Simon Sinek on the importance of understanding that you don’t know what you don’t know, and the value of going out and finding it. Especially interesting is his take on why the best ideas don’t happen during brainstorming sessions (0:38), because those only activate the conscious mind, not the subconscious mind:

Sinek writes:

Most of us stay in our industry to help us be better at what we do. We read our own industry’s trades, we attend our own industry’s conferences, we talk to others from our industry and we take classes offered by “experts” from the inside. Though we may learn bits and pieces this way, we can never learn to innovate and solve problems or think in new ways like this. To truly think differently, we need to look way outside our own industries. If we see and learn how others solve problems, we can adapt and apply the same lessons to our own work.

Get outside of yourself, your specialty, your industry. If you want learn how to create great names, don’t just read what naming, branding and marketing “experts” have to say — read poetry, great literature, see a film that challenges you, and go to art galleries and museums. Great names are all around us, in the language of poetry, literature, art, science, nature and life. Get out there and wallow in it, and you’ll have more inspiration than the usual “brainstorming” session can ever produce.