How to Generate A Lot of Ideas

If you are afraid that you’ll run out of ideas, then the obvious solution is to come up with a lot of them regularly. Serial entrepreneur James Altucher calls this regular practice to keep the idea muscle of your brain from atrophying “idea therapy.” Don’t let your brain get flabby – exercise your “idea muscle.”

Creative Dose: 10 Ideas a Day

Purpose: To train the idea muscle of your brain

This exercise has been adapted from the recommendations in James Altucher’s article “The Ultimate Guide to Becoming an Idea Machine” and the exercise “The World’s Worst Ideas” by Jessie Shternshus, author of CTRL+Shift: 50 Games for 50 **** Days Like Today.

Keep a small notebook and write down 10 ideas a day. Don’t know where to start? Here are some prompts to help you focus and generate your ideas more easily:

• Make “bug lists”: things that bug you. Every annoyance, every point of friction, everything that rubs you the wrong way hides an opportunity to apply creativity!
• Have your 10 ideas go along the lines of a theme, such as 10 blog posts you would write, 10 movies that would be fun to spoof, or 10 things I’d like to build by hand, or 10 businesses that would be fun to create.
• You could generate your ideas based on areas of interest, such as transportation, appliances, or devices.
• Generate your ideas by trying to make them as silly, unrealistic, crazy or absurd as possible. Channel the spirit of your favorite thinker and innovator and generate ideas like George Washington Carver, Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla, or Marie Curie would.
• Do a mash-up: take two seemingly completely unrelated areas and generate ideas from their point of confluence. What do ecotourism and vitamins have to do with each other? Go!
  If you need to, go for the absolute worst ideas that you can think of.

The point is to generate your 10 ideas every day and to capture them. Struggling to get past idea 6 or 7? Then push yourself to come up with 20 ideas to push past self-censoring.

Remember that your ideas do not have to be amazing, unique, or wildly creative. As a matter of fact, deliberately don’t strive to make them perfect or good.

Will they be good ideas? Maybe. Will they be bad ideas? Possibly. Will you build a habit of using your brain and start proving to yourself that you can indeed come up with ideas? Most definitely.

About this process, Altucher says this: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. But practice does make permanent.”

And building a new habit to break the cycle of Creativity Denial and specifically Creativity Misgivings is precisely what we are shooting for.

This post is an excerpt from book Banish Your Inner Critic, under the chapter heading “Become An Idea Machine”. Reprinted with permission.