I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (15 page)

So give yourself a hint of what major success in your field would feel like. If a leader in your company or field is giving a speech, for instance, go hear it and watch the attention that is paid to her, see how nice it is to command a room.

Another way to hone the eye of the tiger is to define your goal in a sexy way for yourself. You may not be a hundred percent certain of what it is, but decide on something that feels right at the moment and go with it for a while. Saying it to yourself not only gets you jazzed but also helps guide your choices.

The wonderful crime novelist Karin Slaughter, who has sold more than 30 million books worldwide, used to own—are you ready for this?—a sign-painting company. But she secretly wanted to write. She finally found an agent to shop her first book, but it took a while to sell, and by the time she was close, she had written another book and had an idea for a third. When the agent asked her what she hoped for, Slaughter suddenly heard herself say, “A three-book deal.” Just saying that phrased crystallized things for her—and she ended up with exactly that from a publisher.

Don’t be afraid to think big. I had the chance recently to work with a dazzling duo of women who run the PR and marketing firm Brandstyle Communications. One of them, Zoe Weisberg Coady, told me that from the time she was in her early twenties, she would tell herself, “One day I want to have my own company,” and that phrase helped propel and direct her.

“Having that phrase in my mind helped me make certain decisions,” she says. “I worked for one of the big agencies when I was younger, for instance, and my boss was
crazy
, but I stuck it out because I knew it was good for me to be there because of my long-range plan. I was learning things I would need to know when I ran a business one day.”

Coady has always done something else that also helps hone the eye of the tiger: she uses envy as a motivator. “It’s so easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day,” she says. “But when I read about someone else doing something interesting or being really successful at something, it’s a real kick in the butt. I think, ‘
I
need to do that.’ ”

No matter how fierce you become about your goals, at times certain things will steal your focus and possibly diminish your fierceness: setbacks, for instance, or crushing criticism. Experiment and find the tactic that gets it back for you. The comedian Amy Schumer, who parlayed being a finalist on
Last Comic Standing
into a very successful career as a comedian, had a trick that worked for her when she was first trying to make it. “When I felt like it was an uphill battle,” she told me, “I reread the positive feedback I’d received in e-mails, on Facebook, and on Twitter. That always kept me pushing ahead.”

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How to Come Up with Bold, Brilliant Ideas
 
}

O
ne of the reasons for the success you have today is that along the way you must have had a few damn good ideas. Perhaps you suggested to your boss some clever way to trim costs, or you came up with a compelling tag line to use in the company’s marketing brochure. Being a good idea person helped you do your job and blast ahead. But now that you’re poised to go big with your success, you need to go big with your ideas, too. You need to come up with not just good ideas but
bold, brilliant
ideas, the kind that these days are called “game changers.”

Think for a moment about some of the most exciting products and companies you know. Facebook, for instance, or Netflix, or lash-lengthening mascara or those spinners that dry your lettuce, or—one of my personal favorites—Paperless Post, whose online cards are as fabulous as anything in traditional stationery. They’ve made your life better or easier (or possibly even more exciting), and now you may even feel you couldn’t live without them. Each began with a bold new idea.

Great ideas are the currency of big success. No matter whether you’re a product developer in Silicon Valley, a high school teacher in Kansas, or a private wealth manager in Pennsylvania, if you’re going to make your mark and make a difference, you need to be a strong idea person. Your concepts may not change the world or make you millions, but you want them to have an impact in the work you do.

The ability to generate ideas comes easily to some people. I also believe that you can
learn
how to do it and make it a regular and exciting process in your job. Though I started off as a decent enough idea person, I’ve gotten much better over the years, not only by working at improving my own techniques but by studying how supercreative people seem to do it.

Here are the tricks I’ve used—as well as a few I’ve stolen!

Find your idea-creating zone.
It took me years to realize that though I’m basically a night person, I have my best ideas early in the morning. That meant I needed to become a morning person, too. (I know—this
could
be called burning the candle at both ends.) Though it took getting used to, hauling myself out of bed at 5:30
A
.
M
. made such a difference for me. And don’t be afraid to book creative time into your schedule. I read once that Madonna scheduled creative time each day. It’s a little like scheduling sex. It may not sound so erotic, but just wait until you’re in the throes of it.

Give your brain something to spark off of.
Ideas don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur when your mind encounters something and suddenly catches fire with a creative thought. Ideas are often about associations. The Swede who invented Velcro began to develop the idea after finding burrs stuck to his pants leg following a walk in the woods.

Sure, sometimes people come up with stupendous ideas by letting one thought in their brain spark off another. But why not give your brain some help? In my home office I keep a huge folder of crime stories I’ve clipped from magazines and newspapers or downloaded from the Internet. Whenever it’s time to start thinking about a new novel, I make a cup of tea and sit for an hour going through those clippings. One of the best plot twists I’ve ever had was sparked by an anecdote I found on the twenty-fourth page of an article I’d downloaded.

Dari Marder, the chief marketing officer of Iconix, has a great approach she uses. She regularly has what she calls a “ten slides meetings.” Everyone in attendance must give a PowerPoint presentation of ten images that have really grabbed them over the past few days or weeks. Those images often trigger amazing ideas.

Don’t become stuck to your desk
. Clippings and images are helpful, but you also need to be out in the world. The more you encounter, the more there is to spark ideas. Walk in nature, as the Velcro inventor did. Go to museums, galleries, shows, events, theater. I once came up with an interesting idea for
Cosmo
when I was viewing an Asia Society exhibit on Marco Polo and the Silk Road (“What to Do When Your Guy Won’t Stay Put”—just kidding). Essie Weingarten told me that one of her nail colors was inspired by the plaid shirt she had seen on someone at a soccer game.

Put the question to the universe.
I know this is going to sound crazy, but it’s something I learned from Laura Day, author of
Practical Intuition
, and it really, really works. Decide on a question (“What end-of-the-year project can I give my students that will enthrall them?” or “How can I encourage more people to come to the open houses my realty company gives?”) and say it a few times in your mind. The answer eventually will come to you. It’s not a weird ESP kind of thing. You prime your subconscious to be ready to receive great input. I use this constantly not only for my work with
Cosmo
but also when I’m writing my books. When I was gathering ideas for my second mystery, I posed the question to the universe and scheduled a pamper-myself-into-a-pound-of-butter day to help things along. While I was waiting to have a facial done, I looked at the instruments and thought, “You could kill someone with that!” Then suddenly I decided to set my second mystery in a spa.

Think about what’s
really
needed.
Remember that statement I included in part I from Paperless Post cofounder Alexa Hirschfeld: “You have to consider what the world wants from you, not what you want from the world.” In other words, if you hope to make money and be a success, your idea has to be marketable. Step away for a minute from your concept and consider whether it’s really going to be in demand.

Put your wildest, craziest thoughts onto the table.
Years ago, I read an essay by Cynthia Heimel called “How to Be Creative.” I still have a tattered clipping of it, and I reread it from time to time. One of my favorite parts: “There is only one way to be creative—and that is to have the courage to examine all our secret convolutions, hopes, and jokes and transform them into art. To hell with what the other guy thinks! The odder and more personal we get, the more everyone identifies. It’s magic.”

So let your wacky ideas see the light of day. Others can probably relate to them.

Brainstorm.
In recent years, some experts have pooh-poohed brainstorming, saying it’s not an effective way to generate ideas, but I find it works great in many cases—and it can be a lot of fun. The key is to work with a small group of people (four or five) who feel totally comfortable together. And though this sounds ruthless, over time you may have to drop people from the group if they suck out the oxygen and don’t produce.

But also channel your inner loner
. According to Susan Cain, the author of
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
, research suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption—and that solitude is a catalyst for innovation.

Riff on it.
When you see something that wows you or another person says something that you find intriguing, hold on to it mentally for a few beats and then kick it around in your mind. Why did it catch your interest? Could some permutation of it work in a presentation you’re doing or a new product you’re developing? That’s what the Velcro creator did. And it’s what I often do when I’m writing a mystery. There’s one kind of kooky example that comes to mind. Around the time I was finishing my first novel,
If Looks Could Kill
, I attended a three-day conference for work and ended up sitting next to Laura Day. Day explained to me that she was an “intuit,” meaning she intuited ideas for companies. I told her I was struggling a bit with the final two chapters of my book and asked if she could intuit for
me.
“I don’t know why,” she said after a minute of reflection, “but I’m seeing a lottery ticket.”

Well, as much as I tried, I wasn’t able to think of a way to use that lottery ticket in the ending. But I hated to let it go. And then suddenly I had a thought. Bailey Weggins, my amateur detective, had broken up with her husband because he was a scoundrel of some kind, and though I’d yet to decide what his problem was, I knew I didn’t want the standard “he cheated on her.” I decided at that moment to make him a compulsive gambler.

Sometimes your brain snags on something interesting but you can’t use it right then and there. But if you get into the habit of paying attention and mentally storing good material, you can come back to it. The PR guru Andrea Kaplan says that one of her best ideas occurred from an observation she made—and then returned to—when she was doing PR for
Family Circle
magazine. “During one of President Clinton’s State of the Union addresses, I noticed that Hillary Clinton was sitting next to Dr. Berry Brazelton, a
Family Circle
contributor,” she says. “A week later in a brainstorming meeting, the editor in chief asked what we could do celebrate Dr. Brazelton’s ten years as a columnist. My synapses started firing, and I said, ‘Let’s do a Salute America’s Children campaign with Dr. Brazelton and Mrs. Clinton.’ It all came together, and I even booked them on
Oprah
. It was Mrs. Clinton’s first time on that show.”

Ask yourself “What if . . . ?”
That’s a technique that’s recommended for novelists as a way to develop plots. You see a lone glove lying on a sidewalk. You ask, for instance, “What if the woman wearing it hadn’t simply dropped it but was kidnapped and forced into a car? What if she had stumbled on information in her job that put her in jeopardy?” And on and on. You can use that same trick at work.

When I had lunch with reality star Bethenny Frankel, I learned that that’s basically how her multimillion-dollar Skinnygirl Margarita business happened. On an episode of
Real Housewives of New York
, she’d asked a bartender to make her “a skinny margarita,” and gave him a recipe she’d concocted. After the show aired, lots of women went online and asked for the recipe. Rather than simply share it, Bethenny asked, “Since so many women like it, what if
I
create and sell the mix myself?” Bethenny said that you have to look at everything and see what you can do with it. “If I were Faye Dunaway,” she said, referring to the star of
Mommie Dearest
, “I would have created a line of clothes hangers.”

Try thin slicing your concepts.
Sometimes making an idea tighter or more specific actually makes it much stronger. That’s been one of the tricks I use with cover lines. To me a great cover line deals with a universal issue but hooks you by addressing a specific aspect of it, thus making it seem an even more intriguing concept. Compare “9 Stress-Busting Tips” to “What to Do When Stress Keeps You Up at Night.” The second is just grabbier (you can’t help but wonder, How do they
know
?). Two of my all-time favorite
Cosmo
lines are “The Most Crucial Thing to Ask Your Gyno” and “Why Guys Cheat in August.”

I think this same approach works with ideas in general. So when you’re letting your mind play, don’t be afraid to thin slice.

Never ignore the pebble in your shoe.
When you’re playing with information, look for patterns, too. Not long after I arrived at
Cosmo
, I began to notice all the e-mails from guys saying how much they loved sneaking a peek at the magazine because it was like “having the other team’s playbook.” That eventually led to the iPad app CFG—
Cosmo
for Guys.