How to Turn on the Idea Faucet

Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling once said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” He was a scientist, but that’s pretty good advice no matter what field you work in. Anybody can improve their chances of success in any field by generating more ideas. 

Some people think they don’t have good ideas. “I’m not a creative person,” they’ll say. “I never think of good ideas.”

Nonsense. Our brains are crowded with ideas all day long, but most of us are not used to paying much attention to them.

Here are some tips for generating more ideas.

• Write them down.

  This is the single most important thing you can do. The act of writing down your ideas means you’re taking them seriously. This is huge, because it tells your subconscious mind that you’re listening to it, and your subconscious will respond by giving you more and more ideas. It’s like turning on a faucet – pretty soon, you’ll have dozens, even hundreds, of new ideas every day. One of the best methods for keeping track of your ideas involves carrying a small notebook in your pocket, so you can have it handy for jotting down ideas as they come to you during the day. A small tape recorder serves the same purpose, and it’s more useful if you’re in the car or someplace where you can’t use your hands easily.

• Don’t edit yourself.

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  Underline this one. Don’t ever, under any circumstances, say, “This idea is too silly/impractical/expensive/whatever, so I won’t write it down.” That turns on your internal critic, who is only too happy to shoot down every idea, and before long the flow of ideas will stop completely.

• Encourage outrageous ideas.

  Yes, that’s what I said. You should deliberately try to come up with some completely ridiculous, even comical ideas to whatever problem you’re focusing on. Why? Because that’s where creativity lies. Outrageous ideas can reveal patterns and insights that wouldn’t come to you otherwise. You may not use the craziest ideas you come up with, but they’ll suggest other ideas that will work in unexpected ways.

• Keep going for more ideas.

   When you’re generating ideas, focus on quantity, not quality. Don’t stop after a few entries; keep going till you have hundreds of ideas about a problem. Even though you might have an “Aha!” moment and think you’ve found a solution, keep trying to come up with more ideas. Your brain delivers better ideas the more you encourage it, so the hundredth idea may very well be better than the tenth one.

• Review them regularly, and pick out the good ones.

   This is important, because it shows your subconscious mind that you’re serious about getting good ideas. Take time to look at your idea list, and pick out the good ones, the ones you want to work on further.

• Generate ideas about the good ones.

  When you have a few good ideas, go back to the drawing board and write down ideas to develop them. Let your imagination fly, and come up with more ideas around those nuggets of gold you’ve gleaned from your list.

• Execute.

  Now, take it even further. Take those ideas you’ve developed and make them real. The greatest idea in the world is useless if you don’t act on it. When you feel you’ve developed your ideas far enough, take steps to make them a reality. Test them, probe them, look for ways to make them practical and useful. When you’ve developed some ideas like this and made them come true, you’ve sent a powerful message to your subconscious that you value the ideas it gives you.

And your subconscious will respond by giving you more ideas the next time you ask for them.