Ideator

The point

An ideator is somebody who commits themselves to constantly examining, evaluating, exploring their business, looking for better performing ideas: better markets, better media, better messages, better management, better maximization, better positioning.

Jay Abraham · Redondo Beach 2023 — Day 1, Session 2 Cued to 1:17:02 2 min 40 sec loading…

Why it matters

Put the problem in the center of a blank page and let it branch outward. One impossible question becomes a whole field of expansions, and the branches worth keeping are the wacky, wild and weird ones. It is impossible — unless. The strategy lives in that last word.

Look at where a ceiling everyone accepted has already fallen. Tennis. Golf. Running. Farming. Electric cars. Formula 1 and Indy racing. Artificial intelligence. Each carried a limit nearly everybody treated as permanent, and in every one the only real limit was a narrow imagination. Widening the vision is deliberate practice, and it compounds every time you use it.

An idea is made, not received, and the cycle is the same every time. Gather the raw material. Compare and contrast it until the pieces start to combine. Then leave it alone; the forgetting does its own work. When the idea arrives, write it down and make it your prisoner forever, then review it cold in the morning.

Some people invent. Others source the best of what already exists and improve it. Doing both is the highest and best use of a mind, and it runs on what you have fed yourself, which is why Jay would hand you the subject you had least interest in, send you off for two hours, and ask for one profound insight. Point artificial intelligence at the same cycle and the raw material, the combinations and the speed of testing each go up 10 times.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Stopping at the first sensible branch. Reasonable ideas arrive early, and they are the ones your competitors reached too, so a session that ends the moment something workable appears has produced exactly what everybody else already owns.

The test: Take your last three good ideas and ask which of them you would have been embarrassed to say out loud. If none, you stopped where everyone stops.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
Cass Information Systems	A neighborhood bank founded in 1906 turned invoice auditor: 51 million freight and utility bills a year, $94 billion in annual disbursements.
Frieda's, Inc. (Frieda Caplan)	She championed a fruit nobody would buy and sold it as kiwifruit: 2,400 pounds in 1962, carried in 84% of American supermarkets by 1986.
Storage Scholars	Two Wake Forest students built a packing, moving and storage service for classmates, staffed by students: 48 schools and $1.86 million in 2022 revenue.
Suguna Foods	Farmers kept the land and the sheds; Suguna supplied over 40,000 of them with chicks, feed and veterinary care, reaching ₹9,155 crore in 2020–21.
Swapfiets	Rented working bicycles rather than selling them: a fixed monthly fee from EUR 13.50, and any broken bike repaired or replaced within 48 hours.
Tally	Made the product free forever and stamped 'Made with Tally' on every form, so users became the channel: $3 million recurring with 8 people.
TinyPilot	Stopped redesigning the hardware, handed office operations to outside vendors, and sold the company for $598,000 — 2.4 times annual earnings.
Vale Park Animal Hospital (Brent Lakia)	The practice moved its pharmacy and prescription diets onto an online store it owned, adding roughly $60,000 a month in supplemental revenue.

What it solves

The words a business owner uses for this before anybody has told them the name of it. If one of these is a sentence you have said out loud, this is your strategy.

We only ever get the obvious ideas“Every idea the team brings back is one I could have written down myself before the meeting started.”A branching method that keeps going past the reasonable answers, out to the wacky and the wild ones where the value sits.
A ceiling we accepted years ago“There is a result everybody here agrees this business simply cannot produce, and nobody has questioned it in years.”The word that reopens a settled limit — impossible, unless — and the blank page you map it on.
Ideas arrive then vanish“I get good ideas and a week later I could not tell you what a single one of them was.”The working cycle that ends in writing it down and reviewing it cold, so an idea survives the morning after.
I only read what i already know“Everything I read is about my own industry, and all of it says roughly the same thing back to me.”Jay's own exercise, the subject you like least for two hours and one profound insight, and the referential background it builds.
We are not the inventing type“Nobody here invents anything, so I have always assumed creativity is not what this business runs on.”Sourcing what already exists, customizing it and improving it is ideation too, and doing both is the highest use of a mind.
The advisor's version“I hand clients the same recommendations I handed the last five, and I can feel myself retrieving rather than thinking.”Ideation practiced as a discipline that compounds, so what you bring a client is generated rather than remembered.

The challenge

Map the impossible, then read the opposite.

Take the constraint you have accepted longest, the result everybody here agrees this business cannot produce, and write it in the center of a blank page. Branch it outward for an hour, and do not stop when the sensible branches run out — keep going into the wacky and the weird, because the wildest branch is usually the valuable one. Then read two chapters or two articles on the subject you have least interest in, come back to the page, and add the branch you could not have written before.

How you will know it is done One page holding your oldest constraint branched for an hour, plus the branch you added after reading two pieces on a subject you avoid.

The AI layer · second pass

Once this is working, here is what to multiply

Improve the system first. Then multiply it. This panel is the second run at the strategy above, and it is deliberately useless until the first run is done.

Before you point anything at this You have read two chapters on a subject outside your own interest and written down one insight.

What it multiplies Branching one impossible question into a field of expansions overnight, then comparing them until it returns the pairings no table of people would have set side by side.

The trap Volume mistaken for ideation. A thousand adjacent ideas drawn from the consensus is a wider version of the narrow vision this strategy exists to break, and the eureka never arrives because nothing was left alone long enough to gestate.