Believe it or not, you have great ideas everyday.
Some of these great ideas will be patties (refer to the definition on the left). Patties are your million-dollar aha moments, where something just clicks in your brain, and before you know it, you’re piecing together your brilliant new invention. How about the airplane, the email, or the television?
"Hot banana peppers" is the other category these great ideas can fall under. Hot banana peppers are those teensy-weensy ideas that we barely even realize are floating around our heads, despite how important they are to us. Coloring books may not be on quite the same level as automobiles, but shading in princesses sure does make little girls a bit happier.
The point is, hot banana peppers are awesome and you can come up with them with this acronym:
Observe
Remember when your grade 1 teacher continually asked you to listen to her? Well contrary to popular belief, there might have been some substance to what she was saying. To come up with a hot banana pepper, you gotta listen, but more broadly, you gotta observe everything around you.
Find a problem
This may seem a little bit pessimistic to you, but while you’re observing, your goal is to find a problem. Actually, it’s easier to find little problems in life; humans are naturally nit-picky creatures and generally have a hard to looking at the big picture. So just find a little problem— say you’re hiking and you find it annoying that you perpetually have to stop to take your water bottle out of your bag. You don’t want to hold it so you’re stuck with this unbearable situation.
Fix a problem
Hmm… What if I invented a water bottle helmet. It’ll have the water bottle mounted on it, then when I’m thirsty, I can just suck some water out of the tube. Perfect!
And that’s the life of a hot banana pepper, folks!
