My blind spots are my solution set

The 35 ideas I had already decided against

I’ve been thinking about blind spotting for a long time because trying to figure out what I need to do next, better, or differently is hard. And it’s hard for a reason because success has a habit of telling me what works, and then I do more of the same.

I got in a car and drove to Acadia, Maine.

Over the course of the next week in Acadia: in the car, hiking a trail, coming down a mountain, swimming in the Sound, I captured these fleeting blind spot ideas.

Instead of letting them flow away and be lost and ignored, I captured them. I had put the laptop away for the week so I could enjoy family time. I only let myself record ideas using Claude (on my iPhone) and its connector to my engine. When I mention my ‘engine’, I am talking about my AI backbrain, my personal chief of staff. I use it to organize my thinking. Each time I thought of an approach or a recommendation, I had Claude summarize it and store it.

By Friday, I had 35 blind spots found.

The items in this list were conceptually all over the place. Some were tools that I use but only use at a surface level, but I had decided to ignore. Some were approaches I had considered but decided weren’t for me. I already know that I have a habit of justifying not using an idea by thinking: “might work for someone else, but it wouldn’t work for me or my business goals.”

The volume of rejected ideas was surprising. I am part of a lot of interesting conversations, but somehow I had decided to ignore good ideas handed to me by people I value. Strange.

My Rollup

It’s now been two weeks. The list is still growing, but not as fast. There are some duplicates in the list, but overall, it’s full of value. Deep and revenue generating value. (I have a long-term open question: how did I get so lazy and good at ignoring ideas?)

First, I think it’s easy to default to valuing ideas through the lens of personal experience. If it has not worked in the past, it might not be worth more time in the future. While true, it is a blunt metric to use. It’s also very egocentric. How can anyone know what works, especially when other people found different things?

My takeaway: “experience blinds and confounds my builder/founder brain.”

Second, I noticed that some of the blind-spot ideas were things I had marked off as completed but hadn’t started. How in the world does that work? I had spent time exploring a solution but hadn’t actually implemented it, and then decided the value was done.

My takeaway: “thinking takes effort, and it can feel like real work, but it’s not.”

Third, I had decided to ignore a number of ideas because I didn’t think they would work for me. The ‘for me’ is the critical part of this. An idea was good enough for someone else, but I was special; it would not work for me. This was a painful realization. These ideas worked for other people and generated impact, results, and revenue, but they couldn’t work for me.

My takeaway: “I am not special; do what other people do.”

The Other Side

It’s been two weeks. I am done marveling at my own ability to ignore good ideas. But these blind-spot items aren’t gone. They sit in my engine. And my AI tools are starting to bring them up. They’re starting to ask me whether we need to use these approaches in a solution.

So now my blind spots are my solution set. My well of solutions.

Oh my god! My blind spot list! It’s creativity! It’s my innovation team. I don’t have to start fresh every morning. I can tap into the bank of ideas that I have pre-rejected and discarded. I could go back to the source person or article and revisit the origins of an idea. Ignored, but not gone.

(Jamie you’re on the list. She wrote me a business plan two years ago, and I have not followed through completely, yet)

I can not be the only person who had made this mental leap. Do writers struggling with writer’s block do this?

Once I got back to the office, I told my engine to add a process that would run after each meeting transcript. Its job is to listen for when I ‘discount’ an idea; preserve the moment and the idea; and give me a task when it notices an idea on my blindspot list that I am still not noticing.

(‘Discount’ is my shorthand to describe when I or a client decided to ignore value)

Twice this week, I have been gently told (by my engine) to look again. Slow down and look again. I missed something. I told my engine it doesn’t need to be polite. Be blunt and force the conversation.

I almost did not write today. I am going back through my Gmail history and pulling up conversations. Conversations where I remember discounting an idea, and then feeding it back into the engine.

It’s been in the works for two years. Everyone is building their own. I think it’s the natural outcome of a founder using AI. Building this very personal, bespoke tool has been an amazing learning experience. I now have a 5-year plan from the work I do in this engine. This tool has changed almost all my client work. And I’m taking the approaches and rolling them out for two current clients.

Anyone else building the same? Book time?

See also

• Blindspotting — the first piece: noticing what you are not doing
• Building a new feature is fun! — the builder-brain pull that makes rejected ideas stay rejected