Thanks for the great post. I whole-heartedly agree that mixing with pros from outside your own industry can give you great inspiration.

I have been fortunate enough to work in a variety of industries – the arts, technology, retail, restaurants and now consulting / copywriting. It is through these varied experiences that I have been able to pull inspiration from past industries to assist me with my current efforts.

Beth, I agree with your recommendation of “The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation” by Frans Johansson. Great book. I highly recommend it to your readers, Ed.

Doug

Beth – Thanks for your comment! Those 2 books sound fascinating. I’ll have to check them out.

Michael – I love that idea. I’ve wanted to do that for a while, but never kept it up once I started it. Need to get back into the habit, because you’re right — taking notes, recording ideas free-form as they come to you can lead to some incredible breakthroughs. Now that I’ve become better at taking notes with mindmaps, I’m going to give it another try. Dan Pink is brilliant, BTW. Completely agree!

I have an idea from Thomas Jefferson I use and that is to carry a commonplace book and write down pieces of these conversations, quotes from books, ideas, etc. It is a bit a of everything and not terribly well organized, but I am amazed when I go back and look through it how many great pieces of info I recorded in there.

I love hanging out with the freelance community from any profession as well. Read Daniel Pink’s book called the “Free Agent Nation” and you will see what a tremendous movement this is becoming. The world’s best kept secret for how to make a living and thrive, even in this economy.

Wow! One, thank you for making me sound so smart and two, this is an AWESOME post! You captured exactly the process I use in terms of creating new ideas and new ways of looking at things. I have always looked outside of myself and my work for new ideas and it wasn’t until I read Michael Port’s book, “Beyond Booked Solid” that I realized this process has a name: “cross-appropriation.”

Cross-appropriation is “taking an idea from one area and using it in another. . . . It means we overcome historical attitudes or ideas, that we understand that what we think of as paradigms (or givens) are most often our own creation and much more fluid than we imagined. It is about questioning our beliefs of how it is and how it should be. Instead, we should ask, ‘What is possible?’” (Beyond Booked Solid)

Thanks for posting this, Ed. Excellent, excellent post!