In the 1980s and 1990s in Dublin all great ideas came from the pub. Most of these great ideas involved going to another pub to get more drink, which lead to even more great ideas, and the night continued onwards until great ideas accumulated in a dawn slump and several hours later evaporated in the rainy daylight.
I have long lists of these ideas and I’m keeping them until the time is right to do something with them. I have patents on them all, supplied by the bar man in the International bar; yes, when the world is ready, I will unleash my laundry basket with a washing machine inside (for saving time), and my polo mints without the hole (for better value), and my cows on stilts (for the craic).
Where else do you think all the great ideas of Irish society came from? Each came over a particular drink in a pub in the 80s and 90s: The HSE was thought up over a Cinzano Bianco – the reason for the existence of both is equally puzzling; Compromise Rules Football came into being over a snakebite; the double Irish (named over a double Jameson’s and ice!), the Lotto over a Snowball (’s chance in hell), and U2 over a beer mat.
After a stand-up show people often come up to me and ask me where do I get my material from. The answer seems to surprise them: work! That’s where ideas come from, and by extension, where great ideas come from.
A comedian knows when he or she writes something "sure fire" – a piece of material that they just know will work, that special gag, or bit, that you don't even have to try out in front of an audience to know it's gold. I've often heard comics do a gag like that and say "I took the rest of the day off after I wrote that" – maybe if they hadn't taken the day off they would have more great ideas. Great ideas, unless you're Leonardo da Vinci, or the man who invented MineCraft, come from the same place that bad ideas come from, the same place crazy ideas come from. With writing it's a matter of spewing out as much as you can in order to panhandle the gold. In writing it's about getting into a "seam" ...deeper, and deeper, into it, like the initial writing is digging down, digging, as Seamus Heaney wrote in his poem Digging.
Several months ago the Science Gallery in Dublin had an exhibition about failure, called Fail Better. There was a piece in the exhibition called the Apparatus for Facilitating the Birth of a Child by Centrifugal Force. It was invented in 1965 by Charlotte and George Blonsky. The pregnant woman was supposed to lie on the apparatus, was strapped in, and then spun around speedily to aid delivery. There was even a little net to catch the newborn baby! A crazy idea, but useful in showing that great ideas lie side by side with crazy ideas. The aim of the exhibition was to look at the idea of failure, not necessarily as an end in itself, but as a stepping stone to better ideas, even great ones. Great ideas come from allowing yourself to think any ways, which ways and all ways.
A centrepiece of the exhibition was Sugru, which is a remarkable material, a sort of Blu Tack that can be moulded to permanently fix broken things, or adapt them. It was invented by an Irish woman, Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh.
Of her invention she said: “I just wanted to create something that looked interesting, or behaved in an interesting way, which would then lead more somewhere else.”
Great ideas consist of searching constantly in the expectation that you will come across a great idea.
When considering great ideas it’s worth looking at some of Einstein’s quotes:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”
“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.”
What all these quotes show is that Einstein seemed to have had little respect for the regular way of thinking. The often heard rallying call is to “think outside the box”, which begs the question, why does anybody ever bother thinking “inside the box”? Why don’t we just get rid of the box?
Great ideas come from a disregard from the usual ways of thinking – from the way we are educated to think. Einstein again: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he has learned in school.”
Great ideas come from following every lead, no matter how strange; in being open – open to failure, to stupidity, to thinking as freely as possible.
This article first appeared in The Irish Times' Innovation e-mag, which can be read at irishtimes.com/innovation
