22 Great ideas come from many
If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away. –Linus Pauling
One of the key principles that creative people live by is to generate many ideas in order to find really good ideas. They may generate over 50 different ideas for most situations and much more than that in some cases.
When I first acquired a decent camera, an expert photographer gave me a valuable tip that illustrates this principle. He told me the secret to being a good photographer is to take many pictures, but only show people the very best ones, which are very few. Even after a couple of decades of trying to master photography, I still take hundreds of photos for every photograph that I would judge as good and worth displaying. Digital cameras have now made this much easier to do.
Source: copywriter.giorgiotave.it
When you take photos with your camera, how many photos do you take of one scene? And from that pool of photos, how many do you show to anyone?
Developing the valuable ideas that will help you solve a problem and/or help you be successful follows the same principle. If you have been tasked to develop a new product, service or solution to a problem, you may need to generate 100 or more ideas before you find the one idea that is worth implementing.
Click here to read this brief blog post about 7 ways to generate great ideas.
Watch this video that describes where good ideas come from.
The surprising habits of original thinkers | Adam Grant https://youtu.be/fxbCHn6gE3U
Brainstorming is a common method for generating ideas that you can either do by yourself or in collaboration with others. This method works best when the idea generation step in the creative process is separated from the idea selection step because when you are generating ideas, you can’t be evaluating them. Judging ideas when they are generated is the best way to shut down the idea generation process. Instead, the rules of brainstorming dictate that all ideas that are generated are captured and not judged until later. Of course, this will lead to a large pool of ideas that are good, bad and ugly, but that is okay because new ideas can be generated by comparing and combining even bad ideas.
If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. — Albert Einstein
Watch this video about how to brainstorm:
how NOT to brainstorm https://youtu.be/ttWhK-NO4g8
Another way brainstorming sessions can be shut down is if anyone falls in love with their first good idea. Don’t do this. If you do, you will have trouble putting that idea aside and continue in the idea generation process. Remember you need 50 or so ideas. If all of the ideas are being recorded, you can be assured that those great ideas are safe from being lost. Don’t stop at the first good idea either, there are likely better ideas to be generated. And besides, you are not supposed to be judging the ideas at this stage, anyway.
What rules have helped you brainstorm successfully?
Would using a mindmap help you with your brainstorming? View the following video demonstrating how to use mind mapping software to brainstorm. This also works great when you don’t have a group to brainstorm with.
There are many ways to make your idea generation more productive beyond brainstorming. One is to use a random word generator, like the one at http://creativitygames.net/random-word-generator, or this one at http://watchout4snakes.com/wo4snakes/Random/RandomWord or at https://www.thegamegal.com/word-generator/ Generate a random word and focus your attention on relating this new word to the problem or challenge that you are generating ideas for. This may take a few minutes but it will help you to consider the problem or challenge from a point of view that you would not have considered before, hence allowing you to generate more ideas. Remember to record all of the ideas, even the weird ones.
Watch the short tutorial below on how to use random words for generating ideas.
Advanced Brainstorm Methods — SCAMPER and Random Word https://youtu.be/YvNOsogS6Mg
How do you generate your ideas? How do you know when you have generated the best ideas possible?
Not everyone takes the time to generate a lot of ideas when they are looking for a fast solution. What is the hazard of going with the first good idea that is generated? Does it save time?
What prevents you from generating enough ideas when you need to find good ideas? What will you do to generate more ideas in the future?
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from the old ones.” John Maynard Keynes
Are you prevented from generating new ideas because you can’t let go of any old ones? How can you make sure you are not being hindered by old ideas?
Challenge:
Pick a challenge or problem that you would like to complete/solve. Use the methods described above to generate at least 50 ideas for completing that challenge or solving that problem. Record these in a list and show them to a friend for feedback.
Generating ideas: Shimpei Takahashi at TEDxTokyo (English) https://youtu.be/ZdJOhgSQJ1Q
