Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
⠀
Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
⠀
🙋♀️ Kate’s podcast that never starts
Kate is an HR manager who wants to start a podcast on the side, for people changing careers in their 40s.
She has been wanting to start it for a year.
Every time she gets close, she searches for shows on her topic, finds fifty of them, and puts the microphone back in the drawer.
🧩 Her struggle:
She thinks a good idea has to be one nobody has done before, so every show she finds makes her stop.
On the train home, she clicks on a video that tells the true story of an entrepreneur
who also couldn’t come up with ideas on some mornings,
and who still built and sold a company for around $15 million.
He didn’t need an original idea to get there.
⠀
🧠 The man who writes ten bad ideas a day
James Altucher, an entrepreneur and writer, keeps a notebook and writes ten ideas in it every single day.
Most of them are bad, and he does it anyway.
He built and sold a web design company called Reset for around $15 million.
He later sold a second business, the financial site StockPickr, for about $10 million.
He says the ten ideas were never really the point.
The point is the daily habit.
He calls it exercising his “idea muscle,” so the muscle doesn’t go weak from sitting unused.
Some mornings he can’t think of ten.
On those mornings, instead of forcing it, he tries a different way.
He takes a thing that already works, and a second thing that already works from somewhere totally unrelated.
Then he asks what you’d get if you put the two together.
That’s how he once told a friend to combine tango and yoga into “Tango Yoga.”
His idea included a book, a class, and photos of dancers holding yoga poses.
Most combinations turn out to be useless, and that’s fine.
It only takes him a minute to write one down and move to the next.
Turns out he doesn’t think mashing two things together is a worse way to get an idea.
He says it’s how ideas actually get made.
If you wait for a finished idea to show up on its own, you mostly just end up waiting longer.
⠀
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Idea Mashup
On mornings when ten ideas won’t come, James puts two things that already work together,
and he has also built and sold a company for around $15 million.
What he does has a name: The Idea Mashup.
He doesn’t invent something from nothing.
He takes things that already work on their own, and combines them.
That combination is where a lot of new things come from.
So you stop waiting until you think of an idea that’s never existed before.
You can make ten new ideas today from things that already exist.
Today your AI sidekick can give you fifty mashups in a minute.
Your job is picking the one that fits you.
⠀
🛠️ Kate’s turn
Let’s check in on Kate, who has wanted to start her podcast for people changing careers for a year, and still hasn’t recorded anything.
That night, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what people at work already ask her about changing careers.
Her AI sidekick says:
Put the job interviews you run at work together with a radio call-in show,
and give one listener a practice interview for their new career in each episode.
She texts a friend who is 44, and is leaving teaching for a job in HR.
That Saturday, they record the first episode at Kate’s kitchen table.
⠀
🌅 Two months later
Kate has put out eight episodes, one practice interview in each.
About 150 people listen to the show now.
Twelve listeners have written in to ask for a practice interview of their own.
You don’t need an idea nobody has ever had.
You already know a few things that work on their own.
Take two things that already work, and put them together into your next idea.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving one person with an AI sidekick can build something amazingly big’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below generates new ideas by pushing what you know against things from unrelated fields.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you know well enough to talk about without research, and what people already ask you about
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. how hiring managers actually read a career changer’s résumé and what makes an interview go well, and they ask how to explain the switchA few formats or ideas you admire from completely unrelated fields
- e.g. radio call-in shows, airline safety cards, and trivia night quiz sheetsWhat you’ve already published
- Write “nothing yet” if you haven’t started.
- e.g. nothing yet, only eleven episode titles in my notes, all in the same shape
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my episode list, my show notes, or my download numbers, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people in their 40s who want to change careers.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Every idea must be a combination of two things that already exist, and you must name both. Do not propose anything original.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I know well enough to talk about without research, and what people already ask me about:
{e.g. how hiring managers actually read a career changer's résumé and what makes an interview go well, and they ask how to explain the switch}
Formats or ideas I admire from completely unrelated fields:
{e.g. radio call-in shows, airline safety cards, and trivia night quiz sheets}
What I have already published:
{e.g. nothing yet, only eleven episode titles in my notes, all in the same shape}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. My side — the ten things I know, listed as separate parts rather than one subject.
2. The other side — ten things from unrelated fields worth pushing against them, with why each might work for my topic.
3. Twenty combinations — twenty pairs, each named as "X, but as a Y", with one line on what it would actually be.
4. The five worth doing — the ones that survive a hard look, and what makes each survive.
5. The one to make this week — the smallest version of the best combination, described concretely.
Then tell me which combination I will dismiss too quickly, and why I should not.