Great ideas rarely just happen — They result from practice. Here are 6 of the best practices I’ve found.
As creative professionals, it’s a lot of pressure to not only create pristine work but also to generate high-quality ideas.
Ideas are the lifeblood of creative work. An app, a novel, a work of architecture — every project is an accumulation of numerous ideas.
Where do these ideas come from? Listening to artists speak or reading their memoirs can often make you feel that they are these gifted souls and inspiration finds them wherever they are. While it makes for a good story, it’s not exactly true.
Real creativity comes from a commitment to processes and practices.
Being responsible for ideas can feel like a lot of pressure if you don’t have a good system for generating them.
Here are 6 practices that will help you become an idea-generation machine.
1. Write 10 ideas every day
If you take only one practice from the list, this is the one.
Create a list of problems that you’re working on:
- How do I illustrate this political situation in a funny way?
- How does Mary find the killer in my mystery thriller?
- How do we improve the merchant details page?
Whatever keeps you up at night, put it on the list.
The next step is to come up with 10 ideas around one of these problems. Review your list before going to bed and pick one topic to generate ideas around.
For the best results, I recommend just going to sleep and allowing your brain to do the work while sleeping. When you wake up, after having your morning coffee or whatever you need to kick-start your brain — start listing out ideas.
Your goal is not to generate 10 ‘good ideas,’ just 10 ideas, so write out whatever comes to mind.
It might seem like a lot at first, but that’s only because of our tendency for perfectionism or desire for breakthrough ideas. Remember, no one else ever has to see this list.
Start with the obvious. Intentionally come up with the worst idea possible. Make it a game. The more fun you have with this, the more success you’ll have.
Make sure to review the list regularly and remove ideas that are no longer relevant. That way the list stays fresh and inspiring.
I learned this first when reading Skip the Line by James Altucher about a year ago and the practice was reinforced a few months ago when I read Ideaflow by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn where the same practice was suggested.
James Altucher credits a great deal of his success to this simple practice which includes writing over 20 books and launching a multitude of successful business ventures.
Not a bad result for such a simple practice.
2. Be a conduit for creativity
Ideas are flowing all around us at any given time, but we have to be open to receiving them.
Below are a couple of practices you can take on to let them in.
Work with the door open
In Mathematician Richard Hamming’s essay, You and Your Research, he tries to understand what separates Nobel-winning scientists from others.
They’re not always the smartest or even the hardest working, but they work on interesting ideas that are Nobel-worthy. How do they get the opportunity to work on interesting ideas?
By working with the door open. They learn what others are working on.
They invite all the interruptions, but they get clues on how the world works and what’s important.
Working with the door closed is a great way to get more done and perhaps more productive use of time in the short term, but in the long run, you miss out on these critical clues.
Be a little underemployed
The famed research collaborators Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were often seen around campus having fun and always engaged in lively conversations.
Their collaboration between 1971 and 1979 was one for the ages and set the foundation for the field of Behavioral Economics. Daniel Kahneman later went on to win the Nobel prize for this work.
What’s most notable in their story, is that most of their influence was achieved through only 8 papers they wrote together at the time.
That small body of work had an immense impact. Their work has touched every field from psychology and economics to law, medicine, and even public policy.
Amos Tversky once said:
“the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
Make the time to be ‘unproductive’ and explore ideas. Go down the necessary rabbit holes, those extra hours can save you years later down the road.
3. Loosen the mind
Creativity flows best when our mind is relaxed and loose.
A fascinating study was conducted by psychology professor Mareike Wieth at Albion College. The study involved 400 students and they were given a quiz at two different times; 8:30 am and 4 pm. The students also completed a survey confirming if they were morning or afternoon people.
She wanted to understand if alertness affected performance on exams.
The quiz involved two parts, an analytical part and creative problem-solving. When it came to the analytical side, alertness didn’t matter. For creative problem solving it did. But not as you would expect.
Students performed an overall 20% at creative problem-solving when they were fatigued!
For obvious reasons, sleep deprivation on a daily basis just wouldn’t work, but there are much less destructive things you can do to get your mind in a more creative state to allow ideas to flow.
Go for a walk
An age-old process of generating ideas is to step away from the work and go for a walk.
It’s a practice that comes up over and over for creative inspiration. Steve Jobs loved to take walking meetings, especially when it was important. Many brilliant minds relied on walking for inspiration including Beethoven, Albert Einstein, and Charles Dickens amongst countless others.
In Ideaflow, the authors suggest having a specific problem in mind when going for your walk and filtering your observations through that frame. If you’re working on a usability problem, pay attention to every handle, button, and knob you notice. The outlet of a fire hydrant, the door handles on every car, etc.
But keep your mind loose and simply observe instead of diving into deep thoughts.
Micro-meditation
In Creative Quest, The Roots drummer Questlove, shares a practice he calls micro-meditation. It’s essentially stepping out of the moment and allowing an idea to formulate and germinate.
It’s usually just a short pause for less than a minute where you just give space for an idea to surface. You can read the author’s description below.
Micro-meditations should last a minute at most, and sometimes they aren’t even that long. Sometimes they are thirty seconds, sometimes fifteen. They’re longer than a blink, but shorter than sleep. Maybe they’re like a slow wink. They aren’t long enough to relax you entirely. They don’t require any special apparatus or condition. In some way, if they’re done correctly, they won’t seem like meditation at all, but rather a stepping back and a surveying.
– Questlove in Creative Quest
4. Capture ideas on a larger surface
We unconsciously fill up the space we’re given, whether it’s a canvas or a sheet of paper. Increasing the surface area upon which we capture ideas will automatically prime our minds to create more.
Find a whiteboard or buy some large rolls of paper. But step away from the laptop and the 8.5x11 sheets of paper.
I know in theory a digital canvas gives you unlimited space, but it makes a surprisingly big difference for our minds to work with large physical surface areas.
5. Free-flow writing
The most important thing about creativity is that it needs to constantly flow.
Ideas beget ideas. A great idea is not something to be cherished and protected. It wants nothing but to be expressed and join the river of all creation that came before it.
Our minds are always brimming with ideas, but we don’t even notice. These two practices below will help you bring those ideas to the surface and keep them coming.
Morning Pages
The first is Morning Pages a practice introduced in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The practice involves filling up 3 pages of a journal every morning. You don’t have to write about anything specific, just write whatever comes to mind.
You don’t even have to look back at what you wrote at any point. This isn’t about writing well or creating Walt Whitman-like poetry, it’s just about writing and getting ideas flowing. Over time, you’ll notice the thoughts that keep coming up for you. You might find yourself dreaming about writing a novel or complaining about work or something else that just needs to change.
Confronting it over and over may actually lead to actions. But what’s important about this practice is that it gets your creativity flowing.
When we experience creative blocks, it’s usually because we don’t let ideas and creativity flow. We get caught up in perfectionism or fear that we can’t meet some arbitrary expectations. Creative professionals know that good work is the result of iteration and that the first sketch is usually pretty horrendous.
Morning pages are one of the most powerful tools to out there to keep your creative energy flowing.
Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing whatever comes to mind.
– Julia Cameron
Crash and Burn Stories
Another practice I recently discovered comes from Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks.
Crash and Burn Stories begin with a prompt, let’s say red table. For 10 minutes start writing a story about a red table. The first thing that comes to mind.
As you’re writing another idea will pop into your head and then you start writing that story. Mark the end of the previous story with a slash (/) and keep going.
Every time a new story pops into your head start writing that story and mark the end of the last one with a slash.
After 10 minutes you’ll have a whole lot of ideas in front of you to work with. This practice might be specific to storytelling, but storytelling is a fundamental practice regardless of what you do.
6. Work in inspiring environments
When producer Rick Rubin was working with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on their album Blood Sugar Sex Magik, he noticed that the band was just not inspired about recording the album.
It was just business as usual for the band. So Rubin decided to rent out a mansion and convert that to a recording studio. The band loved it and the environment really helped them get their creativity flowing.
Most of us can’t rent out a mansion when we’re feeling uninspired, but a change of environment and scenery can do wonders.
When I was in college I regularly went between the architecture studio, our on-campus Starbucks, the library, and my apartment to work. Each environment provided something different.
Starbucks allowed me to loosen up and be around people that didn’t really care what I was doing.
The architecture studio, where most of that time was spent, allowed me to be around designers from whom I can get input and work through specific problems. I had the space to draw and sprawl out, but sometimes the anxious energy from other classmates striving towards the same deadline just wasn’t helpful.
Each environment served its own purpose.
Researchers Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu discovered that ceiling heights play a role in influencing creative behavior that’s been labeled as the Cathedral Effect.
The effects produced by high or low ceilings actually occur because such ceiling heights increase or decrease vertical room volume, which in turn stimulate alternative concepts and types of processing.
— J. Meyers-Levy, R. Zhu The influence of ceiling height
The study concludes that spaces with higher ceilings are more conducive to creative work while lower ceilings are more conducive to focused work.
When you feel limited in generating ideas or can’t get the creativity flowing, these are some useful practices you can take on.
Originally published on Boundless Canvas on January 9, 2023.
