Shift your mindset from believing creativity comes from a ’lone genius’ or ’light bulb moments’ to seeing it as a process of discovery and careful work, where ideas are found externally.
When feeling stuck, actively seek inspiration and new ideas from your external environment, including new places, objects, and people around you.
Engage with other people and listen to their random ideas, as social connection can boost your creativity and overall performance.
Begin your creative process by getting a sense of the conceptual landscape, identifying where good ideas have been discovered in the past to orient your search towards promising sites.
Establish a clear guiding question (e.g., ‘What am I trying to do and why?’) to act as your compass, focusing your search and understanding the value your idea will provide to others.
Actively seek out and embrace limitations or ‘boxes,’ using these constraints to your advantage as a powerful source for generating creative solutions, rather than avoiding them.
Take principles or successful concepts from one domain and apply them to an entirely different one to generate novel and effective new ideas.
Engage in a variety of outside hobbies and interests, as this broadens your knowledge base and provides more diverse ideas to transplant into your primary field.
Don’t strive for perfect originality; instead, borrow existing ideas and add your unique ‘5% novelty’ through a new spin, application, or way of thinking.
Make your creative search process systematic, similar to an archaeologist gridding a site, to keep track of where you’ve searched and where you’ve found (or not found) ideas.
During the idea generation stage, prioritize quantity by brainstorming as many ideas as possible, including ‘bad’ ones, without worrying about their practicality initially.
Recognize the ‘creative cliff illusion’ and continue generating ideas even when you feel you’ve run out, as persisting often leads to many more unexpected and valuable insights.
Use AI as a powerful tool for rapid idea generation, but provide specific guidance to direct it towards new and promising directions, preventing generic or similar outputs.
After generating a multitude of ideas, adopt a hardheaded and critical mindset to objectively evaluate which ones are truly useful and can be carried forward.
Counter the ‘creative endowment effect’ by creating psychological distance from your own ideas or seeking external evaluation, as others can more accurately identify the best ones.
Actively look for opportunities to subtract elements from your ideas, thinking about making them ‘watertight’ by finding and fixing holes, rather than just adding more.
Be cautious when receiving early praise for an idea, as it can make you reluctant to explore further, subtract, or make necessary changes, hindering its true potential.
Frame feedback as an opportunity to make incremental tweaks and get on a ’learning curve,’ rather than a reason to discard an entire idea.
Pay special attention to ideas that feel novel, abstract, or even make you slightly uncomfortable, as these often hold the most promise and should be explored further.