Martin Amor Pellew - The Idea In You: How to Find It, Build It, and Change Your Life

To Anita, my amazing wife-to-be, the cornerstone of our family and the making of me. Thank you for your patience, understanding and support as I snatched moments around family life to write this book. And to Sofia, my beautiful, strong-minded and funny daughter. I cant wait to see the amazing idea you have inside you.

A.P.

To Jaime, who taught me to shoot for the stars.

M.A.

Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

These days we are all creators.

Powerful computers sit on our laps connecting us to millions of other people in seconds. Affordable software makes it easier than ever to design websites, edit movies, create compelling images, write books and sell what we make to a global audience.

Yet for most of us, our ideas stay in our heads mingling with thoughts of dinner and telly, stuck behind mental barriers of our own making:

Only people who are more creative than me make their ideas happen.

Im not a born entrepreneur like the ones on TV how will I know what to do?

Im just not the sort to take a leap of faith like that. Id better stick to what I know.

But if you choose to start, and arm yourself with just a handful of simple tools, steps and behaviours, and put one foot in front of the other, you can you will change your life with your idea.

Whatever your idea ends up being a new gadget, a hit TV show, a craft event in your village hall or the next Facebook the process of bringing it into being will change your life.

Your idea will inspire a sense of purpose in you. It will show you what you can do, displaying the world and your place in it through a new lens. It will sharpen your sense of your own power and in time, with persistence it will offer you the freedom to live the life you want.

All you need to do is start

Its Tuesday morning.

You are sitting at your desk, knee-deep in emails.

You smile and take a minute to reflect fondly on your moment of genius last night

As you struggled in through the front door laden with shopping, it came to you.

Bin bags!

You had done almost everything right. You had scribbled a note on your little blackboard when you realized you were running out. You had even made a mental note as you left work heading for the supermarket that evening. But, crucially, the words bin and bags had not been added to a shopping list.

So, for another few days at least, the kitchen would be graced with that bulging Sainsburys bag hanging off the door under the sink.

You allowed yourself a few seconds of self-loathing but then something shifted.

Wait.

What if I could programme my phone to ping up a reminder when Im at the supermarket when I am at the place where I actually need to remember the damn things? What if, as I cross the threshold, a message pings up on my screen: BIN BAGS!

This is gold!

Why has no one thought of this before?

Even without a shopping list, that roll of tie-handle fifty-litre bags would find its way into my trolley.

Damn it, this is dynamite!

Everyone needs one of these A LOCATION-BASED REMINDER!

Youve found a perfectly elegant solution to one of modern lifes most enduring problems: forgetting things when you go to the supermarket. Your mind plays the movie of a future when youre the toast of the tech world and millions of forgetful people follow your hilarious wisdom on Twitter, when your company is awash with cash thanks to the thousands of daily downloads of your life-changing app.

You luxuriate in the possibilities around your location-based reminder:

• What could it be called?
• What will it look like?
• How much should I sell it for?

This is exhilarating. The Location-Based Reminder idea will surely change your life. Youve always known you have special creativity and energy. Finally, you are realizing your potential. You head to Godaddy to check for available domain names.

A few days later, the movie in your mind has changed. Where there were once images of yachts and ski lodges, there is now only a list of difficult questions:

• Err, how do you make an app?
• What if someone else has thought of it? Surely Google is on to this.
• How many people would actually buy it anyway?
• Can I afford to leave my job?
• Will I have enough money to make it work?
• Do I really want to spend the next couple of years making an app?
• What will people say when I tell them that I probably the most forgetful person they know want to develop a reminder?

A couple of conversations with friends reinforce your doubts and, before you can whisper maybe this time it will be different, this idea has joined the others you wont get round to taking any further. Instead of changing your life, the location-based reminder has become further evidence that youre not the type to make your idea happen. Anyway, you reassure yourself, life isnt all bad. Youve got a roof over your head and an OK job. Why put a big challenge like this into the mix especially when it looks like it might not work?

Now back to those emails.

Weve been having ideas too for years. In fact, our ideas have made millions. For other people.

We have spent much of our careers helping big companies become richer, including Nike, Telefonica, Unilever, Mars, Pepsico, Fosters, Prudential, SK Telecom (Korea), Samsung, Nestl, Heineken, Carlsberg, Virgin, Pernod Ricard, Shell and InterContinental Hotel Group.

We work on their tough questions:

• What will our new breakthrough product be?
• How are we going to top last years performance?
• How will we fight off the threat of our competitors new technology?
• How can we expand our audience to include younger people?
• How can we turn this new technology into a product lots of people will buy?

We have always had to work fast, so we have learned techniques that solve problems like these and quickly every time.

In the last few years, we have started to wonder how what we have learned could help people as well as companies. We can help an organization develop a new product that sells millions, so surely we can help a person find an idea and turn it into something that will change their life.

We decided to test our techniques on ourselves and committed to realizing our own ideas first. These are now growing businesses having a positive impact on the world, and we both have high hopes for the future. You can find out more about our ideas at theideainyou.com if youre interested.

We now believe that these techniques have the potential to make a huge and positive change in many peoples lives. Were confident that they will help you negotiate your freedom and make your dreams come true. To us this will mean at least as much as developing a new packaged coffee for a blue-chip multinational, a clever flu remedy concept for a pharmaceutical company or a new credit card idea for a bank.

We had never seen ourselves as entrepreneurs. We had always assumed that we would work for other people, and for many years we did. Now we know that we can turn ideas we care about into businesses, and that we can thoroughly enjoy it. We know because weve tried, finally. And, because weve come to this a little late, we have developed missionary zeal about it.