Here’s something I love:

Idea Conversion…

Now, chances are, you have never heard that term before. But before I dive deeper into what Idea conversion actually is want to share with you why I care about it so much – and why I think you should too…

If you are anything like me, you like big ideas. Like, the type of idea that shifts your perspective on the world. The type of idea that opens up a whole new domain of knowledge and experience to you. Simply put: transformative ideas.

But if you are anything like me, you are also often disenchanted by big ideas.

Science, philosophy, and religion can have – if things fall into place – huge ideas that really have the potential to change your life and the lives of the people around you for the better…

…but they also have a very big problem:

more often than not, the ideas produced in these domains lack the necessary connection with the real-world context…

• Science might have grand theories but might not think about how they apply in day-to-day life or outside the laboratory.

• Philosophy might have a genius insights, but is limited by language to make clear why this idea matters.

• And religion has thousands of years of history behind its stories, but cannot update them for the changing contexts of modern times.

And that is why I am so obsessed with idea conversion…

…I do believe that all of the domains above hold the richest of ideas…

…but often lack the ability to transform them into something of pragmatic utility.

That’s what idea conversion is all about:

It is the process of turning big and abstract ideas into specific applications in the day to day life: products, systems, principles, or simply behaviour.

Idea conversion is the process that bridges the gap between the abstractions of big ideas and the practicalities of everyday life…

Living in Simulation

Here’s one reason why thinking is great: It allows us to set up alternative and/or completely fictional versions of life in our heads… and then let them play out to see what happens.

For example: imagine you are part of a hunter gatherer tribe. You are out and about hunting and gathering. During the day you come across a cave. You briefly investigate it but find signs that at least one bear lives within the cave. So, you continue with your day, hunting and gathering about…

…towards the evening dark clouds pull up and you can smell the thunderstorm in the air. You start looking for shelter. Suddenly, you remember the cave. And you play out the potential scenarios in your head:

• Maybe the signs of the bear were older and the bear actually is not anymore in the cave

• Maybe you can surprise the bear while it is sleeping

• Maybe you can kill the bear together with your troup, and have some extra meat

• Maybe the bear kills many of the people in your troup… something that you really cannot afford.

You run through all these examples. And decide to try to find shelter elsewhere.

You just used the power of ideas. You set up a scenario – your troup entering a cave in which may or may not be a bear – and let it play out in all the different directions in which it might go. And based on this, you make a decision…

This is what Whitehead meant with letting ides die instead of us…

…and that’s amazing!

But ideas also come with their downside…

The Problem with Ideas

This is the sentence that preceded the “letting ideas die instead of us” quote above. And it highlights an important problem…

Our ideas can never be as detailed as the reality in which we live…

And even worse… It is not anymore that we are letting our ideas die instead of us…

…we have gotten so good at surviving, that we don’t even have to let our ideas die anymore. We have become so good at surviving that we can afford to have our ideas stick around – independent of whether they are good or bad.

This has a major benefit, to which I will come in the next section: abstraction.

But it also has a major downside, to which I want to come now: abstraction.

Yes, abstraction is both a power and a downside of great ideas. Let me explain…

By getting better in surviving the physical world, we have allowed ourselves to live more and more in our heads. We are not anymore able to just run a quick “is there a bear in the cave” simulation. We are able to go much deeper… To build ideas on ideas on ideas. And so, we manage to construct amazing theories and mental constructs about what might or might not be true…

…but the problem with that is that we don’t have to find our anymore whether our ideas, especially the most fundamental ones…

…are actually true.

Our life doesn’t depend on our ideas anymore (at least not in the sense of us being eaten by a bear because we messed up one of our mental simulations).

And so, we can continue to stick around with the same simulation for so long…

…that we forget that its just a simulation… just an idea… just a belief.

We don’t even notice that we are creating situations in our heads that stress us and give us anxiety because they threaten not our physical bodies…

…but the idea that we are living in.

We have stopped to let ideas die instead of us…

…and have started to let them develop a life on their own…

…within our minds.

Now, this might sound quite dark (and it is)…

…but of course, big ideas are not just all problem…

…because if that were the case, they would not be called “Big Ideas”.

The Power of Big Ideas

As I already mentioned above…

…despite also being their weakness…

…one of the biggest strength of ideas is abstraction .

An abstracted idea has the potential to be more powerful than a non-abstracted idea because it potentially applicable to a larger set of situations.

For example, take the idea of sacrifice:

sacrifice used to be the idea that you offer something of value to you to please the gods or God and thereby “buy” a better future for yourself. You gave something up in the now to have it better in the future.

There are many mythological and religious stories surrounding the theme of sacrifice. The most famous one is probably that of Abraham and Isaac.

Abraham is called by God to offer up his only and beloved son Isaac. That is, to give him to God as a burned offering - as a sacrifice.

As you can imagine, this story, which is part of the old testament, is quite controversial. Some people use it as an argument against religion and religious faith, pointing to the absurdity of Abrahams faith and his willingness to murder his son. interestingly, others see exactly this absurdity as the strength of Abraham and that this is what made God select Abraham to become the father of nations (Kierkegaard wrote an entire book on this called fear and trembling).

The point that I am trying to make here is the this:

Here we have a specific story surrounding the idea of sacrifice. We have Abraham who is called to make a sacrifice and Isaak who is supposed to be the sacrifice. The details of this (a father sacrificing his son to God) are repulsive to many people in our modern society…

…but the abstracted idea of “Sacrifice” is still strong in our modern cultures.

Essentially, work is nothing than sacrifice. You do something that you would rather not do in the present, to get a paycheck at the end of the month, to be able to go on holiday in the summer.

You bulk and train very hard, only to go into a cut in order to have a desirable physique.

You go to bed early, instead of continuing to binge watch your favorite series, to make sure that you feel good tomorrow.

All of these are examples of sacrifice. The offering of the present to the make the future a bit better.

And this is where the power of ideas lie. You can map an abstracted idea on many specific examples (like I did above with the idea of sacrifice). But once you have done that, you can draw the energy from one example, and shift it to that of another.

For instance, a religious person might draw inspiration from Abraham’s story. Not to offer their own son… but to get better at work and get a promotion.

Similarly, someone who is inspired by a specific idea might be able to find the abstracted idea, and apply it to their own circumstances.

So the question is…

…where can we actually find those ideas?

And how can we learn to apply them to our own life?

Sources of Great Ideas

Once thing that we seem to have forgotten in our modern, highly westernized and scientific worldview…

…is that great ideas do not come from following a predefined procedure.

They cannot be predicted.

They cannot be forced.

Rather, great ideas come from places that the rational and conscious mind cannot fully understand. They come from the depth of the unconscious.

That is, what insight is. The sudden realisation of the solution to a problem you were facing. The light bulb turning on. The moment when it makes “click”.

And this has implications where we can find the big ideas that we want to turn into something practical. Something that helps us in our day to day life…

The first place where we can find great ideas is stories.

And not just any stories. When looking at the type of stories that we are producing at the moment – the big one’s coming out of Disney these days – we notice that they aren’t made to tell the story itself. They are tools used rationally to spread a certain idea…

…but it doesn’t work…

…which is why every franchise that Disney bought has gone to sh*t since they started working on it: Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Marvel…

Why is that?

Well… Some people, like Jordan Peterson for example, consider great stories as more than just entertainment. They look at stories – and especially the traditional, mythological, and religious stories – not as tools to pass the time…

…but as explorations of how to be well in the world as human beings.

I have written about this in more detail in Why We Will Always Need Stories… But here is something that I did not cover there:

In his 1999 book “Maps of Meaning” Peterson outlines how ideas morph from action into stories:

1. It starts with an act that is observed. This can be actually a simple action, like moving your body, but also larger patterns of actions, like how to deal with betrayal or in the face of chaos.

2. This is then imitated by the observer and later on abstracted into play. This can be play of children who observe their parents and then play as if they were parents (e.g., with their dolls as their kids). But also, this can be play in a broader sense…

3. …like the formalization into drama and narrative, which is the next step. This is where some of the great stories of our modern times draw from. Joseph Campbell has worked out the hero’s journey, a formalized plot structure that the hero in different journey goes through. It easily maps on the original movies of the three franchises I mentioned above: Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and the Marvel Movies. They are literally stories about how to be a hero. But usually, at least in pre-modern societies, it doesn’t stop there…

4. If narratives stick around long enough, they are crystalized into myth. Not myth in the sense as we understand it today – as a faulty belief – but more as a deeper exploration of what it means to be human and how to be in the world, with the help of myths. What is important to mention here is that you have to think how this happened in pre-literate societies. Before people could write down things, they had to tell stories mouth-to-mouth. This way, the stories didn’t remain 100% of the same. Over generations, they slightly changed. But one thing did not: the core of the story. That part which makes the story work and gripping, always remained part of the stories we still know today. Otherwise, these pre-literate societies would have stopped telling the stories. And it is through this process…

5. …that things move beyond myth and are codified into religion. It doesn’t really matter which religion you look at, most of the stories of any religions can be traced back to other mythologies, of cultures that came before. At some point, religions then give rise to…

6. …philosophy, which is a more rational and even more abstracted form of dealing with the knowledge within these stories. It is the attempt to extract the implicit lessons, and codify them into a logical sequence of steps – principles for behaviour…

This was quite a long excursion, but it was an important one!

Just look at how deep the knowledge that is held in stories goes. How long it has been developing. How long it has survived.

This is one reason why stories and philosophy can be so abstract and so frustrating…

…but it is also the reason why so many deep ideas come from stories that have been around for a long time…

It’s also why you cannot just rationally invent new stories to make people believe in your message. Because no matter how good your propaganda is, it cannot be as deep as the process outlined above…

To make a short story long…

…one of the places where we can find great ideas is in the great stories of our time and the times that came before…

But there is more…

Great ideas cannot only come to us through stories – gripping us by the emotions, as I like to say…

…they can also just come to us in the moment…

…the “Aha” moment.

This usually happens when we deeply engage with something. When we face a problem that we really want to solve. Or when we are simply curious about something.

Sometimes, just sometimes, life throws an insight your way…

…and you get a great idea, seemingly out of nowhere.

Whether you encounter a great idea through stories or through exploration in the moment…

…one problem remains:

It’s not clear, how this idea can or even should affect your day-to-day life…

Idea Conversation

So here we finally are…

Idea Conversion…

The process of turning big ideas into specific behavioural changes or principles to live by.

Basically what you are doing when you engage in idea conversion is designing.

Not necessarily a product (although you might also do that)…

But designing more generally...

You take an idea, explore it, and at the end of it, derive something of pragmatic value. This is what we need more of. More big ideas. And more big ideas that are turned into something practical… that actually helps us live better lives.

Lucky for us, what I call Idea Conversation has been researched by others under the guise of “Design Thinking”… mostly in the realm of product design. And lucky for us, designing a product is not that different from designing a practical solution for a better life…

So, what is Idea Conversation..?

…and how can we implement it in our own lives?

The States of Idea Conversion (or Design Thinking)

The first thing I want to highlight before diving into each state by itself is the word “state” in itself…

I chose this word quite carefully, because words like “stages” or “steps” would imply that idea conversion is a linear process.

But it is not!

Rather, it consists of separate states, each of which has its own purpose and attitudes attached to it. You can go from one to the next sequentially… but usually that is not enough. Especially when dealing with deep ideas. Keep that in mind when trying to implement Idea Conversion in your own life…

That being said, here are the states you can inhabit when you engage in Idea Conversion:

• Empathise

• Define

• Ideate

• Prototype

• Test

You can see the product design lingo shining through, but don’t be fooled that this cannot also be applied to designing behaviours or principles based on deep ideas that you encounter as you walk through life.

With that being said, let’s have a look at the different states of Idea Conversion (or design thinking)…

Empathise

The first state that we can take on when it comes to Idea Conversion is, somewhat counterintuitively, empathy.

We start by looking into how it feels to have a certain thought or idea.

This can either be other people or yourself. But usually it starts with yourself.

Why does the idea excite you? What exactly about the idea does so? What does the idea promise, in terms of a better future?

Exploring these questions is important to really understand what you are dealing with. This is especially true because of the abstraction that comes with ideas… It’s easy to derive a principle or a change in behaviour from an idea that is not aligned with the thing that got you excited about the idea in the first place. And so, here you try to figure out what the exciting part of the idea actually is.

Of course, you don’t have to stick to yourself here:

How would others feel about the idea? Either think about it or, better, ask them. Have others encountered similar ideas? And how did they talk about it?

At this stage, it is good to take a deep dive and explore. Even if you uncover things that end up not being relevant… Because a) you cannot know beforehand what is and what is not relevant and b) in the next state, you are going to narrow down on what it is actually about…

Define

Defining is the second state. In a sense, it is quite opposed to the first state, in that that empathy is a state of exploration and divergence, while defining is a state (or process) of integration and convergence.

What you do when you define is to choose the right frame for the question at hand. The question at hand is “how do I turn this idea that I have into something of pragmatic utility”. And last week, I have written extensively about how questions organise our thinking around what we don’t know.

This is in essence what we are trying to do here. We are taking a stance. Among all the things that we identified in the previous state we select a few or even just one and define it as the core idea or problem that we want to dissect.

Which brings us to the next state…

Ideate

As the name suggest, ideation is about coming up with as many ideas as possible about how we could turn the idea that we have into something practical.

It starts again, with divergent ideation. We are simply listing as many ideas as possible for what implication this idea might have for our everyday life or that of other people. Nothing is off limits. In this case, more is better. Dare to write everything down, because we are going to cut heavily in the second part of this state.

Because after divergence, comes convergence again. Here we select among the ideas for implementation that we have just created.

And here’s a little fun fact: the best predictor for coming up with good ideas or solutions is not about the type of idea or solution or a specific way of thinking. It’s the number of ideas that you generate. Because, as it turns out, most ideas are garbage. But if you produce enough ideas, there might just be a golden nugget among them 😉 

This is the point of this stage. To create as many ideas as possible…

…and then select only the best one’s.

Because those will inform the next state…

Prototyping

When you start prototyping you start putting together a first idea of how the final implementation of the big idea you had in the beginning might look like.

Here you start dealing with the specifics of how this idea looks like when you embody it in the day-to-day of your life.

This is linked to my concept of Embodied Science, which I have written about in my Integrative Model of Personal Growth. As the name suggests, it is to embody the principles of science, but apply them to your own life…

What you are doing when prototyping is to come up with an “experiment” that you could run:

• What are the behaviours that would embody your big idea?

• How will it change your life when you embody those ideas?

• (How) can you measure this impact?

Thinking about these things is important because it allows you to a) come up with a proptype for your converted idea (e.g., for the embodied aspects of your big idea) and b) prepare for the last of the states of idea conversion…

Test

Now it’s finally time to do what this is all about: actually doing something.

To try out your converted idea. To run the experiment.

Here, the previous state comes in handy, because it helps you to evaluate the embodiment of your idea.

• Is it actually implemented in a way as you planned?

• Did it change your life in the way you expected?

• Could you measure the impact in the expected (and also unexpected!) ways?

Based on your answers to these questions, you can go back to the prototyping (or any other state). In general, remember that this is why I called these things “states” and not “stages” or something similar. This process isn’t linear. Maybe in the first go, but afterwards, you might go back and forth between prototyping and testing, only to notice that something is off in how you defined the problem. So you go back there and try something different.

The key here is not that you go through different stages, but that you are aware of inhabiting different states at each step along the way of turning your idea into something of pragmatic value. It is to step into the right state (or mode, if you like that more) of thinking, to get the job done as good as possible.

This is what you want to do…

…to systematically turn (your) big ideas into pragmatic principles and behaviours for a better living!

I hope I gave you some inspiration to do that!

Now it’s your turn…

…Go and Do!

Much Success With It!

All the best,
Niklas