One of life's great pleasures is the discovery of something new: an unearthed gem from a favorite band's back catalog, an extraordinary athletic feat, or a simple cat trick. One of my favorite sources of something new is the English language. With over a million words according to the Global Language Monitor there's a strong chance that there's at least one that hasn't yet entered my mental lexicon. Today It's the word "meretricious" meaning "apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity."

Wow. Clearly, I need to reexamine the body of my design work to determine just how many meretricious pieces I've unleashed upon the world!

James Altucher, author of "Choose Yourself", a book Forbes Magazine calls "one of the top five books every entrepreneur must read," has written about something he calls the "Idea Muscle". He writes that the cliché that ideas are a dime a dozen is simply untrue. Instead, ideas are a dime for three. He recommends this exercise: come up with 10 ideas to surprise your significant other for an upcoming date night. The first three are fairly easy, but after that the going gets tougher and tougher and by idea seven most people are reduced to counting the list over and over again hoping for a change in the laws of arithmetic.

By repeating this exercise on a daily basis about any theme you choose, the Idea Muscle will become strengthened and your life will be enriched. I plan to put this notion to the test over the next few weeks. At best the world may become a better place and at the very least my wife and I will have better dates.

Time will tell which ideas have merit and which are merely meretricious.