glue slows them down. Our conscious intention collects groups and that gives us matter and the physical experience of our life.Electrons, for example, whirl around the outskirts of atoms, and are responsible for important things like “electricity” and “chemistry” and for that matter “biology.” But without the Higgs, electrons would have zero mass, and according to Einstein that means they would move at the speed of light rather than settling into atoms. That means no atoms, no chemistry, no life itself. The Higgs is pretty important.A good analogy is to think of the ocean and a fish. A fish has no concept it is in water just as we have no concept that we float in cosmic glue called a Higgs Field. A fish thinks the whole universe is like that. Like what? Well, like swimming and gliding and feeding and mating. It does not “feel” the water. Every time a fish makes a move it sends signals that reverberate throughout the water to connect it to mates and predators alike.A shark can detect the slightest movement 330 meters away. Whales can communicate through this medium over 10,000 miles. The same happens when we interact with the Higgs Field. Lyn can detect emotion in another person thousands of miles away. She messages through this cosmic glue and interprets the response. Not knowing this, most people are not ‘listening.’ To develop or deepen intuition we have to work on our listening and interpretation skills.Media would have us believe that mystics and scientists hold opposing views. I have discovered the opposite to be true. Every mystic or healer I have ever spoken to is an avid student of quantum physics, and every true scientist I have met is an avid student of ancient text and cosmological knowledge. For decades both have been awaiting confirmation that the glue that holds us all in place is proven. The Brahman and Particle Physicists have finally collided in harmony.What does it all mean? Well, for me it hints that the more we consciously attempt to interact with the field, the more connectivity we can experience. Each deliberate effort deepens connection and connects us to more potential solutions.Does it give evidence to long held beliefs like ‘once connected, always connected?’ Can we tap into the minds of smarter people than us to get instantaneous solutions to problems that have haunted us all our lives? Does it provide the medium for the medium to connect to the past and the future voices?Have you ever stopped to contemplate what really separates the successful person from the less so? It is almost always a brilliant idea that makes the difference, a moment of insight about starting a new venture whether in business or the arts or the ability to pull solutions out of the air.When you have an issue and try to conquer it by analysis, the energy of the universe flows away from you. I can’t prove it, but I know this is how it responds. When you deliberately put aside the problem and ask the universe for help whether it be with a business issue, a painting, or a book, to the field it is like a new bright light or a confluence of high frequency that is irresistible. Ripples all start vibrating toward you instead of away from you. ‘Don’t hide your light under a bushel,’ says the ancient texts.In businesses, I have never hired executive teams because I felt my connectivity was strong enough to warn me of issues before they occurred and alert me to opportunities no one else could see. Some might call it a higher power, others intuition. Today, I call it my ‘Higgs sonar.’ All I know is it works and it helps tremendously. I ponder the problem, then close my office door and take a walk… problem solved.To have those moments of insight means developing better interaction with – and connection through – the field of energy. It is that simple, but all too rare because we are taught to analyze, calculate, theorize, sit in meeting rooms for hours on end and then vote for consensus. No one says ” You need a solution, take a walk, touch some trees.” “Feeling overwhelmed with issues? Then go watch the night sky for 15 minutes.” “Want to get out of the rut and make something of your life, then sit in a chair and do nothing for 20 minutes.” These tools are contrary to what we learn at school. School teaches us to go step by step and work on something until everyone is in agreement.Deepen Your Intuition through Quantum Entanglement and the Higgs Field using meditationIt is in the silence that the soul grows strong. For then it is thrown back upon its own energies and powers, and learns to know itself. One of the finest ways of getting light on a problem quickly and certainly, of cultivating intuition, is by not passing the trouble of solving it on to someone who you believe can help you. Seeing solutions and solving problems are a matter of training, of inner growth. One of the first rules that a neophyte is taught is never to ask a question until he has tried earnestly and repeatedly to answer it. Because the attempt to do so is an appeal to the intuition. It is also an exercise. It strengthens one’s inner powers. Asking questions before we have ourselves tried to resolve them simply shows that we are learning, and this is not good. To exercise our own faculties means growth, the gaining of strength and ability.

The Path of Compassion — G. de Purucker

For me meditation is the key to deeper intuitive connections.I started meditation when I was in my early twenties. I can’t imagine my life without it today. The answers don’t always come immediately after, but during the day when I take my breaks away from the office. I can be walking on a beach and then as I look into a tide pool the solution will slap me in the face. Solutions can come in the shower or while simply distracted playing with the dogs. One thing is for sure, the intuitive knowing never comes when I am trying hard to solve something.I have a preferred method that I call ‘Taking Quiet Time,’ but there are as many meditation techniques as flowers in the woods. If you have never meditated before you can start with my technique which comes next.

Additional Resources:

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The world of media would have us believe that mystics and scientists hold opposing Knowing that everything in the universe we see is connected, does it change how you will approach this field? Try picking one person who gets under your skin and mentally send images of the two of you hugging and the other person supporting and respecting you. Let us know what happens in the comments below:

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