How to Think Like a Weight Trainer

The way to gain strength from information, as with the nutrients from food, is to flex your ideas like they were muscles.

Gather those ideas, put them into words, then find some way to test them. As your own ideas strain and rip, celebrate! For this is an opportunity for them to mend stronger than before.

“The test of all knowledge is experiment,” said Richard Feynman. We need to put our ideas into practice – expose them to the real world to test their strength.

You might have just read a chapter of an enlightening book, and now have some interesting ideas. The next step is to go out and find someone with an opposing view to talk to. Hopefully a kind soul who won’t be too harsh when they push back, but will act as resistance to your ideas.

Pretty soon you will see the weak points in your notions stretch and break, some will fall away, and some were just a bit raw and can now heal stronger. Some ideas might be strong already, and you will know when they stand up against a good opponent’s scrutiny.

Please do choose your opponent carefully though. You want people who will give you polite resistance and address the topic, not someone who would use unfair sophistry and personal ridicule – that’s the debate equivalent of using the weights machine wrong. You’ll end up hurting yourself!

Perhaps your investigations helped you come up with a great creative idea for your business. Great! But before you spend a whole lot of money pitching the idea out in its raw form, how about you put that idea through the rigor as well, and see if you can make it even stronger.

The process you would have heard of before, it is prototyping and product testing, but it’s the same principle – you put your ideas in as solid a form as you can, pitch it against friendly resistance, or in a harmless way, and see which bits break off, and which bits are a success.

You then take it back, reinvent the broken bits, accentuate the successful ones, put it together and do it again. Repeat until it is market-ready.

So get out there and flex those muscles.