Moment 36 - How To Create Great Ideas: Marcia Kilgore

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Marcia Kilgore is responsible for revolutionising the beauty industry through the multiple multi-million dollar businesses she’s founded and built. She’s the woman behind Beauty Pie, Fit Flops, Bliss spas, Soap and Glory and Soaper Duper. Clearly Marcia isn’t short of a good idea, but how do you come up with good ideas? In this moment clip, Marcia reveals how her ability to connect the dots became the secret to building her beauty empire. Episode 99 - https://g2ul0.app.link/g4g9MAiA0lb Marcia: https://www.instagram.com/marcia.kilgore/?hl=en https://twitter.com/marciakilgore Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  What is it about you that made you successful? I mean, I've picked up on one, which is really high standards. The other one I've picked up on, I picked up on the minute you walked through the door, which is you're just a very pleasant human being. And I'm like, all of these things, if they compound over like 30 years, you're going to get to a really good place. But is there anything else within, you know, some people are visionaries, they are, you know, whatever, is there anything else where you say, do you know what? That's probably a trait of me that made me successful.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I connect the dots.

• 0:29Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  In new ways. So that, if that were to be kind of my thing.

• 0:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  It's about, have you read the book? It's called Originals by Adam Grant?

• 0:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, on there.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So someone gave it to me, actually the art teacher in my son's school, gave it to me and said, this sounds like you. And I read it and I was like, oh, you know, when you think you're special.

• 0:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  And then you read a book and you're like, nope, I'm not special because everybody, he's, he's got it down, like every chapter is like, oh yeah, this is me. Oh yes, this is me, this is me. And he talks about in the book about how you become an expert in your area. Right? So you are very deep in expertise in one particular area, but then you're very curious about all this other stuff, which is me. I scan everything, right? Whether or not I'm really interested in it, I got newsletters coming out of my eyeballs and I just kind of scan, I'll click on things. And sometimes I'll just force myself to read something that I have no interest in at all, just because there might be something in there. And, and I think from doing that, I find new ideas.

• 1:31Steven Bartlett?

  That's what creativity is, isn't it?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33Steven Bartlett?

  I think.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  But you have to feed it.

• 1:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  It's like top of funnel, mid funnel, bottom of funnel, right? And so if you don't have enough top of funnel, you dry up at the bottom, where, you know, there's nothing that comes through. And then being able to kind of edit a good idea from a mediocre idea, right?

• 1:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  But I guess if you come up with a lot, so the more you feed the funnel. Then the more stuff you have to look at and then being able to know which one is the one that is actually going to resonate with enough people that it's actually a business. Because a lot of people, I think, can be quite navel gazing in, oh, I have this idea and people will care.

• 2:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  So I can also be quite brutal with my own ideas and just go, who cares? You think about it for a couple of months and then you have to be able to not fall in love with your own ideas, kind of like with writing. So writers will say, a really great writer is like, you can't fall in love with your own words. You need to be able to go into your writing and just chop it out, right? Just so it's succinct and you like, you can't love what you did, you have to hate what you did. And cut it all down so that just the crispy parts are there. And I think it's the same with ideas. You can spend a lot of time on stuff that nobody cares about. And so you have to be able to edit.

• 2:45Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting. I completely agree. I think about the successes I've had in my life and it was just a process of like multiple sources from multiple disciplines. Pull one little dot, as you've said, from those different disciplines. And then when they come together, so it could be like cryptocurrencies, music and my knowledge of social media. And then you come together and you go, oh, together it makes something new and interesting and valuable as a, these three different points of inspiration. I was going to ask you the question when we were talking about that, I was like, can you teach someone in your experience to be better at thinking of good ideas?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  I think you can provide the environment.

• 3:23Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Right? But not everyone's going to be able to do that. So there is going to be a cohort of people who just don't think of new ideas and they're probably really good at other things. And that's okay, because the world needs all of them, right? It's like Switzerland, like they, you know, some people are plumbers, but they still make a hundred grand a year and everybody's happy. So if we put people in the right seats on the bus, there's such a position and that, of course, is management, isn't it? It's trying to find when someone has talent, but not in a particular area, you make sure they're doing the right thing. But I think you can. You see this a lot in business school. Not that I've been there, but I've sat on a lot of panels with people who are entrepreneurs,

• 4:04Speaker 01

  and they're entrepreneurs because they have done a business plan. They've done a business model. They've modeled out what if, you know, we can do this. They haven't come up with, oh, wait, just like you said, if I connect this and this and do it this way, or, right, then I can make this happen. They've, they've said, well, I've gone to Harvard and now I'm going to model out this business plan. And I think if we do this, then that we can make, oh, look, it's a profit.

• 4:29Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And so there's two ways to come by it. And I guess both are valid. And especially these days, the, there's so much money in the universe that people will invest in so many things that you could actually get to a, a good result by just putting a business plan down. You're having tons of money.

• 4:52Steven Bartlett?

  And having gone to Harvard, which is much easier to get money.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:55Steven Bartlett?

  Being in Silicon Valley and being a white male.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  All that kind of stuff. Yeah. So it works.

• 5:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Is it full of passion?

• 5:04Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I don't know. Maybe if you're passionate about making money, that's a passion. It's not my way to do it because I just have to be passionate about whatever it is I'm making or selling or, you know, whatever. I think I'm improving. If it's improving people's existence, then I'm passionate about it. And it was like so amazing to be at Bliss and have people coming in and walk out the door after their treatment, feeling like so happy. And you could see it, right? And they just had such a great time. And you thought, well, I'm responsible for that. And what a great thing to do all day. And then the same with beauty pie, right? Is wow, people open up these boxes that they get delivered and it is like, it's like a fairy tale.

• 5:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  And it didn't cost them much so they can treat themselves because everybody needs a little lift once in a while. And to be able to get this incredibly deluxe stuff for such a, an affordable price, you know, every time one of those boxes opens up, that somebody is just feeling thrilled. And that is a reason to like show up in the morning, right?

• 6:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.