Nub of an idea

I’m part of a class in innovative thinking at work—basically, since my department is sponsoring it, I have to take it pour encourager les autres. This is the second iteration of the course, and I’m not going to go into how gobsmacked I am with how incredibly doltish my colleagues can be about mastering the utmost basics—like when and where the class is meeting.

At any rate, an ongoing assignment is to be always on the alert for ideas: ideas about anything, really. Remembering you need to pick up whipping cream; there must be a better way to keep track of time than ADP; maybe if you lay out your kid’s clothes at night, you can save five minutes in the morning and get out of the house in a timely manner. Whatever—the deal is, you should just be aware of things that are going on around you so that when the time comes to come up with an idea for a product or service that might actually make money, you’ve got the wherewithal in terms of knowing how to recognize when something annoys you enough that it might also annoy others, and they’d pay for a solution.

We have to come up with ten ideas a day, and keep track of them.

The last time I went through the class, I took squares of paper to people on this floor, giving everyone I found four of them and asking them to write a word—any word—on each slip of paper. I then collected them into a bowl, and when my trigger mechanism went off (back in December, it was whenever I heard Christmas music on the radio, but for others it was whenever they filled their water bottle, or checked social media), I’d reach into the bowl, pull out a word and try to come up with an idea around that word. Any crackbrained idea.

I dusted off the bowl o’ trigger words for this round, and yesterday upon hearing Mozart for the 42^nd time that day, I pulled out “nubs”. (Perhaps I should preface this by noting that some of my colleagues may have been taking the piss. In addition to “inspire”, “fire hose” and “black”, yesterday I also found “kill”. Yesterday I was entirely ready to act on that suggestion.) Well—kind of interesting, no?

I was struggling to be inspired by my existing understanding of “nubs”, so I Googled it. Turns out that a “nub” is someone who totally sucks at playing a video game, even if he’s been playing it for a long time. No matter how long they keep at it, they’re still going to suck.

Ah, I thought—like the Kleptocrat trying to be president. I wished he was limited to playing the role in a gamer environment instead of the real life version. So my idea was a video game with him scuttling around the White House in a bathrobe, screaming at his Gauleiters, ordering pie with two scoops of ice cream, calling Putin to check in on how he’s doing, etc. Every 30 minutes, he’d have to go somewhere to play golf.

There’d be a lot of fundraising, of course, and money laundering. You’d have to decide when to raise the membership fees or rent at various Kleptocrat properties. Also, you’d have to decide which family members are part of the administration and which ones have to live 500 miles away and only be trotted out for ceremonial events. One of the best parts is that there's no requirement for internal logic: just like the Kleptocrat in our space-time continuum, reality shifts at irregular intervals.

Oh—and the tweeting. If you don’t interrupt whatever he’s doing at six-minute intervals, you lose the round and have to start over again running in the primaries. Plus whining; there'd have to be a constant stream of that, mixed in with grandiose self-puffery.

See—a lot of this ideation stuff is just releasing personal stress. But this one might actually have legs. I should write up my pitch and start looking for VCs.