Accidental Genius

For the next ten minutes, you’re not you. You’re Jennifer, a marketer for BeefSalami.com, a year-old company that sells salami over the Internet. Given your well-defined niche, your market share in Web-based salami sales is 90 percent. But your profits aren’t where you’d like them to be. What can you do?

Customize business books as you read them: underline, dogear, question, argue, agree vehemently, write in the margins and on the blank end papers. You’re reading the book to get workable ideas, and the best way to find the workable ideas is to be active as you read. • Through writing, try applying the author’s ideas to your own life. Even if you di

Consider, then, this idea of varying audience in your own writing, particularly as you try to write precisely about a tired situation (almost like holding a paper conversation, except your audience remains silent but attentive).

• Vary the session lengths and specific techniques you use during your bouts of freewriting. • Talk to yourself, on paper, about any resistance you’re feeling about your problem or about the freewriting method itself. (“I don’t feel like doing this.”) • Dumping a lot of details and information on the page often in and of itself suggests a solution.

When you finish making annotations, look the page over once more.

Here’s how the writing marathon works: Fix your subject in your mind, open a blank document, set your timer for twenty minutes, and start typing.

When you have to come up with an idea, don’t try coming up with just one.

How Is the Book Structured? It’s divided into sections: this introduction and three additional parts. In the first part, you’ll learn the six secrets to freewrit-ing. In the second part, you’ll explore methods of using free-writing to ideate and solve problems. In the third part, you’ll discover ways of using freewriting to generate public works, s

Try this: Fix a subject in your mind, a subject about which you consider yourself an expert. Now, if I asked you to give a 250-second speech about it to a roomful of surgeons, how might you tailor the information to make it interesting to them? Even if the material doesn’t lend itself to overt customization—how would I apply my origami expertise to