Thomas Edison is a perfect example of someone who shows that ideas and dreams in business can be cultivated and achieved in reality. The essence of his success is through learning the correct sequence of doing things through trial and error, and then following these learnings and accumulating more on top. Below you will find a series of helpful tips to help you cultivate the same power and gravitas which Edison had:

1. Concentrate on generating lots of ideas.

Out of the quantity if ideas, you will find the quality through a simple process of refinement. Also, by setting yourself a tight quota of how many ideas you wish to generate, you push yourself to come up with ideas.

The other key to idea generation is to let all your ideas come to the fore, and not just those which you feel are good. Training yourself to let everything come out will help you to delve deeper into your mind and extract hidden and revolutionary ideas.

2. Scrutinise the norms and assumptions of things. 

The more you fall into a frame and particular way of doing things, the more defined you become by it. The alternative and better frame is to see no frame at all, and let others become defined by it instead.

When you see no frame or preceding basis, you are taking away the assumptions which have been placed on the situation. Assumptions in themselves are the death bed of creativity and free thought.

A good way to remove assumptions is to consider the opposite of them and see if the situation still makes sense or is potentially viable. If it is, you should consider as many options as to how it can be achieved.

3. Learn a lesson from everything.

There is no such thing as failure. It simply does not exist. What exists instead is a lesson, and if we learn and apply as many lessons as possible, we will be on the straight road to achieving our dreams. The reason why we are not achieving our dreams now, is because we have not learned enough lessons. So when we act and apply the knowledge we have, and when we learn the lessons from them and apply it, we are skyrocketing our progress towards our goals.

4. Write your thoughts and ideas down.

Relying on your memory will get you nowhere. The memory is a device which is subject to change and fault as our focus is always progressing to hold only a set number of things in our awareness. When we write things down, we can always go back to them for the rest of our lives, without having to rely on memory alone. Brilliant ideas have come and go throughout the ages because people did not bother to write things down. So instead, keep a note book on you and use it to record your ideas.

5. Look for ways to improve the ideas and innovations already in existence.

In almost every product around, there is room for improvement. The objective should be to focus on those products where our interest lies, and improve and perfect them for the benefit of the consumer.

There are a certain number of standard ways which will allow us to make improvements to a product or components of it. These are namely to substitute, combine, adapt, magnify, put to other uses, eliminate or rearrange. This has famously been named "The Scamper Method" and is a world class method to rapidly generate new ideas.

6. Always be open minded to new ways and new subjects.

This does not mean drop what you're doing and go and do something else altogether. If you have a vision and have a good idea of how to achieve it through the techniques we are teaching, you should stick to doing things in that way. However, should a new matter of interest crop up, you should wait until the end of the day where you have some quiet time to analyse your progress, and set your plan for the next day.