I’m looking forward to sharing this one, friends.
The secret to generating great ideas is honestly something that is easier at the beginning of your career, and something you have to be very intentional about as you gain seniority.
The secret is to put pen to paper. And go for quantity.
That’s it!
In the ideation phase, wait to prune. Generate idea after idea after idea instead of eliminating them. Ideas that are radically different from one another.
Give yourself permission to come up with sh!tty ideas. Let the constraints go. Explore, play, give yourself time to get all the predictable, low-hanging fruit ideas out. And then keep going.
Allow your creativity to really surface.
“More herb planters!”
It was my junior year of undergrad when I was studying industrial design (physical product design). The assignment was to design a product for an urban home. And after exploring a few different product ideas, I decided to design an indoor herb planter. Checking in with my professor, I showed him the maybe 4 or 5 different designs I had come up with.
His feedback shocked me.
I loved one of my designs. But he told me to sketch 50 more designs of what an herb planter could be.
50?! What? I thought “WHY?!?” I really like one of my sketches. How could I come up with something better?
But I took his advice and kept going. Pushing myself to come up with 50 ideas. And to be honest, after a certain point, I was just filling pages to hit the 50 mark.
At around 30 sketches, things started to get good.
The dam opened. And my ideas were going in more interesting places.
Your assignment: fill 50 pages
Maybe you’re working on a presentation. Write out 50 outlines. (What are all the ways you can tell the story?)
For an article, write out 50 titles.
For a logo, sketch 50 ideas.
For a homepage, sketch out 50 explorations.
Whatever the deliverable is, this week, carve out time to ideate where you’ll get the most value. It doesn’t have to be time-consuming.
Find a place where you’re inspired. Fun fact, environments help creative thinking too. Meyers-Levy and Zhu conducted a study back in 2007 that found that individuals in a room with a high ceiling engaged in more abstract thinking and generated more creative ideas compared to those in a low-ceiling room.
Use themes, reverse the priority, design the absolute worse idea, …have fun with it! You never know what ideas those extremes will unlock.
The goal is radically different explorations.
I think too often we don’t give ourselves enough time to really explore. Instead, we’re focused on getting out of the ambiguity and to the solution as quickly as possible, defending our ideas, and being “right”. Tweaking this or that.
And I’ve found the older I get in life, I’m losing the beauty of a “beginner’s mindset”. Being intentional about exploring a range of designs helps me combat this.
We’ve been taught to do things the “right” way. But the thing is if you want to discover something that other people haven’t… you need to do things the “wrong” way.
Explore a version that’s silly, unthinkable, retro, minimalist, maximalist... the options are endless.
Allow your creativity to take you on a completely different path.
One of the funny things about life is, you solve tough problems by being unconventional and determined.
“People who believe they can succeed see opportunities where others see threats.” ― Marshall Goldsmith
Give it a try this week!
It’s a mindset shift. So remember, instead of trying to generate the best idea as fast as possible, make the goal to generate a crazy amount of ideas.
Quality is found in quantity.
Nothing improves the quality of your ideas faster than freeing your mind to be creative.
Innovate, don’t imitate.
Favorite Quote and Photo(s) of the week
“Desire, not necessity, is the mother of invention. New things and ideas for things come from our dissatisfaction with what there is and from the want of a satisfactory thing for doing what we want done. The development of new artifacts and new technologies follows from a failure of existing ones to perform as promised or as well as can be hoped for or imagined.” — Henry Petroski
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Until next week,
raika
I like the story-telling element I'm seeing you invoke in your newsletter lately. The high number of reps is a bit daunting, but honestly you are so right. I've seen it first hand with anything that had a creative component. Thanks for the reminder!