Creative Something

Five valuable ways to produce more ideas.

Coming up with ideas isn’t always easy. Even creative geniuses like Einstein, Picasso, and Edison found it difficult to always produce ideas.

However, the best creative geniuses knew that the more ideas you produce, the more likely you are to discover a successful and remarkable idea, so they found a few things to help them produce more ideas over time.

Here are a few of the absolute best techniques that creative geniuses use to produce more ideas.

While one of these techniques is sure to help you, using more than one or two of the techniques is a good way to guarantee that you produce more ideas.

Set a daily idea quota. Sometimes the only thing keeping you from creating new ideas is determination. Setting a goal for yourself everyday to think up a certain amount of ideas (good or bad, it doesn’t matter) is a great way to actively pursue ideas, rather than waiting for ideas to naturally come to you. You could also setup a reward for yourself every time you reach your daily quota (treat yourself to a nice bowl of ice cream or slice of cake).

Dedicate half an hour every day to creative thinking. The best way to reach your daily idea quota? Dedicate a few minutes every day to creative thinking. Even if you work as a creative professional, your day is probably full of non-creative thinking. If you focus on creative thinking for as little as half an hour everyday, you are giving the creative parts of your brain enough work to keep the creativity flowing for hours. Ideas will come easier when your mind has been trained to create them.

Take risks. You can set a daily idea quota, and dedicate time out of your day for creative thinking, but if you are not willing to take risks with your thoughts, you are better off not trying to produce creative ideas at all. Get in the mind frame of taking risks, act on ideas that may seem crazy or stupid, spend a little bit of money (if you can) on investing in an idea, do the impossible without worrying. No great idea has ever been achieved by avoiding risks.

Read about creative thinking techniques. There are a LOT of creative thinking techniques out there, which means there are a lot of ways for you to produce more creative ideas. Read more about creative thinking techniques until you find three or four techniques that work really well for you. A great resource for some of the creative techniques I use can be found at Michael Michalko’s website.

Overwhelm yourself with inspiration. When you have some free time in your day, and you desperately need new ideas, a great technique you can try is creative overloading. Many famous painters have used this technique for producing more ideas, and it works. All you do is take a few minutes to fill your brain with inspiration. Read articles online without stopping, look at several famous paintings in only a minute, or browse online for inspiration. Do this until you feel completely overwhelmed with inspiration, then empty that inspiration out onto a piece of paper, or into your idea notebook.

With these five techniques, coming up with ideas is easier than ever. Of course, the first step to producing more ideas is to start trying, so what are you waiting for?

Original photo by Helen Cook.

The Buddhist way of making ideas brilliant.

A defining difference between useless ideas and brilliant ideas is that useless ideas are just plain ideas, brilliant ideas are ones that are made into reality.

One person who really understood the difference between useless ideas and brilliant ones was the famous spiritual teacher, and the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Siddharta.

Gautama knew that the first step in making any idea into a remarkable one was to first make it a reality; he once stated that “an idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.”

Not only did Gautama believe that ideas need to be acted on, but he acted on that idea itself and created Buddhism, a series of teachings that evaluate our human existence.

Hundreds of years later, Buddhism is a major religious faith for millions of people around the globe. The ideas of Gautama have been acted upon and have become incredible. If Gautama had never acted upon his ideas of the world, Buddhism would not exist as it does today, and you wouldn’t be reading this post right now!

An idea is useless unless acted upon.

The value of an idea that resides in your head is substantially less then the value of an idea that has been acted on and made into a real thing. Plain, lone ideas are worth very little, ideas that are made into something that you can see, feel, touch, smell, or taste, however, can be worth a lot.

Even if you just write your ideas down, you are taking them from your thoughts and putting them into the real world. It is in the real world where you can really work with your ideas.

An idea cannot be experienced - and therefore judged - until it is made into reality. You can accurately judge how great an idea is only when you can experience it in the real world.

The first step to making any ordinary, useless idea into a brilliant one is taking action on that idea. As Derek Sivers - an entrepreneurial genius - once said: “The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is [only] worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000 (source: Getting Real).”

Original photo by parhessiastes

Monday Motivation: Brand association with Brand Tags.

Searching for creative motivation or inspiration? Each Monday you can find all of the creative insight you need right here at Creative Something, with “Motivation Monday”.

Your creativity is like a regular muscle on your body; if you spend some time working it out it will grow stronger, but if you are lazy and don’t ever work with your creativity, it will grow weak.

A good creative exercise for generating new ideas is association.

Finding connections between two or more objects or ideas makes it easy for you to open your mind and discover new, previously unthought of, ideas related to an original, or preexisting idea - or ideas.

For this week’s Monday Motivation, head over to Brand Tags and start associating brand with words.

“The basic idea of [Brand Tags] is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.”

One of my favorite things about Brand Tags is that it displays a tag cloud that shows what words other people have associated with a specific brand. So, if you are looking for some great creative motivation today, Brand Tags is a great place to start.

Original photo by bala.