30 Ideas for 30 Days; This is What I Learnt…

Back in July 2020, I set myself the challenge of publishing 30 ideas for 30 days on Medium. You can read my opening blog piece here. I called this challenge The Ideas Project.

Now let me set some background. I was new to blogging, but keen to learn. Over the prior months of COVID lockdown in the UK, I had been testing myself with some 30 day challenges; first yoga, then general strength and conditioning, then kettle bells. These were great, and I found I was good at discipline required to complete the 30 days. However, they were all physical, I was keen to also test my mind in a similar way.

I had also been undertaking a great course; ‘How to build a brand with very little money’ delivered by Daivd Hieatt through the ‘Do Lectures’ platform. In this course I was introduced to the ‘10 ideas a day’ concept originally conceived by James Altucher on his blog post: ‘How to become an ideas machine’.

Rather than 10 ideas a day, I thought I would try and make life easier or myself and publish just one idea a day for 30 days… Turns out it is harder than I thought!

Things were going well until idea 22. I managed 3 solid weeks of publishing an idea a day, but then I hit a brick wall. It took me 30 days to eke out the remaining 9 ideas. Interesting. But I did persevere. I wrote my 30 ideas (31 in fact). So the first thing I learnt about publishing an idea a day for 30 days, is that it is hard!

But having completed this body of work, I was keen to synthesise my writing, to see if there were any patterns in the ideas I was choosing to write about. So I ran my full 31 days of blogs through a word cloud to see what jumped out, this is when I spotted the 4Ps; purpose, problem, product and people:

These four words weren’t necessarily the top four in my word cloud, but I thought they summarised well the themes of my blog pieces. And had intrinsic connection to each other:

Purpose<=>Problem<=>Product<=>People

For me, these 4Ps are the pillars of organisational design and foundational for success. What is the organisation’s purpose? What wider problem is the organisation trying to solve in society? This can be distilled into what problem(s) is the organisation trying to solve at an individual level? What customer problems is the organisation trying to solve? If a customer has problem, what is your solution? Therefore what is the product that your organisation will produce? And, finally who will produce it? What people will the organisation recruit to deliver the product?

I found it astonishing that these were the four words that jumped out of my word cloud, and almost immediately formed a congruent idea in themselves.

So, bringing it back to the beginning, I wrote 31 ideas over 55 days, and what did I learn?

1. Generating new ideas is hard!
2. Daily bogging takes discipline.
3. But it is rewarding and enjoyable.
4. I now have a stack of interesting ideas, that are in themselves a source of inspiration.
5. And summarising and synthesising those ideas, results in common themes, and a strong standalone framework; the 4Ps!